Today I had one of the most frustrating experiences since I started to follow the UNFCCC negotiations. During Rio+20, when I decided, together with a group of friends, to brainstorm about creating an NGO that could increase the participation of the Brazilian youth at UN conferences, I was warned by many people. Phrases like “it is really hard to understand the negotiations”, “getting a consensus among so many countries sometimes takes years” or “it’s easy to be frustrated for not feeling that you can influence the process” were raised by experts, young friends, academics, UN employees or even by my family.
Well, I accepted the challenge and it’s been one year since Engajamundo started its activities in Brazil. I know, diplomacy and the process of trying to get to a consensus are indeed really hard. But only today I could truly feel what all these people were actually trying to say.
One of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s original articles (from way back in 1992) is about education, raising awareness and participation. It’s place in the Convention’s very foundation makes it one of the main issues (particularly for me - it is THE main issue) followed by young people during the negotiations for years now.
As you may know back in your countries, there are only a few – if any – initiatives to educate and engage the population on the impacts and challenges we’re facing because of climate change. In my country, there is still a large percentage of people who don’t even know what it is. My main fear is that if we don’t communicate this, especially for children and youth today, the next generation of leaders will lack crucial knowledge required to actually lead.
That is why education and participation should be highlighted as one of the key issues of the conference and the inputs coming from youth should be emphasized. It is definitely not what is happening. Unfortunately, the attention given to this concern here in Bonn and during the last years of climate negotiation couldn’t be less. Most countries don’t even have a negotiator to follow these discussions and many of the ones who do are delegates without experience on the subject.
During this week, G77+China - the group that aggregates developing countries - had meetings every day in attempt to achieve a consensus on a draft to be discussed on today’s (Friday) and tomorrow’s (Saturday) negotiations. Even if there were some disagreements within the 140 countries (only a few them present during these meetings), the group succeeded in reaching a consensus to present the draft on Friday’s negotiations. After days of hard work to build a consensus and after including youth’s and other stakeholders’ visions, G77+China hoped to present the fruits of their labor to developed countries and try to convince them to adopt the draft.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case (at all!). The developed countries had their own draft presented by the EU, utterly devoid of content, which they seem to think is in their interest. There were only two or three procedural points - like where is the next meeting going to be, and how is the Secretariat reporting what happened on the Dialogues this week. And they were clear about saying that they would only discuss these issues. To try to avoid a huge failure, the G77+China called the developed countries to have a further discussion during the night. Apparently they didn’t shared the same concerns, and none of them appeared for the meeting.
Now, tomorrow (Saturday) at 10am we are going to need a massive support from youth and the civil society so that we can pressure the developed countries for ambition on this issue. If we can get the room Liszt full of people showing that, at least for us, education and participation are not secondary topics, but extremely significant and vital for the young and future generations!
I hope to see you all there tomorrow at 10am!!!
Format: Aside