Tim in Cancun - The Wrap Up of my experience at the United Nations

I've been back in Taiwan for a few days now and finally have gotten to this final blog post, my wrap up of what I came away with after the United Nations climate change negotiations.

The first thing, the most positive, is that our Conference Of Youth was a smashing success!

I've been to dozens of leadership and youth conferences and even organized a few and I have to say that the difference between last year's COY in Copenhagen and this year's COY in Mexico was like night and day as far as organization. (This is where I pat myself and the other COY6 organizers on the back)

COY6...workshops

- Last year's COY5 was thrown together in less than a month by people who were already way too busy, this year's COY6 had a dedicated team working together for months in advance.

- At last year's COY5 there wasn't even a posted schedule nor were there visible volunteers, at COY6 our schedule needed a bit of work but was loads more organized ahead of time and our volunteers were everywhere to see.

- Last year's COY5 they struggled to even get whiteboard markers for the classrooms, this year we had it all covered thanks largely to our Mexican organizers.

- Last year there was no central person who was visible and available to keep the conference running, this year it was me. I'm not gonna be gentle about this, I know I did a good job and it felt fantastic to have 3 straight days of troubleshooting and making sure things went smoothly. I hardly stepped foot in a workshop, I missed both keynote speakers and I was left behind when the youth movement took off the following week, but it was worth it because COY6 was my baby, and it went great!

The next thing, during the UN conference. 

It was 2 weeks and I only had 6 days of accreditation where I could go into the UN building. The first 4 days I was sick. That kind of sucked, I was bored and slept for most of my accreditation period.

European Renewable Energies Expert Panel

When I did make it into the building I was lost most of the time. I went to a few side events on renewable energies and businesses involved in climate change activities but I really didn't see or hear anything I hadn't seen before. I guess that's what I get for being addicted to podcasts, I'm fairly up on the topics that I'm interested in.

The overwhelming message from businesses were that they needed "favourable policies" to help them develop their industry, which is basically their way of saying "we're waiting for governments to give us money, until they do we can't do anything."

When I asked them what they were doing to lobby governments and what social programs they were implementing to get the public on their side they only said "education is key." Yeah, that's great, what kind of education, who are you educating and how do you plan to do this? Oh, that's right, education is also the government's responsibility.

So, lemme get this straight, you expect the government to educate the public on why we need "favourable renewable policies" so that we'll get enough public support to make the government realize they need to make "favourable renewable policies." That's basically having the fish teach the fisherman how to fish so he can catch more fish. That's just dumb.

The third thing, and most important, was working with the youth climate movement.

Here I met some of the most talented, intelligent and highly motivated people I've ever encountered, but trying to work with them was a bit trying.

Spokescouncil...so many laptops

Before I went to Mexico, I thought my time at the UN would be spent collaborating on projects back in our home countries; doing joint campaigns and the like.

The reality was that most people were there to react to what happened at the talks. There was some discussion about being less reactive, but from what I saw, that was still what most time was spent on. I honestly don't know of anyone who spent their time planning to have a direct effect on emissions, it was all very abstract, and most of the youth's emotional capital was spent being disappointed with the negotiators rather than using the tremendous available human resources to have a concrete and measurable success.

The ability for the youth to make decisions quickly and efficiently is severely lacking.

There was so much talk for so little action during spokescouncil - the decision making body of YOUNGO (Youth Non-Governmental Organization) - and often discussion got bogged down on topics that didn't lead to any action on climate change. For example, nearly an entire 2 hour meeting was spent talking about whether or not to hold spokescouncil bilingual in Spanish and English, which is a worthy topic, but the fact that it took so much time and overtook an arguably more important topic (Article 6 policy discussions), speaks to the fact that YOUNGOs decision making processes need work.

Spokescouncil in English and Spanish

The youth climate movement is still very young, in all senses of the word. The actual structure of YOUNGOs decision making is not even 5 years old and there is no formal review process to make sure that it's being updated as we learn more about what works and what doesn't. This has to change. It also seems to be assumed that the current processes are as good as they're going to be. This also has to change.

When I was 21 I thought I was smarter than everyone else; now that I'm almost always the oldest person in the room at these youth meetings I realize how wrong I was.

I have ultimate faith that the youth movement can do a lot better than it has been doing and I hope to be a part of it.