INHERITANCE OF LOSS

The young are restless to conserve the world they know they will inherit

- DAKSHIANI PALICHA

AFTER SKIPPING a year due to covid-19 disruptions, the 26 th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is here. While the anticipation and run-up to this meeting has matched that of previous ones, or perhaps even surpassed them, the spotlight this time also shone on an event that has hitherto been all but relegated to the footnotes of the agenda—the 16 th Global Conference of Youth.

Held as usual a few days before cop (October 28-31 this year), this youth conference is the biggest so far, with thousands of participants having registered from over 140 countries. This is leaps and bounds ahead of the few hundred participants that would attend the conference a decade ago. The sixth edition of the conference, for instance, held in Cancun, Mexico in 2010, saw just 500-odd attendees.

The main agenda of the youth conference this year, as per Heeta Lakhani, an elected Global Focal Point of the Youth Climate Movement or youngo, a constituency of UNFCCC, was to share the views of young global leaders through a position paper that will be presented at the end of COP26. “Hopefully we can help countries build a consensus on how to move forward with the Paris Agreement, which they’ve been struggling with right now,” she tells Down To Earth (DTE).