June 26, 2025
Reading time: 2 minutes
By Andréa Ventimiglia, Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Future Earth Canada and Sustainability in the Digital Age
On a spring evening in May, about 100 enthusiastic young professionals gathered at Montreal’s Maison du développement durable for the 9th edition of International Organizations Day. Against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows and a plant-filled living wall, representatives from many of Montréal’s 70 international organizations engaged in a lively networking exchange with an early-career workforce equipped with questions and optimism.
The event was organized and hosted by Connexion internationale de Montréal (CIMtl), a volunteer-driven professional development network with over 300 members. About 60% of the network are young professionals and 40% graduate students, working and studying in fields like global affairs, finance, administration and policy relations.
This year’s event featured three concurrent roundtables on topics where Montreal’s international expertise shines, namely: responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) in international relations, sustainable management of the world’s resources, and Dronautics in civil aviation.
I was honoured to be part of the sustainable resource management discussion with fellow panelists Alain Fréchette, Director of Rights, Climate and Conservation at the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and Julie Amina Jacquemin, Lead for Outreach, Partnerships and Youth Engagement at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).
Our conversation was moderated by CIMtl’s Vice President, Nadine Antoun, and what a discussion it was! We spoke about the utility and weak points of global accords like the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement and came to the consensus that international agreements are unlikely to spur the urgent action needed on the world’s environmental crises. So instead, we discussed the concept of “glocal,” where actors at a local or community level are collaborating with scientists and governments to address global challenges like food insecurity, misinformation, and land-tenure rights within their own cities or communities. I raised Donnella Meadows concept of leverage points in a system and how changing mindsets is one of the most effective levers to action, a theme that solicited many interesting follow-up questions from the audience on behaviour change. Julie enlightened us on the 2018 Escazú Agreement, historic as the first ever environmental treaty for Latin America and designed explicitly to protect environmental defenders in the region. And Alain truly inspired all of us when he quoted his mentor’s advice to “never let school get in the way of your education.”
We closed the session with a reminder that sustainable resource management is, yes, about taking care of water, climate and land, but is also about ensuring a broader understanding of humanity’s role in a much larger Earth system. We recognized and named in the discussion that sustainability means not depleting resources but ensuring they remain available for years to come. If the young professionals in the room were any indication of the passion and enthusiasm of the next generation, the Earth is in good hands.