After an intense group flight and then a day of meetings with our entire team, we are all settling in to Copenhagen. How are we all, you ask? Well, It’s really cold, but not snowing. Half of us are staying in Danhostel, a massive youth hostel with 1000 beds (mostly youth and NGO representatives attending the negotiations) and 6 beds to a room. The other half (the Pacific delegates and Australian Project Survival Pacific team) are staying at “The Clubhouse”, which is a motorbike club house near the Bella Centre.
We’re all jet lagged but being driven to stay awake through adrenaline and the excitement of being here and meeting so many people. Today was the first day of the Conference of Youth, and we met hundreds of other young people from almost every country in the world, including 160 youth from the Global South (thanks to the tireless fundraising efforts of Deepa Gupta and others).
Our teams have all swung into action: policy, international networks, actions, media, video, online, logistics and welfare. Lots happened today: Amanda and I ran a workshop on how to set up a youth climate coalition; we were contacted by several Australian media outlets, we got local mobile phones, some of us got our internet sorted (others still struggling); Deepa and I have speeches at the closing plenary of the Conference of Youth, Sheena and Braden went to the global Indigenous caucus, and we finally got to see Anna Keenan, an AYCC organiser who stayed in Europe after the UN Climate Negotiations in Poznan last year and is now on Day 30 of the Climate Justice Fast.
So – we’ll be writing many more updates soon, posting photos on the AYCC Flickr, and uploading videos every few days. Stay tuned and thanks for all your support!
