I'm sitting inside the 15th annual Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the opening ceremony is about to start.
I'm here with the Sierra Student Coalition, the youth organization of the Sierra Club. We are also part of the International Youth Delegation, which includes around 2000 young people from 80 countries. Over the weekend, I attended the 5th annual Conference of Youth during which all of the youth delegates discussed the policy proposals we wanted to see passed during the conference, and how we could make our opinions known to our individual national delegations.
The importance of the conference really began to hit home when I talked to a young woman from the Maldive Islands whose country, which is already forcing to adapt to rising sea levels and decreasing fish stocks, will be under water in less than a century unless CO2 emissions are reduced.
For the time being, our delegation will follow the policy discussions closely, hound the U.S. delegation and members of Congress in attendance, and work as hard as we can to achieve a fair, binding and ambitious agreement to combat climate change.
More info on the specific details of the negotiations, and what such an agreement might look like, will follow later.
Daniel
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