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Youth address world leaders at high-level plenary at UN Climate Summit, demanding governments commit to bold targets to ensure survival and climate justice.

With over 1000 youth leaders from more than 100 countries gathered in Copenhagen, the International Youth Climate Movement at the UN Climate Summit today sent a powerful message to the assembled world leaders that governments must rise above the divisive politics of the past and show true leadership to ensure nothing less than the very survival of current and future.

“We have all worked for the past two years with the promise of a strong deal in Copenhagen to safeguard our future. Now it seems you will not get it done,” said Juan Carlos Soriano, a youth delegate from Peru, addressing the summit plenary. “This is unacceptable. We placed our trust in you. You should be ashamed.”

“Our rivers are drying up. Our crops are turning to dust. An unrelenting sun scorches our land while other areas are ravaged by storms and diseases,” said Esther Agbarakwe from Nigeria. “If developed countries set aside just 5% of their GNP for effective adaption by the most vulnerable countries, we will survive beyond 2050.”

“I came as a part of the Pacific youth delegation, but here I united with the Caribbean, the Maldivian, and the International Youth Climate Movement as a whole, calling out with one united voice for only 1.5 degrees of temperature rise and 350ppm of carbon concentration in the atmosphere”, said Krishneil Narayan from Fiji. “If the youth can unite as one movement at COP-15, we expect the leaders deciding our future to do the same, and deliver a legal binding treaty to ensure our survival.

Youth are calling for a Fair, Ambitious, Binding deal in Copenhagen, to avoid catastrophic climate change and ensure the survival of current and future generations, that:

Ensures Climate Justice

Limits global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 °C

Reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide levels back down to 350 PPM or lower

Commits developed countries to financing for adaptation of at least 5% GDP by 2020

Reduces the emissions of developed countries at least 45% below 1990 levels by 2020

Hundreds of millions of people in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region and in the river basins downstream are being forced to adapt to a new reality: climate change.

Climate change is increasing uncertainty and the risk for extreme droughts interspersed with extreme floods that are challenging food security, housing, infrastructure, business and even survival.Even hardy mountain populations, adapted for centuries to survival in extreme environments, are undergoing events so unprecedented that their traditional coping strategies are being overwhelmed by the events unfolding.

These are some of the main findings of a new study released today at the UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research (CICERO).

The findings are based on five field teams in China, India, Pakistan and Nepal who took part in this unique collaborative pilot study to look at the realities facing mountain populations and hundreds of millions people downstream.

The acute experiences of people in this region are living proof of the pressures some societies are already enduring  as a result of the onset of climate change—adaptation here is not just a necessity but a question of local communities’ very survival,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director.

In Nepal, a country normally known as a country of water abundance, extreme droughts in some cases lasting years have impacted large parts of the country. People who can afford machinery respond by digging trenches in the dry river beds. Now the trenches and tube wells have to be guarded to protect them against those who cannot afford to get water this way, leading to increased inequality and conflicts in the society.

In Assam and Bihar in India, embankments built to contain the Koshi River have led to waterlogging, and even worse, cause catastrophic floods when they suddenly burst as a result of improper construction and inadequate maintenance. People who have settled closest to the embankments are the most vulnerable and take the heaviest toll.

“Policies that determine people’s access to resources when facing water stress and floods are currently weak throughout the region, thus people rely on their own innovations,” said Andreas Schild, Director General of ICIMOD. “Governments have to find ways to support improved livelihood strategies, and increase people’s influence in the governance of infrastructure, such as embankments,” he added.

For the impoverished, everyday activities are focused on immediate survival, thus rendering the hope of developing long-term resilience and economic development even more remote, says the report.

In some places, necessity has forced local farmers to sell off livestock and land during droughts to pay short-term debts, to cope with elevated food prices, or to rebuild destroyed housing– resulting among others from extreme climate events and inadequate policies elsewhere in the world.

Traditional institutions, like the Gram in Chitral, Pakistan, help people to manage scarce water resources in an equitable way. In Pakistan, a near doubling of the population in just 40 years will also challenge the food production, which is mainly based on irrigation from rivers fed by meltwater from snow and glaciers in the mountains.

Social networks and cultures are an asset in dealing with the extremes, such as the designation of women as water guards in Yunnan province in China, to manage water conflicts.

Networks can also ensure that migrants find help, as in Chitral, Pakistan, where kinship and traditional hospitality help fellow villagers re-settle after catastrophes. But in some cases traditions can also challenge the need for new ways to adapt.

In Assam, India, non-Mishing people are unwilling to use the flood-tolerant housing techniques developed by the Mishing because they do not wish to be associated with another caste.

Traditionally, many of the government policies in the countries of the region have been sectoral in nature, such as the investments in irrigation infrastructure in Yunnan. These investments, focused on increasing cash crop production at the national level, have largely improved and strengthened lowland communities’ coping capacity and productivity – but they have not helped the up-land communities in dealing with water stress, as this was not their focus.

Similarly, road development in Nepal has increased market access and thereby supported new livelihoods, but has destroyed many traditional streams and wells, reducing local ability to cope with drought. Restoration programmes following droughts have frequently simply reconstructed buildings in high-risk flood zones, even new schools have been constructed in high-risk flash-flood locations.

A chief finding of the report is the need for governments to prioritise the development and improvement of national and regional policies to provide better support for local adaptation against a more extreme climate, helping to shift planning from acute survival towards long-term resilience. Many of the countries in the region, such as India, have assigned special institutions nationally to address disaster management.

“The report is ground-breaking in that it brings together best-practices aimed at increasing adaptation and resilience from across borders in Pakistan, India, Nepal and China,” Mr. Steiner said. “If the world is to deal decisively with climate change, we must also address the need for programmes targeted towards adaptation strategies to build long-term resilience. Local people already have to make choices daily, and governments with adequate international assistance must step up their efforts to support them in coping,” he added.

Key Findings from the Report and Statistics on the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region:

Extreme climate events are destroying crops, depleting water resources, causing losses in livestock, cropland, and agricultural productivity, and destroying the meagre infrastructure present, thus reducing market access and access to public services.

The warming in the Himalayas appears to be much faster than the global average, for example, 0.6 degrees Centigrade per decade in Nepal compared with the global average of 0.74 degrees Centigrade over the last 100 years. The rate of change is higher at higher altitudes.

Glaciers are generally receding in the Hindu-Kush Himalayas, some 40-80% have been projected to be lost by the end of the century, with the exception of the Karakoram, where the glaciers have been more stable.

The proportion of glacial melt in rivers varies from 2-50%, with mountain snow and ice being critical for much larger shares of the flow in some rivers.

Irrigation water from rivers sustains nearly 55% of Asia’s cereal production and around 25% of the world cereal production, feeding over 2.5 billion people in Asia. Another UN report, “The Environmental Food Crisis”, warned that the melting glaciers and snow could jeopardize world food security and drive prices to unprecedented levels.

A member of the Intenrational Youth Climate Movement hands out a scarf to a delegate to signify the beginning of Youth and Future Generations Day. Photo Credit: Robert vanWaarden)

Hundreds of youth from around the world are celebrating “Young and Future Generations Day” with the UNFCCC at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference on Thursday, December 10. More than 1,000 young people from over 100 countries are attending the UN Climate Summit calling for bold climate leadership by their governments. Their collective vision is to protect their future and the lives of future generations threatened by climate change.

Organized in partnership between the YOUNGO (youth) constituency and the UNFCCC secretariat, Youth and Future Generations Day seeks to send a powerful message of inter-generational equity to COP15 delegates, as well as highlighting the vital role of youth as both advocates for, and implementers of climate solutions. Highlights of the day includes an Intergenerational Inquiry with Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, as well as the launch of “Growing Together in a Changing Climate”, a publication featuring efforts by youth and the UN to engage young people on climate issues. Side events through the day showcase Youth and Student Movements’ leadership on climate, the role of education, and youth voices on deforestation and degradation (REDD).

“Today’s youth will live their lives with the decisions made in Copenhagen, and our governments have a moral responsibility to deliver a fair, ambitious and binding deal”, said Prisca Randriamampihavana, a 20 year old youth delegate from Madagascar. “We want to ask world leaders, how old will you be in 2050?”

UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Yvo de Boer adds that “Young people…have brought their energy and creativity to the intergovernmental process, demanding concrete action from their governments.”

The year 2009 has seen an explosion of youth climate advocacy, and the emergence of what many youth in Copenhagen are calling the “International Youth Climate Movement,” joining hundreds of youth organizations and climate advocates from around the world. On 10 December, visit youth and youth organizations at the Youth Arcade and find out what they are already doing to tackle climate change and how you can engage with them on working towards solutions.

By Hansha Sanjyal

Youth Stand with Africa and Vulnerable Countries to declare: “We Will Not Die Quietly”

Hundreds of individuals spontaneously gathered outside the main plenary to support Tuvalu and call for a real, fair binding deal.

Echoing the words of Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed and the African negotiator Ambassador Lumumba, hundreds of youth joined a loud and energetic climate storm. Youth from every continent clapped, snapped, and pounded their feet to make the sounds of a rainstorm in a representation of the typhoons and hurricanes that have ravaged communities around the world this year. Severe weather patterns are likely to be exacerbated as the global climate warms, threatening nations and communities around the world.

“Negotiators are turning their backs on us and telling us to keep quiet. As a young person living in the Pacific, I know what it’s like to fear climate change,” said Subhashni Raj, a youth organizer from Fiji who spoke at the rally. “I’m here to say that we will not die quietly.”

Responding to growing calls from African, Island Nation and Developing Country delegates for a deal based on science and real justice, today’s storm was the largest youth demonstration seen yet at Copenhagen. The over 1,000 youth participating in the talks – the largest youth delegation in COP history – have consistently refused talk of political compromises that amount to “suicide pacts” for many low-lying nations around the world that would be destroyed by unchecked climate change.

Youth are specifically calling on developed countries to step up their emissions reductions commitments and to cease the secret, back-room dealing that has plagued the talks.

“Yesterday, in a meeting with African civil society groups, Ambassador Lumumba made it clear that African countries will refuse to sign a suicide pact here in Copenhagen,” said Landry Ninteretse, a youth organizer from Burundi. “European and American aid proposals look more like colonialism than an attempt to solve climate change. Our hopes and dreams can’t be bought off $10 billion dollars.”

“Those of us in the North have colonized more than our share of the atmosphere, and it will be impossible to reach a deal without a serious commitment to repaying our climate debt,” said US youth Madeline Gardner.

The year 2009, has seen an explosion of youth climate advocacy, and the emergence of the “International Youth Climate Movement,” a network of hundreds of youth organizations and climate advocates from around the world. By virtue of their age, youth from developing countries in many ways have the most at stake at the climate change talks as they will far outlive the negotiators – and experience the impacts of their decisions. Youth are demanding targets of 1.5 degrees C and 350ppm, with no offsets to ensure basic survival.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”
At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

(Source – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/06/copenhagen-editorial)