Members of Gulf of Mexico Youth Climate Summit’s leadership team join a crowd of organizers from the Gulf Coast to protest a bank financing fossil fuels in New York City in 2025. On Aug. 1, the organization is hosting its annual climate summit in Houston, which will be free and open to the public. Photo courtesy of Gulf of Mexico Youth Climate Summit.
Organizers from advocacy groups across the Gulf South are meeting in Houston for a youth-led climate summit on Saturday, aiming to address environmental issues affecting the Gulf of Mexico and the communities that rely on it.
The 5th annual Gulf of Mexico Youth Climate Summit will host a lineup of speakers from local organizations. After gathering nearly 500 attendees in Corpus Christi in 2025, the event is coming to Houston for the first time on August 1.
Armon Alex, the co-founder of Gulf of Mexico Youth Climate Summit, said the event was first conceptualized in 2020 as a response to a lack of diversity in environmental academic spaces.
“We know that policy has to be influenced by facts and figures and data,”Alex said. “So we see this route of access to science created and guided by people of color, women, queer folks, young people, to better inform policies that create a collective future where we can all breathe clean air, drink clean water, and grow in clean soil.”
The summit brings together scientists, educators, artists, and community leaders under the age of 30, he said.
“The Gulf of Mexico became the centerpiece of our work because we knew that there were young people doing incredible things,” Alex said. “Why didn’t they have access to these spaces?”
The Gulf of Mexico might seem like a narrow centerpiece, but advocacy in the region reaches a wide audience, Alex said.
“The Gulf of Mexico is more than just a body of water,” he said. “It is a shared home for many people, from Texas to Louisiana, Mississippi, Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean, connected through the currents that go all the way up and around Florida, up along the East coast of the U.S., even including the connections of the Mississippi watershed.
“Our futures are deeply intertwined with this watershed. The environmental challenges affecting one part of the Gulf, I would say, inevitably affect all of us.”
In past years, the environmental challenges discussed at the summit included the impact of pollution from the Mississippi River on dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico and concerns about local desalination plants in Corpus Christi, organizers said.
This year, the lineup includes talks on migrant justice and environmental racism, a term that describes inequities in how environmental burdens are placed upon communities through infrastructure and policy.
Organizer Kaitlen Vargas said the goal is to not only educate attendees, but to provide a space to share resources and offer concrete ways for them to get involved with each other’s work.
“It’s all about building chains of solidarity between the different groups that are doing work across the Gulf of Mexico, as well as shedding light on the issues that we’re all facing, because a lot of us are facing really, really similar issues,” they said.
This year, the summit’s theme is “Liberation for the Gulf: The Fight Against Fossil Fuel Imperialism.” Vargas said the theme invites attendees to not only name the environmental issues facing Gulf South communities, but to imagine alternatives to the current state of the land and water.
“For me, when I imagine a liberated Gulf, I imagine the Gulf South not being treated like a sacrifice zone,” Vargas said. “I imagine a Gulf where the profit from industries isn’t placed over the health of the people and where we actually treat our ecosystem as if it provides for us and not something that we just purely extract from.”
The summit will be held at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, with doors opening at 9 a.m.