YOUTH LEADER SERIES

Dayna Noltie

Dayna first became involved in biodiversity work in 2007 when she attended an E-POWER (Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources) Conference on Climate Change with a group of students from Christ the King Catholic Secondary School.  This inspired them to start their school’s environmental group Club Green.  She was vice president during the first two years, and president during its third year.  During this time she also joined the steering committee of POWER’s conference planning board, and helped put on another conference about climate change, and a third about biodiversity.   

The conference about biodiversity qualified her to attend the Second International Youth Symposium on Biodiversity held in Ottawa during 2009.  Here she networked with global youth and helped produce a Youth Accord on Biodiversity, to be presented in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010 as a part of the Convention on Biological Diversity COP-10.  She is currently working to establish consistent international youth participation at the CBD.  In preparation for the meeting, she is learning as much as she can about Access to and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Materials, and has a particular interest in the ties this has with indigenous peoples.  As a part of her learning about this, she attended the Resumed Ninth meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-Ended Working Group on Access and Benefit Sharing, Freshwater Summit 2010 and the UNESCO international conference on Cultural and Biological Diversity.

She also recently attended the Commission on Sustainable Development, held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York during May 2010.  Here she joined the CSD Youth Caucus, and she is now working with them to produce their position paper, coordinating the Mining section.

She is currently the Youth representative on the Canadian Environmental Network’s  National Council.

Dayna attends the University of Western Ontario, and is working towards an Honours Specialization in Health Sciences with a Major in Physiology.  She is currently volunteering with Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources.

(Image above: Jessica Walsh-Moreau, Dayna Noltie, Keegan Fitzgibbons)