This fall the Northern Climate Exchange will once again offer it's climate change for decision makers course.

But this year students will have the added benefit of learning from Alison Perrin, who has just returned from a three-day conference in Chicago where she gained new skills for communicating information about climate change from Al Gore.

Gore, a well known climate advocate and former US vice-president, started the Climate Reality Project as means to ignite a global movement calling for action on climate change.

Every year the organization hosts a conference to train climate leaders across the globe in communication strategies, particularly around social media.

The conference is free, but attendees must cover their own travel and accommodation costs and be accepted to the program through an application process.

Perrin said there were about 1,400 people at the conference from 50 different countries. About 150 Canadians were present, she guessed, but she was the only one from the northern territories.

"Part of my role here at the Northern Climate Exchange is to do outreach, providing climate change presentations for government branches or industry or school groups,” she explained yesterday afternoon sitting in a boardroom at the NCE.

"The training was a way to learn new skills, get some more information and sort of improve the presentations that I'll be giving.”

While the conference goers didn't get the chance to personally meet Gore, they did get some 10-odd hours of training from the man behind the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.

"It was really exciting,” Perrin said.

"He's a great speaker. He was on stage for about 10 hours and was just as passionate at the end of the 10 hours or even more passionate.”

"The main messages that I took from the presentations were, first of all, the importance of storytelling in connecting people to something like climate change, because in the past a lot of the focus has been around the science, which is a very important part of it for us, as a research centre. But for the general public, they really connect to hearing about people's personal stories and what it means for them, the impact of climate change,” she said.

Focusing on specific impacts to communities and what they are doing to adapt is another important aspect to focus on, Perrin learned. And there's a lot of that work happening in the territory.

"Everyone that drives the Alaska Highway feels the permafrost under the highway and we're already doing work to improve that highway and try to deal with permafrost, so that's something I think people here already see and know about,” she said.

Other important storytelling tools are the natural hazards of climate change, like the increased incidents of flooding or the greater threat of wildfires.

"Those type of hazards people connect with because they either know someone that's been impacted by it or they're concerned about that in their own area.”

While the conference program itself was bursting with useful information, the attendees themselves provided inspiration.

Perrin shared a story of one young woman who first attended the conference about six years ago, she was 11.

Since then she's been continually giving presentations about climate change to raise awareness.

Perrin was also impressed with the relative age of the crowd.

"We often think that this is something younger people are taking on as their movement, but there were quite a few people that had come that were lets say 70 plus,” she said.

One of the key challenges when discussing climate change in the Yukon is the same as it is everywhere else, Perrin said – overcoming that sense of not being able to do anything about it.

"A lot of the work that we do here at the Northern Climate Exchange is focused on adapting to climate change. I think that's really something that people can wrap their heads around and they're interested in how it might impact them and what they should do to prepare for that,” she said.

"It's a good starting point for people, they can have something to focus on and work towards,” she noted.