I attended my first youth meeting on Monday afternoon. There were young men and women from many different cultures gathered together in Meeting Room 8.1. While we sat in a circle waiting for Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, to join us, chatter of all different languages filled the room. It was a bit overwhelming listening to so many different dialects at the same time and then the room got quite and clapping began. Christiana Figueres had walked through the door. She sat down on the floor with us. The youth were able to ask her any questions they and their groups wanted. She answered them easily until she got to the last one. She said she gets the same difficult question every year: How can the youth move forward, pave a pathway, and have more of a voice? She said this is one of the hardest ones; she doesn't know the correct answer because there so many rules and regulations in the legislation of the UN not allowing youths to do certain things. For example, youths under the age of 18 are not allowed to attend the conference and since COP was designed as a strict intergovernmental process, youth end up not being able to have much of a voice. She said she instead wants to encourage us to continue what we are doing, to fight for a voice and to share with each other, at the conference as well as with everyone when we get back home. She said she would like to see us, the youth, to continue and not give up sowing the seeds to take over decisions rather than the process itself. This means at COP, but even more so at home. WE need to take the messages, ideas, facts, and hope back home, to all the different corners of the world we come from (my corner is thousands of away from here in Pennsylvania). We can make a difference without really knowing it. We need to motivate people now more than ever because if we don’t who will?
At the end she said something that really let us know she believes in us. She said in her future she hopes to see us at the negotiation tables helping to make the decisions.
At the end she said something that really let us know she believes in us. She said in her future she hopes to see us at the negotiation tables helping to make the decisions.
RSS Feed