Over 10,000 negotiators—and many more journalists, activists, and the like—are expected to arrive in Copenhagen this December for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP15. A little over 800 of them have been identified as members of the youth constituency, and you just might recognize 10 of those exuberant faces.
Drawn from myriad disciplines—Peace and Conflict Studies to engineering—the 10 students make up the University of Toronto’s delegation to COP15. Selected based on our proven dedication to environmental activism, U of T’s group will be one of the four campus delegations present, the others being Yale, Oxford, and the College of the Atlantic.
If you are envisioning the cliché of vegan liberals who wear hemp sweaters for all occasions, you guess wrong. Yes, some of us are fond of plaid, and many are suspected cyclists, yet we have been thoughtfully selected to best represent the University of Toronto. Within the delegation, there is an architecture student, a yoga instructor, a former ad executive turned PhD candidate, and myself, a journalist. One of the members is a soon-to-be mom. Another makes excellent cookies (yes, vegan ones).
The delegation began with the thought that university students can so easily fall into the trappings of the ivory tower, and lack opportunities to apply their theoretical knowledge outside the classroom. Spearheaded by the Centre for the Environment, the delegation is intended to highlight the importance of an affair in some distant Scandinavian capital.
COP15 is arguably the most important meeting of climate leaders. They’ll be meeting to discuss, well, the fate of our planet. With the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol due to expire in 2012, COP15 has been set as the deadline to map out our common post-Kyoto future. It is imperative that the international community band together to forge a new international protocol that addresses climate change.
Against this backdrop, the U of T delegation has been formed to serve two main purposes. One, as members of an academic institution, we hope to engage the campus through creative means. We’re doing this in many ways, such as our Youtube campaign allowing students of all disciplines to upload videos of themselves answering the question, “What would you like for Canada to do at the climate negotiations in Copenhagen?” The videos will be collected to become part of a larger video installation effort. We hope the video campaign will enable us to carry these individual voices with us to Copenhagen.
Two, we hope that by collaborating with the Canadian Youth Delegation, we will take part in holding our government accountable, and remind our leaders that thousands of young Canadians are concerned for the state of our shared environment. The delegation also hopes to engage with the international youth contingent to advocate for a science-based agreement to cut carbon emissions by 2020—the only scenario identified by the scientific community as ensuring that humanity will avoid catastrophic climate change.
“I am excited for the chance to get involved directly as a member of this delegation, and to represent and voice the concerns of students here at the U of T at COP15,” commented David Gordon, who is part of a joint-university research team studying climate politics of Canada and the European Union. With every effort by these environmentally-conscious great minds, the University of Toronto takes one collective step closer to a much greater future.
May Jeong is a member to the U of T Delegation to COP15 and will be writing for *The Huffington Post on her experiences at the climate summit this December.
For instructions on how to get involved, email [email protected] or go to uoftcop15.ca (under construction but up soon).*
