Day 2

Street view of Cancun Downtown

Terrace of our Hostel

New Zealand Youth Delegation's Art Message from school kids

After negotiating crazy bus stations, negotiating with taxis, getting lost for a bit, going past endless police and army trucks with machine guns, we arrived at Cancun Messe to get our accreditation for COP16. Accreditation is permission to enter the COP events and be on location – its essentially a backstage pass. However as we aren’t official government delegates, we don’t have access all areas, but we get pretty close!!

We navigated across the city, it took over an hour, to get back to the university where COY was being held. We arrived in time to see the final few presentations that were on success stories of youth Climate Change campaigners.

 We saw presentations from the New Zealand Youth Delegates who have been travelling around their country giving workshops on climate change impacts and science at schools and helping the kids to see where they can make a difference!  There was also a presentation from the Philippines Official Youth Delegation and one from the Nepalese Youth for Climate Action. The Nepalese group ran a campaign which raised awareness about changes in mountains ecosystems and glaziers melting in Nepal as a result of climate change. This campaign influenced their national government, which lead to a change to the government changing the way they address climate change in Nepal.

After the mornings sessions it was off to working groups. I didn’t mention it yesterday, but COY is run by YOUNGO, the international youth organisation that campaigns on climate change. The working groups are formed within YOUNGO and are working on position statements or policy platforms as part of the YOUNGO campaign. I still hadn’t decided on a working group to join by this stage so I went to go a see what a few of them were up to. I went to a Women and Youth working group, led by one of our very own WAGGGS delegates, which was aiming to bring the issues of women and youth into the UNFCCC negotiations and get the words, young women and girls into the text of the convention.

The next working group I went to was the long term strategy group, which is working on developing a long term plan to guide the work and focus on YOUNGO in the next few years. This is a relatively new and abstract working group so it was more exchanging ideas about what we saw as possible future visions for YOUNGO.

On top of all this, all the WAGGGS delegates are in working groups of our own; either policy, actions or blogging. I am in the blogging working group and we are creating written word, videos and photo content for WAGGGS and UNICEF everyday! We have a blog and are putting videos on the WAGGGS website and the UNICEF youtube channel. Today the other four bloggers and I were finding youth delegates to interview and find out hopes and expectations on the COP negotiations. I interviewed two young women, one representing the Cook Islands and the other from the Indian Delegation and central policy agency! We have had a bit of difficulties with internet the last day or so, so hopefully they will all be up soon and I can post the link!

After such a long day we got a real treat! YOUNGO and the university within which we were holding COY at had organised a session of traditional Mexican dancing – there was so many beautiful dresses and costumes and the dancers were so very talented!! It was a really great way to end the day J