YOUTH: PROTAGONIST, NOT SPECTATORS

Youth Declaration at the 10th Conference of the Parties
of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(Buenos Aires, December 2004)

Youth participation in the COPs of the UNFCCC, as in many other international, national and local decision making processes, is scarce and disarticulated. However, the decisions being taken significantly affect our life at present and in the future.

Whether we are taken as part of the problem or as part of the solution, many people recognize the importance of youth role in sustainable development. Without any doubts, our participation becomes especially relevant considering the imperious need of continuity for any long-term strategy.

Youth daily carry out initiatives for sustainable development that, not only enlarge our capacities to face environmental, social and economic challenges in the future, but also contribute today to the improvement of our communities. We want to be valued as social actors with the capacity to generate creative and effective solutions to the problems that are being discussed today.

We must have opportunities to participate in decision-making processes that limit our options and condition our future. Climate Change will not only be addressed in conference rooms and negotiation tables. Civil Society must be responsible for this work, otherwise there will not be a place on Earth that will not feel the consequences.

We need to walk the road that separates beautiful words from real actions. We need thousand words written in conventions like this to cross these walls and become a social goal, shared, understood and pursued by us all.

It is fundamental that these walls don’t become barriers that keep us away, as if we were not facing a common destiny. We understand that building bridges bring generational gaps together, and someone has to start building. That is why the young people gathered by the Initiative for Youth Participation at the COP10 commit to:

• Keep promoting education, public awareness, participation and access to information, in accordance with Article 6 of the UNFCCC and the New Delhi Work Programme. Likewise, to actively participate in the Regional Workshops.

• Mobilize social youth organizations to create a Global Youth Alliance on Sustainable Development (GYASD), in order to promote and articulate our participation in the decision-making processes related to Multilateral Environmental Agreements.

At the same time, we invite the parties to work with us toward the elimination of barriers that have kept youth visions and voices practically absent in the past ten years. In this sense, we propose:

For Young People to reach the COP:

• The recognition of a Youth Constituency Group within the COP in order to assure youth participation, as businesses, indigenous people and other environmental organizations already have.

• The establishment of a permanent working space – Youth Office – during COPs, to increase the efficiency of our participation, facilitate information exchange and become a reference point and support for young people.

• The creation of a special fund to enable the attendance of youth delegates from developing countries to international negotiation meetings, therefore overcoming an important obstacle for youth participation.

• The active promotion of the inclusion of youth projects and initiatives on climate change within the Clearing House been created under the Article 6 of the UNFCCC.

For the COP to reach young people:

• The creation of a youth section inside the UNFCCC Website, created with the contribution of the GYASD. Although we recognized the improvement made on the site, at present it does not satisfy young people’s information needs.

• The permanent support from the UNFCCC on the realization of the bulletin “The COP from the Youth Perspective”, through the concession of press badges for young reporters of the GYASD.

We are convinced that we must adopt an active role in the issues that affect our present and future; and no doubts climate change is one of them. We have responsibility on this issue, experiences worth taking in and visions that in few years will determine the world’s course. Even more, we have capacity and willingness expressed in uncountable concrete actions like the ones required to reach sustainable development.

We understand that our participation will increase our capacities to face the challenges that climate change, in particular, and sustainable development in general, impose. But we will also make constructive contributions to the international negotiation processes, the implementation of the New Delhi Work Programme and the consolidation of youth as a relevant social interlocutor.

We hope that our participation in the COP and the bonds established here will become the platform from which youth will have a permanent and recognized space in the following Conferences of the Parties.

We as youth invest time and efforts in our communities; we work in our free time or make from our hobbies a job; we learn at the same time that we educate and sensitize others; we demand and negotiate; we get together, cooperate and establish networks even when we think differently; we reach unreachable people while we stay at the reach of people; we propose ideas and we put them into practice. We are in NGOs, universities, schools, clubs, original peoples, community centres, political parties, religious groups, government bodies, international organizations and businesses.

Occasionally we demand opportunities for participation. The truth is we have uncountable spaces from which we daily build our societies. That is why today we are not asking for a space, but simply for the recognition of the one we already have.

The Young People from the Initiative for Youth Participation at the COP 10

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