Too young to vote and not even in high school, Julianna Espinoza has already pushed policy at the city of Indianapolis.

At 10 years old, she stood in front of the city's public works committee in February 2017 and told them about her dream of becoming a nature photographer.

"And that's the problem," she told the committee. "We don't know if there's going to be any nature at all."

Espinoza and her peers are part of a global trend of young people who are speaking out about climate change and its catastrophic effects in the face of what they view as negligent indifference from world leaders.

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Earlier in December, a 15-year-old Swedish girl addressed a global climate conference, imploring world leaders to take significant steps to reduce the world's climate footprint. Thousands of Australian children skipped school on December 1 to demand more action on climate change. And lawsuits on behalf of people as young as 11 are being levied against the Canadian government and the United States, citing lack of progress on climate change.

And in Indianapolis, it was a group of young people who crafted and lobbied for the city's climate resolution, which was passed in 2017 and helped lead to the climate action and resilience draft plan released by the city last month.

But as the city celebrates a plan that aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and suggests more than 60 actions the city wants to take to prepare Indianapolis for climate change, the kids at the heart of it all say they will be asking for more.

"We're very grateful to have had this opportunity," said 17-year-old Maddie Swank-Brooks. "But we're going to keep pushing. We're going to treat this like a first step."

'It's a lot to take in.'

Swank-Brooks and several of her peers recently gathered ahead of what should have been a happy occasion. The city was hosting an event to present its climate action and resilience plan. She and her cohort had helped craft the resolution that led to the plan, called Thrive Indianapolis. A couple of them had even sat on the plan's community task force.

But Swank-Brooks was fighting back tears.

"This is the first time I've cried about this in a really long time," said the Herron High School senior. "It kind of sucks with this being put on our shoulders so young."

The scale of the problem is daunting, the result of generations of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions.

"Stuff like (the city's plan), it's like, you know it's good, but the skeptic part of you knows it's never going to be enough to totally fix the issues," said Reed Rouch, an 18-year-old senior at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School, who sat on Thrive's community task force. "It's a lot to take in."

Many of these kids have worked on climate change issues for a large portion of their life, starting with Earth Charter Indiana's climate camp, interning with Earth Charter, or otherwise interacting with the nonprofit's executive director Jim Poyser.

It's not something that's made them particularly popular. Hailing from schools across the city, they find themselves a small minority of kids working on climate, at least in Indianapolis.

"I think a lot of people our age are definitely concerned with climate change," said Cora Gordon, a 17-year-old senior at North Central High School, "but they don't necessarily think it's the pressing issue at this time."

"My friends like to make fun of me every time I talk about environmentalism," Rouch said.

But for them, it's an unavoidable topic. It enters into their thoughts about their future. Should they go to college or continue their activism without pursuing a degree? Should they ever have children?

At the same time, they say they see little to no progress on climate change from leaders local, national and global.

"We're all just kids with, like, dreams, and we want to live life as life, and we don't want to deal with something that's been compounded generation after generation," said Aidan Hamilton, a 15-year-old student at North Central High School. "Now it's on us to fix."

'Young people who can remove that political bite.'

It was Poyser who brought the idea of a climate recovery resolution to the kids, inspired by a group of youth in Eugene, Ore., who in 2014 successfully lobbied their city council to pass a climate recovery ordinance that commits the city to reducing fossil fuel use by half by 2030.

Some of the kids working on resolutions in Indiana were not even sure how their local governments worked.

"One of the frustrating parts is I didn’t learn anything about this in school," said Maddie McGuire, who worked with the city of Carmel on passing Indiana's first youth-led climate change resolution in 2017. "'What is a resolution' is something I think I typed into my computer."

In Indianapolis, the kids dubbed "little warriors" by a local filmmaker found an ally in City-County Councilor Zach Adamson. He helped the kids draft the resolution, and said that they were a crucial part of getting concrete action moving on the city level.

"What we discovered is oftentimes it’s young people who can remove that political bite out of controversial issues, even when issues shouldn’t be political at all," Adamson said.

With the help of Adamson and Katie Robinson, head of the Office of Sustainability, the warriors met with several people at the city to draft the resolution.

Robinson said that while the city had been having conversations around climate and the environment prior to the resolution, the efforts by the kids helped raise the profile of the issue.

Within her first two weeks on the job, Robinson met with the warriors.

"I was just blown away to hear these young people being so passionate in this particular area," she said. "It was sort of a no-brainer that we were wanting to support their work."

With the help of Robinson and Adamson, the group of youth drafted a resolution to present to the city council. The resolution called for the city to cut carbon emissions, increase energy efficiency, and "create a climate-resilient City of Indianapolis that will protect the children and grandchildren of the community."

More concretely, it called for all city functions to be carbon neutral by 2050, for the creation of a climate action plan for the city, and the continued involvement of youth in the process.

On February 9, 2017, the warriors gave their, at times, tearful testimony. The topics ranged from the scientific facts of climate change like the greenhouse gas effect, to air quality impacts of coal-fired power plants, to the simple subject of fear for their future.

Robinson remembers getting emotional that night when she realized how old her daughter would be in 2050.

"She was going to be my age at the moment of my testimony in 2050," she said. "I had to compose myself ... I didn't want to go up there a sobbing mess."

On February 27, the full city council passed the resolution, 20-4, making it the largest city in the country to adopt a youth-led climate resolution.

'It needs more than Band-Aids at this point.'

With the resolution passed, the kids waited for the next steps.

"There was a period when we weren’t really seeing (progress)," says Swank-Brooks. "All of us got kind of nervous, anxious that the resolution wasn’t going to do anything, because again, it was just a promise."

By the end of 2017, they were at a loss. Then, early in 2018, the city announced its Thrive Indianapolis process and the Thriving Schools initiative, which will fund sustainability projects at Indianapolis schools.

"It took a little bit to connect the dots," Swank-Brooks said.

Officials from 20 city and county agencies and representatives from 27 community organizations met throughout the year to provide input on the plan, a draft of which was released in November. The plan lays out more than 60 actions the city could take to reduce its carbon emissions and prepare the city for climate change.

Notably, the plan sets a goal to power the city entirely by renewable energy by 2050 — a goal post that is too far out, according to the warriors, who will live will live their lifespans over before then.

"We're actually starting to see that (climate change is) hurting people," Hamilton said.

Farmers are seeing it in their fields, Californians are seeing it in the form of devastating wildfires, he said.

"It's not like it's just this like theoretical thing like, okay so in a couple generations the world will be over, not my problem ... It needs more than Band-Aids at this point."

Early next year, the plan will be put in front of the City County Council for adoption, according to Robinson from the city. Some of the gears of the plan are already moving: The Department of Public Works announced last month that they would be expanding their street sweeping program 2019, a move that could help the city's storm water infrastructure handle increased rainfall caused by climate change.

The work isn't over for the warriors, either. At the November event, Swank-Brooks flagged down Robinson and asked for a meeting. She wanted to go over the plan in detail.

"It's a tough job, but it needs to be done," Gordon said, "and it's not being done by grown ups so we're doing it."

Emily Hopkins covers the environment for IndyStar. Contact them at 317-444-6409 or emily.hopkins@indystar.com. Follow them on Twitter: @_thetextfiles.

IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.