The International Climate Conferences in Poland are told by youngsters from different countries

Twenty young students and researchers from Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Italy will be as reporters at the at the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations (COP24) that will take place in Katowice, Poland, from 3th to 14th December.

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The event will count on the participation of 20.000 people: negotiators from the 197 countries that signed the Paris Agreement, representatives of multinational industries and observers from the non-governmental organizations and from social movements around the world.

Patricia Espinosa, Secretary General to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, conceives the COP24 as an important step for the international climatic diplomacy as countries go forward in the application of the commitments taken in the Paris Agreement. “With the Conference in Katowice we hope to reach some key objectives. First of all, it’s necessary to complete the guidelines of the Agreement, so that it will become fully operative, just as it’s necessary to make a balance of the results that countries are reaching in a collective way to respect the Paris Agreement’s objectives and to increase the degree of ambition for the actions to take in the next years.”

The international scientific community has recently recalled the urgency to intervene with the reduction of greenhouse gases emissions if the intention is to respect the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5°C as established in the Paris Agreement. In order to avoid more serious impacts on human life and on natural ecosystems, “urgent and unprecedented changes are needed” according to the authors of the IPCC report published the 8th October 2018.

The urgency to act needs therefore a strong mobilization action to involve also the civil society during the negotiations in Katowice. In this sense, the involvement of youngsters during the negotiations will be one of the fundamental pillars.

The involvement of the youngsters at the international level is one of the main activities of the project Youth Press Agency, promoted by the Association Viração Educomunicação in Brazil, the Tierravida Foundation in Argentina, Climalab in Colombia and the Association Viração&Jangada in Italy. The project is supported by the Autonomous Province of Trento, the European Jean Monnet Centre, the Association Mazingira, the Fontana Foundation, the Unimondo Portal and the Association In Medias Res. The project counts on the scientific support of the Trentino Observatory on Climate.
Between the most awaited activities realized through the Youth Press Agency there is the annual participation in Conference of the Youth (COY14). This year, the COY14 takes place from 29th to 1st December in Katowice (Poland). It will be an extraordinary occasion to promote a free space for the youth from all over the world to share knowledge and experiences on climate change-related issues, to create new networks and movements, to develop creative ideas and to get ready for the following COP24 as the main protagonists. The Italian students will have many experiences to tell: for example, they could testify the most intense event after the 1966 alluvion that hit Trentino at the end of October.
Record rains and winds that have dramatically marked our territory, are probably the signal of the awaited increase in intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. Because of climate change, these events will involve us in the Alps too in the next year.

The main purpose of the Youth Press Agency is to report the two international events through a fresh and young perspective with the production of articles, pictures, videos and performances. The main sharing platforms are the website www.youthpresagency.org and social media (Facebook and Instagram), but also traditional newspapers, radio and magazines at the local and national level. Their articles will be translated and published also in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian in the national websites of the Youth Press Agency.

To follow our news from Katowice, please visit our websites: www.youthpressagency.org (in English), www.agenciajovem.org (in Portuguese), www.agenciajovendenoticias.org (in Spanish), www.stampagiovanile.it (in English). Moreover, click on “like” in our Facebook page @youthpressagency and follow us in Instagram @stampagiovanile.