Youth and Climate Finance – Side event to President Macron’s One Planet Summit 12 Dec at UNESCO HQ in Paris

A Pathway to Enhancing Climate Finance through Youth and Education

Date & time:     December 11th, 2017, 2-5 PM

Venue:             UNESCO headquarters (7 place de Fontenoy, 75007 Paris)

Live Webcast:  https://www.facebook.com/CliMatesWorldwide/

Organizers:

Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/8Hfrb8GmQzZp6Bio1

The One Planet Summit (https://www.oneplanetsummit.fr/en/) has three core objectives, namely: taking tangible collective action, being innovative and supporting one another. To do that, the summit advocates for scaled-up and greener finance, local and regional action and a push for ecological and inclusive public framework.

Freshly back from COP23 and inspired by the progress on Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), we want to keep this momentum going through adding a youth component to the One Planet Summit, strengthening and promoting all its components: climate change education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information. The goal of our conference is to provide a unique presentation of concrete solutions, actions and experiences that can be enhanced through the cooperation of the leaders attending ahead of the summit. In our view, international summits are not only a place to exchange energies and practices, but also a time and space to design together the world we want to live in, as a global community. We believe that innovating formats for conferences is essential to share these new ideas and accelerate climate action. We believe that youth can and shall contribute to Paris Agreement implementation.

As young change-makers, we stand for a recognition of our work at the individual, national and international levels, by inclusion and access to finance. Only a close collaboration of institutions with youth on governance and long-term strategies will allow an efficient sustainable development; “next generations” are already doers, innovators and educators, linking local and global scales and creating a crucial intergenerational dialogue to curb and adapt to climate change.

Our aim is to call on Parties and stakeholders to develop two main approaches to boost the implementation of the Paris Agreement and reach the SDGs.

1. A clear emphasis on education and empowerment to enhance and accelerate the ecological transition

Policymakers can facilitate community mobilization by providing the financial and organizational means for education programs. This event will draw inspiration from effective projects and how they can lead to effective decentralized trainings and thorough capacity-building.

2. Scaling finance is crucial to better fit local and regional project needs and increase local community and youth involvement in the fight against climate change

          Green funds are often said not to be adjusted to the reality of local actors, whose bottom up approach responds to concrete issues identified on the ground and ensures their integration in long-term policies. Redesigning finance opportunities to enable their accessibility to local communities, and notably to youth, is not only the answer to fighting climate change, but also the path to enforcing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Format

We will have official speakers as the backbone of the conference, sharing their good practices and eventually starting the common reflection in the room. Their intervention will be short, dynamic, ted-talk like, and include video when relevant.

We call for inclusion of Youth in current processes, and believe that our conference should reflect that plea. Accordingly, we want to pursue an intervention in accordance with the Talanoa Spirit promoted during COP23, namely a space where every person in the room can contribute and share their own views and experiences to learn from each other. We would design the space in the room accordingly to encourage every person intervening to come speak in front of everyone.

Projected outcomes

1. A constructive dialog to ensure the inclusion of youth and their access to finance
2. Encourage stakeholders to hold events in a similar innovative and inclusive manner
3. Tend towards a partnership between UNESCO, ECOS, IAAI, CliMates and partners around the world to foster youth engagement in climate action/Paris agreement implementation

Indicative programme

• Introduction (14h)

1. Education (14h15-15h15)

            Introduction; Julia Heiss – Education for Sustainable Development Team Leader, Education Sector, UNESCO

• Introduction: The centrality of education in tackling climate change and implementing the Paris Agreement and SDGs

Jonathan Guyot – GERES ; Jean-Paul Brice Affana – Association Actions Vitales pour le Developpement durable (AVD

• Youth current efforts regarding education on climate change

Johanna Schäfer – BonnLAB ; Viktor Josa – CiMC ; Nouhad Awwad – Arab Youth Climate Movement, Lebanon

How to better integrate and support youth in institutional frameworks?

Danae Espinoza – ECOS ; Martjin & Emma – Netherlands Youth Delegates; French young delegates

2. Finance (15h15-16h15)

       Introduction: Magnus Magnusson – Director of partnerships and outreach, UNESCO

• Introduction: Stakes of finance designed and adapted to the scales of local projects and current shortcomings

Kelly Clark – European Climate Foundation ; Liane Schalatek – Heinrich Böll Foundation North America ; Liudmila Strakodonskaya – Pantheon-Assas PHd candidate

• Showcase of innovative youth-led projects tackling climate change and their difficulties to reach for finance in the current system

       Saffran Mihnar – EarthLanka ; Kjell Kühne – Keep it in the Ground for Peace

• What solutions to concretely allow youth to access climate finance and be integrated in the design and decision of big climate financed projects?

       Alexandre Borde – Carbonium ; Miroslav Polzer – IAAI GloCha

3. Creating links and finding solutions (16:15-16h45)

       Final (16h45-17h)

Wrap-up of discussion, lessons learned and call to put discussion into practice

Outline: opportunities for follow-up activities at the California Global Climate Action Summit 2018

Our goals

•  Diversity – Have a mixed panel to showcase different viewpoints before the common discussion and hold a constructive dialog (both youth and institutions) from all regions of the world
• Inclusion – rely on all participants in the room in the Talanoa spirit + broadcast live to allow for intervention outside the conference room.
• Organized inclusion – specifically invite projects to make sure that participants in the room have a story to tell – in addition to random participants
• Active plural moderation – several moderators to draw parallels and keep the track of the dialog