A moment to get my head clear…

So I attended the post-mortems of the Copenhagen conference and met up with the European Youth Forum to officially evaluate our presence there. We all agreed that we could have had more impact had more of us been able to get into the Centre on the days they cut youth out. They reduced the youth NGO passes to 12 on the Thursday and Friday which still riles me. And I have still no idea why – in comparison the other 6-8 official constituency groups had roughly 900 passes to divy up between themselves on Thursday and 300 on Friday.

So last Sunday we all met up to thrash out what our learnings were from the conference – where we felt we were most effective, how we felt we advanced the youth agenda etc. And the big thing was when we could participate we felt we could make a big difference – lots of us were able to get the youth message back to our national media because of mine and a few others work with the press. Many of us were able to change the text in the working groups of the conference to include youth an many parts of it. But the main area we felt we lost impact was on the last two days (for me) and the last four days for others, when people were not allowed in because of the over-booking of the conference for 45000 people when they only had 15000 capacity.

This year our Slovenian representative, Anela, was able to be accredited as a party candidate as an official youth delegate. So now Slovenia, along with Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium are leading the way with their youth delegates which are officially part of their country’s delegation – hence they never were cut out from coming in. This is something we need sorted for next year in Ireland and as many other countries as possible. The UN have again and again recognised the importance of youth as a stakeholder in international delegations – we’re the ones the policy makers are determining the future for – it all harks back to the question we wore on our orange t-shirts around the centre (while we could get in) – “What Age Will You Be In 2050?”

I wonder, out of the few I met, would any of the Irish delegation still be alive?

Anyways the wrap up statement I brought home from Copenhagen, is that it’s not over yet. We’ll make sure of that. Here the Australian Youth Climate COalition sum it up:

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