Copenhagen Team Update: Conference of Youth
After an intense group flight and then a day of meetings with our entire team, we are all settling in to Copenhagen. How are we all, you ask? Well, It’s really cold, but not snowing. Half of us are staying in Danhostel, a massive youth hostel with 1000 beds (mostly youth and NGO representatives attending the negotiations) and 6 beds to a room. The other half (the Pacific delegates and Australian Project Survival Pacific team) are staying at “The Clubhouse”, which is a motorbike club house near the Bella Centre.
We’re all jet lagged but being driven to stay awake through adrenaline and the excitement of being here and meeting so many people. Today was the first day of the Conference of Youth, and we met hundreds of other young people from almost every country in the world, including 160 youth from the Global South (thanks to the tireless fundraising efforts of Deepa Gupta and others).
Our teams have all swung into action: policy, international networks, actions, media, video, online, logistics and welfare. Lots happened today: Amanda and I ran a workshop on how to set up a youth climate coalition; we were contacted by several Australian media outlets, we got local mobile phones, some of us got our internet sorted (others still struggling); Deepa and I have speeches at the closing plenary of the Conference of Youth, Sheena and Braden went to the global Indigenous caucus, and we finally got to see Anna Keenan, an AYCC organiser who stayed in Europe after the UN Climate Negotiations in Poznan last year and is now on Day 30 of the Climate Justice Fast.
So – we’ll be writing many more updates soon, posting photos on the AYCC Flickr, and uploading videos every few days. Stay tuned and thanks for all your support!
‘The 17,000 people visiting Denmark for global talks on reducing greenhouse gases will release as much carbon dioxide during the two-week event as about 200,000 U.S. passenger cars do in the period.
Environmental activists, government envoys, business leaders and journalists will emit 40,500 tons of the global- warming gas traveling to and within Copenhagen and for electricity and heat in their hotels and meeting rooms, according to an estimate by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees the talks. Denmark’s government says it intends to offset the gases.
“The fact that all these people are flying into Copenhagen is a wonderful irony,” Adair Turner, chairman of a committee that advises the U.K. government on climate change, said in an interview. He’s taking the “more carbon-friendly” approach of appearing at the conference via video conference, Turner said.
Envoys from more than 190 nations aim to devise an agreement while in Copenhagen to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases that UN-sponsored scientists have said are causing “unequivocal” global warming, threatening to increase droughts and raise sea levels, swamping island-nations and coastal towns.’
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=aHq47NNs__Eo
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