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EmailGiving children a voice at the UN Climate Change Conference
Annie, age 15, is one of two teenagers chosen to represent UK youngsters after winning a national competition to go to the COP15. She has since been interviewed by BBC Gloucester Radio on her passion for Climate Change awareness.
As global leaders gather for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, children and young people around the world are listening to the global debate on climate change and want to do more.
Plan will be supporting a group of young journalists from Indonesia, Kenya, UK and Sweden to attend COP15 (December 7th – 18th) and have the opportunity to creatively and widely share their views on climate change via traditional and new media. The young journalists will be attending press conferences, interviewing key delegates and sharing their accounts via daily blogs from Copenhagen.
We’ll also be attending the COP15 as a member of the Children in a Changing Climate coalition, cofounded by Plan in 2007. Other members of the collation include UNICEF, Save the Children, the Institute of Development Studies and World Vision.
Plan calls for action at the COP15
We are calling for a number of actions at COP15, including:
- Giving children access to dialogue and formal decision-making mechanisms on climate change;
- Investing more in education so the next generation knows more about managing the environment;
- Ensuring that National Adaptation Programs of Action (NAPAs) and other international, regional and national strategic plans on climate change protect and involve children; and
- Emphasizing the significance of children – in terms of impact and ‘agency’ – within the 5th IPCC Assessment Report.
The main tool Plan and the youth representatives will be using at the COP15 is the document 'Global Warning: Children’s Right to be heard in Global Climate Change Negotiations.'
Following the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Plan will continue work on children’s engagement in climate change decision-making and action through climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction as part of the Children in a Changing Climate coalition, through a new development education project on Climate Change (Plan Kenya, Senegal and Malawi, UK and Netherlands), and through the growing number of disaster risk reduction, climate change and environmental management projects being implemented throughout Plan.
