Youth and Future Generations Day was held on the 10th of December at COP. It was the first time ever in the history of COP that such a day was held in honor of the children and youth around the world.

It is significant as it acknowledges and highlights the important role that children and youth plays in the climate debate. Children and youth are amongst the most vulnerable that will be worst affected by climate change. Thus, what is at stake here is ours and our children’s future and we will be the ones who will live up to the consequences of the decisions that world leaders make at the last week of COP15.

Yet the current state of negotiations shows little signs of hope.

The negotiations are close to collapsing with developing countries walking out of meetings and sessions. With how things are currently shaping up, I have no idea what will happen and what to expect over the next few days. All I hope is that we can seal a fair, equitable and strong deal to safeguard our future of humanity. Despite everything that has happened in the last couple of days, I believe our cry to seal the deal is heard all around the world through the various protests that were organized all around the world on the 12 December, the Global Day of Action.

I am optimistic. I believe in the power of people. Someone once said to me that

“Working together, people can perform feats. They can push things that come into their hands a little higher up, a little further on towards the highlights of excellence.”

It is not too late to save the future of our planet.

For those of you who are not here with us, I strongly urge you to write letters to your politicians to demand for stronger action on climate change and join the global climate movement and rallies happening all around the world in order to build up the momentum needed to prevent our planet from embarking on the destructive path we are currently on.

A Ray of Light

According to the dictionary a plenary is the following:

Plenary

adj.

Complete in all respects; unlimited or full: a diplomat with plenary powers.

Fully attended by all qualified members: a plenary session of the council.

To be honest, this doesn’t make any sense seeing what I saw today. A couple of people sitting in one big room talking about documents with wonderful titles such as FCCC/CP/2009/4, honestly, it’s hard to make sense of. But after silly discussions about the logo have past and the ‘fun’ stuff is over the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP15) gets really serious.

Today a country called Tuvalu made a curious move. After having discussed the above mentioned document, a proposal for an additional document to the Kyoto protocol, the small island state managed to somehow get the session of COP suspended. In theory this sounds like an event that would have stopped the talks continuing. In practice the agenda point was suspended and the negotiations continued with the next agenda point.

Yet what happened over the next few hours can only be described as a movement that arose on the spot. Tuvalu gained massive support from NGOs because of its radical proposal to fight climate change. At 3PM, as COP went back into session protests were started by several NGOs. The blame, however much people would like, cannot be placed with the youth. The as of now unidentified NGOs had made banners beforehand for which the youth simply does not have the resources. Nevertheless, the group of adults was joined by youth present and UN security had to intervene to allow parties to access the plenary.

Sadly this meant that all NGOs were no longer allowed to enter the plenary to observe. Those already present were allowed to remain seated. The entire conference, however, was clearly in an uproar about the event and media was buzzing everywhere, eager to report.

A day that I spend mostly in the plenary ended up being extremely interesting. Despite many confusing factors the day seemed, personally, more productive than any day here so far.

Let’s hope parties are not afraid to speak up like Tuvalu today. The size of a country doesn’t have to matter to make an impact on a day at COP. Let’s just hope the impacts reaches further than that.

Amongst the Chaos...

Amidst the chaos and throng of people, the COP15 negotiations continued at a steady but increasing pace. You can notice the increased confidence in the people as they discover their purpose within the conference. A conference of this size, roughly 45,000 participants, the meetings can seem quite hectic but we do hope that we can have some form of influence. Our goal as TYN members is to lobby and get out our policy line into the negotiating text, to try to influence leaders into adopting a legally adopting agreement, and to network and create contacts, potentially as speakers for future summer symposiums, to obtain leadership roles within youth working groups, and develop new ideas for upcoming TYA conferences.

So far, our second day is quite productive, though we are still finding our feet. Xander Brouwer has provided support for participants, who have new ideas on Youth Produced Media. Beth Gunningham engaged with the adaptations policy group and is now working on drafting policy text as well as finding candidates to interview. Sven Herreman took charge of the finance policy group and will be representing them in the spokescouncil. Michelle Son attended the US State Department briefings on recent negotiations. On an exciting note, all members of the TYN delegation will be attending the spokescouncil meeting tomorrow morning. We hope that tomorrow will be equally as productive as today.

An impression of COP15…

Today the conference finally kicked off! Unfortunately for many NGO delegates, including ourselves, it was difficult to actually get to the conference - we didn’t manage to get registered yesterday, and today could only register as of 12am as government delegations had priority. Expecting long lines we decided to come at 11am already - and stood outside in the cold for about 2 hours along with many, many other IGO, NGO and media people… Once inside the building it took us another one and a half hours to get registered, but we got through and could finally really get started!

A quick impression of COP15: it is gigantic and seems incredibly chaotic at first. We therefore used the remainder of the afternoon to get an idea of what is happening, and when, and where… To give you a bit of an idea, here is a brief description of what the conference looks like.

First, there are many different people at COP15 – over 30.000 people have signed up to attend in fact! This ranges from government delegations (COP15 stands for 15th Conference of the Parties) to NGO representatives, from media to scientists etc. All these people meet each other in all kinds of different ways during the conference. First there are the different official sessions in which the government negotiations take place, in which today countries made opening statements. Then there are the various side events, in which an NGO, research institute, a city – anyone really who wants to organize a side event – addresses a certain topic or question, bringing together people interested in that topic and sharing knowledge. Also (and this is what’s most visible when walking outside and through the conference centre) many NGOs organize all kinds of actions. Dressing up, singing, holding up banners, dancing, whatever can be used will be used to attract attention and create an atmosphere of urgency at the conference. More official lobbying happens everywhere in the conference centre as well of course. Also the various alliances of countries at the conference as well as all the stakeholder groups have daily meetings, to coordinate their strategies. Youth is one of the official stakeholder groups at the conference, along with for example indigenous peoples, business, women, farmers – and with our delegation we’ll be engaging in the youth constituency meetings and projects and through there try and influence what is happening at the conference. Keep watching this space for updates!

Conference of Youth; Here at Last!

On the weekend before COP15 begins, a conference is held for the youth delegates attending COP. The Conference of Youth, or COY, is in part a training ground for delegates, in part an information sharing forum and in part a place for delegates to meet and network before COP commences.

A number of workshops were held on subjects such as UNFCCC processes, Emissions Trading Schemes, the Kyoto Protocol and Long Term Cooperative Action, how to use a day at COP15 effectively, and Youth Media. As a delegation, we split ourselves across the groups so that we could share information between ourselves and gain as much from the workshops as possible. The workshops were very informative and, I think, have put us in good position for the beginning of COP15.

In the afternoon there was an ‘open space’ for discussing the role of Youth at COP15, our expected outcomes for the conference, and whether we could use any perceived failures to our advantage. For this open space we talked as a delegation, along with other youth, to brainstorm on these subjects. This was instrumental in further developing our own agenda, as a delegation, for COP15.

Finally, at the end of the day, we were split into working groups, such as policy and media. This was a great opportunity for deepening our understanding of issues that we will be focusing on at COP, as well as for meeting delegates who will be working in similar areas as ourselves.

Overall, COY was a success and the TYN delegation gained much from the experience. The knowledge and contacts gained from this conference will put us in good stead for COP15.

Introducing TYN COP15 Delegation

Hey everyone! I'm sure you guys want to know more about the TYN Delegation in COP15 so here are our introductions!

Beverly Ng

My name is Beverly(Bev) Ng and I’m from Sydney, Australia. I’m currently completing a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences at University of Sydney, majoring in Government, International Relations and Environmental Studies. I’ve been involved with TYN for a number of years, starting with TYA10. This is my second year at COP and I’m excited to be working with such an amazing team for COP15. I’ll be mainly working in the policy group, particularly on adaptation and mitigation policies.

Annika Greup:

My name is Annika Greup, I come from the Netherlands, study European Politics in Oxford, and am delegation coordinator along with Beverly for our TYN delegation here at COP15! I've been involved with TYN for a number of years and last year I attended COP14 in Poznan, which was a great experience. I'm even much more looking forward to COP15 getting started, considering how much higher the stakes are this year. I'll be great to keep you all updated through this blog!

Xander Brouwer:

My name is Xander Brouwer and I am studying History and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. I have been working with TYN since TYA13 and I am currently the President for the Summer Symposium. At COP15 I will be coordinating the Youth Produced Media at COP and produce media for TYN. Some strange information about me: I do not drink beer despite being from the Netherlands.

Sven Herreman:

My name is Sven Herreman, and I am a law student in the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels. I have been active in TYN since TYA 13, and I was supposed to be president of the 2009 Summer Symposium. I will be a co-coordinator for TYA 14, and Deputy President for the 2010 Summer Symposium. At COP 15, I will be compiling a contact-database for TYN as well as being in the Policy workgroup.

Beth Gunningham:

Hey, I'm Beth. I'm mostly Australian but am a citizen of Australia, England and the USA, so my nationality is a little confused. I'm currently studying Law and Development Studies at the Australian National University and I'm loving it so far (law is actually much less boring than I thought it would be!). As far as random facts about myself go, I have crazy eyes; I can vibrate my irises and can move my eyelids inwards and outwards, not just up and down. I also have an obsession with skies, speak Swahili (or try to) and my favourite time of day is 12:34.

Michelle Son:

Hi! My name is Michelle Son and I'm from California. I'm currently studying International Relations at The University of San Diego. I've been invovled with TYA for the past year now and also will be co-coordinating Environmental Sustainability and Human Development this January for TYA 14. I am the deputy secretary general of my university's MUN club.

Gina Murphy:

My name is Gina Murphy. I am Irish and and have lived in Dublin all my life until this year. I am currently doing an MPhil (masters) in Development Studies in Cambridge, UK. My experiences in TYN made me very interested in development so I was eager to study it from an academic perspective. I have been working with TYN for four years now. I am very excited about COP15. It is a conference which is frequently mentioned in my lectures as being the most important event of the decade.

That’s it for now! You’ll hear about what TYN will be specifically working on at COP15 tomorrow so stay tuned!

TYN on the ground for the UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen!

Hi guys!
My name is Beverly and I’m one of the delegation coordinators for TYN’s COP15 delegation. The TYN COP15 Delegation is here on the ground in Copenhagen, getting ready for the UN Climate talks that will start on Monday!

Throughout the next two weeks, we will be blogging about our activities here at COP15 and provide you with the newest updates regarding the negotiations! We will be engaging you in the process by updating our blog here, on TYN’s Twitter and facebook:

Twitter

Facebook

You are encouraged to submit questions, comment on our blogs and keep track of what we are doing here!
Despite cold and windy weather we are very excited to be taking place in this conference the next few weeks.

In the next few days, we will be introducing ourselves to you and give you an idea of what we will be doing at UN climate talks.
Hope you are all excited and hyped up as we are!
Cheers,
Beverly