Young campaigner Luke Hughes, who is in Durban for the UN climate summit with the UK Youth Climate Coalition, rounds up the frantic final few hours of the talks and asks whether the new climate deal goes far enough to satisfy young people who attended and played a part in the final outcome.
The last two weeks have been crazy. I’ve been here at the UN climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, with 10 other delegates from the UK Youth Climate Coalition. We’ve been working with the international youth climate movement to try to get a good deal for young people. It’s our future on the line, and we were determined to remind negotiators of this.
In the early hours of Sunday morning (36 hours late), the conference reached its dramatic conclusion. With passionate speeches and frantic huddles, the outcomes that we’d been waiting all year for were literally hammered into reality. As I sat at the back of that plenary hall at 5am, and the chair rattled through the decisions, banging her gavel after each one, I reflected on my time in Durban.
Young people at the back of the plenary hall in the early, but final, hours of Sunday morning. (© UNFCCC/2011)
The job of young people at these conferences is to inject positivity and hope into a process that is often painfully slow and dull. However, when the process seems destined to ignore our interests, it’s really hard to stay positive. In the last few days of the conference, we found our collective voice, and the conference sat up and took notice. Our impassioned interventions and actions repeatedly received standing ovations, and we felt like we were finally having an effect.
So was our voice listened to? Well, undoubtedly, we made an impact. Richard Black from the BBC, wrote that "Outside the halls of government, it was a very good meeting for the youth. Unfailingly charming, youth delegates brought a freshness, a 'Yes-we-can'-ness, to the often jaundiced proceedings."
Are we pleased with the outcomes? It depends whom you ask, and what their expectations for this conference were. For me, it could have been a lot worse. A month ago, we were talking about the entire process unraveling here in Durban, and that didn’t happen. Instead, we saved the Kyoto Protocol, we got a timetable for a new global deal, and the ‘Green Climate Fund’ was born. These are all important steps on the road to beating climate change.
However, the world is still very much on course for catastrophe. While we may be one year closer to that catastrophe, we’ve kept open the possibility of changing course to avoid it. The best way I can sum up my feelings right now is that we’re fighting a fight for my generation’s future. We could have completely lost that fight this weekend, but we didn’t. And for that, I’m glad.
Luke Hughes is is a former UNICEF UK Youth Climate Ambassador and is in Durban for the UN climate summit with the UK Youth Climate Coalition.