14 DAY TRIAL // Under the auspices of the 2010 UN Climate Change Conference currently taking place in Cancun, Mexico, experts are calling for the climate generation to pay close attention to the talks, and learn from the failures of the current political generation.
Kids from this generation are the people who will experience the current generation's lack of political will, skill and commitment towards addressing a problem that can still be fixed.
However, if the 2008 Poznan talks and the 2009 Copenhagen conference are any indicators, the Conference of the Parties (COP) 16 will not make any difference in the way things are currently set up.
Participants at the UN meeting are obviously lacking the motivation to take any concrete action, and are still engage in deplorable attempts to shift blame to others, or to dispute the very existence of an established phenomenon – global warming.
This is why training the climate generation starting now is so important. Children need to realize how incompetent and bogged down by petty interests the current decision-makers are, and to avoid becoming the same way when they get into positions of power themselves.
The environment issue is one that concerns them directly, given that they will be the ones living in the heavily-polluted world that awaits us if our so-called leaders do not take steps to mitigate climate change.
These children will have to live under the threat of the ice caps melting, of sea levels rising and engulfing entire cities, of droughts and massive floods. They need to learn everything they can so that they will know what not to do when they grow up.
A meeting of 30 such young climate champions took place between November 22-26 in Vietnam, reuniting kids from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and Vietnam, experts at Our World report.
The group was brought together by the British Council Climate Generation Project. The United Kingdom is the only country to have imposed legally-binding carbon dioxide emission cuts onto itself.
“We made an environmental survey of 334 universities and assessed them according to criteria, such as energy consumption per student, reduction in energy consumption, climate change policies, climate education for students and unique initiatives,” said Hiroki Fukushima.
“We published an Eco University Ranking and awarded certificates to universities with good environmental policies and activities, and organized a seminar to promote universities with good practice,” adds the Japanese Climate Champion.
Endeavors such as this one were presented at the meeting, where kids demonstrated a lot more commitment, and also courage, than the politicians allegedly representing them.