Action for Climate Empowerment: One of the Challenges for Youth in COY13

The opening ceremony of the thirteenth youth conference (COY13) was held in Bonn, Germany on November 2.

_

Adriana Valenzuela, youth and education focal point of the secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) participated in the opening.

She highlighted the role of young people in the “Action for Climate Empowerment” (ACE) “because we are the way to integrate people in mitigation and adaptation to this phenomenon.”
Thus, YOUNGO started different working groups and conferences where we are going to participate in the coming days, with another 1,300-young people from 140 countries, in order to generate from different points of view inputs that serve to operationalize the Paris Agreement (AP).

In addition, we took the opportunity to be in the ACE working group, where interesting points of view emerged on how the action is being developed and on climate empowerment.
In this session, different Latin American youth expressed that the focal points are not established in the region yet, and even those who applied were unaware of their role in Article 12 of the PA and the 6th article of the UNFCCC. The lack of communication channels and articulation between civil society and the public sector reflects the lack of implementation of these articles.

As we said before, this is reflected in the realities of Argentina and Colombia, since climate education and access to information for generate empowerment is not so present in the public agenda. Those who write express that they do not know the process by which their countries committed themselves to represent themselves in the focal points.
This reality contrasts with that of the Dominican Republic, because since 2013 they are leaders in climate education up to this date, they have trained 3.200 teachers.

But despite this situation and as a conclusion of the first session of the ACE working group, we think that there is still much work to be done to ensure that nationally determined contributions (NDC) and adaptation plans (NAP) to be consider as a central term to achieve the established local goals.