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Youth Climate Change Conference 2017 - Final Report
Youth Climate Change Conference 2017 - Final Report
January 5, 2019
| The 2017 staging of the Youth Climate Change Conference (YCCC), held under the theme “Our Climate, our Voice, Our Change” was co-hosted by the USAID-funded Jamaica Rural Economy and Ecosystems Adapting to Climate Change II (Ja REEACH II) Project and the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Japan-Caribbean Climate Change Partnership (J-CCCP) Project in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information. The YCCC was first held in September 2014 and the second staging took place in 2015. The 2017 YCCC, the third iteration of the event, involved the participation of 600 youth from eight Caribbean countries and Japan. Caribbean countries included: Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname. For the first time, the conference hosted participants from Japan. This was in keeping with the mandate to facilitate North-South and South-South cooperation, having benefitted from financial and technical support from the Government of Japan as well as the partnership between the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Sophia University in Japan. Conference participants were selected by local review panels. They ranged in age from 14 to 29 years. The execution of the conference was guided by the overall goal of fostering an environment in which Caribbean youth had the opportunity to grasp climate change concepts and were empowered to take action. The goal was pursued through the following objectives: Facilitating increased understanding among youth attendees of local and regional climate issues; Developing advocacy skills among youth attendees; Sharing individual and institutional climate actions taken by youth, with these actions scaled up to youth who were not in attendance; and Facilitating the transfer of knowledge between Japan and the Caribbean Participants were engaged in a series of climate advocacy training workshops, presentations, exhibitions and competitions to increase their awareness of the various challenges and proposed solutions. The conference was expected to cement the role of youth as being vital in advancing climate action in the region. |