Highlights from Friday, December 11 - COP21 in Paris - Canadian Youth Delegation

As we finished sending this Daily, the Paris Agreement was adopted. This is our update from yesterday, but we promise more soon from this last day of negotiations! You can follow along live here.

Highlights from Friday, December 11 - COP21 in Paris

• We bring your voices to the negotiating table in a hella epic way.

• Running on adrenaline and caffeine.

COP’s time is up

Along with hundreds of other youth attending COP21, we set our phone alarms to go off in sync and marched off site together, meeting up with non-accredited youth in front of Le Bourget to show that real power lies in people’s hands. Powerful young leaders from the Global South called out the false solutions of COP and their disregard for Indigenous and frontline communities. Most powerfully, the new & inspiring Keep It in the Ground declaration was read out.

With just a day left of negotiations, many of the most important elements of the text are missing or watered down. We came into COP21 knowing it was a broken process, but the agreement’s status at this point it still a disappointment. Just like us, youth around the world are
feeling this frustration and doubling down on their promises
to go home and build solutions from the ground up in their own
communities.



Drawing our red line

At 3pm civil society members at COP gathered in a mass action that took over the main walkway of the conference space with people holding a long red line of fabric. Over a hundred activists filled the space with a heartbeat sound as they beat their chests saying the five red lines civil society wants the Paris outcome to respect: “equity, justice, finance, zero emissions, and compliance.”

Canada, don’t COP out

We also delivered 6,000+ signatures to the Canadian government, calling on them to commit to reaching zero emissions by 2050 at COP 21 - pulling from the over 1000 names our petition gathered since being launch just three days ago, and those supplied by our friends 350.org and Leadnow.ca from pre-existing petitions with a consistent ask.  

In UN climate change negotiations, countries must lift their placards to be heard. So we delivered the signatures as names on placards because these calls for climate justice deserve a place in the UN negotiations. We read the petition out loud to the government representatives at the Canadian delegation’s office, and then took turns reading out the names of those who signed as we literally covered the room in placards. We hope this is a reminder to the negotiators who are signing this deal that this is about more than the numbers, this is about lives.

It was our last chance to remind the government who they’re working for both in these last hours of COP21 and when they get home. We managed to get included in Friday night’s edition of the National (Skip to 19:50) so we’re hoping they heard us loud and clear.

We’re not going to lie, sometimes it has felt pretty lonely here at COP21. Sometimes it feels as though the 17 of us are pretty small relative to the power of the Canadian government, not to mention the fossil fuel industry sharing the table. That shifted today, bringing all your names in the room with us. So thank you, for all your support and general badassery back home. We are so excited to get home and work with you all to hold the government to their 1.5C commitment!

aCOPalypse Now

The end of COP is near, and negotiators are in another round of informal all-night meetings to hash out the rest of the deal. As per UNFCCC tradition, things are behind schedule and lot of important aspects are still up in the air. We’re self-medicating with caffeine and ClimateTracker’s Playlist to Survive the Final Hours of COP21.

Though we didn’t have high expectations for the deal, things are looking fairly bleak from where we’re sitting. The most concerning aspect right now is the lack of transparency in how the final decisions are being made. The French Presidency has strayed from convention and opted for all meetings to take place behind closed doors instead of holding open Comite de Paris sessions. This has the CYD and many other observers concerned about what backroom trades are being made.

A few of us snuck into the back of one of the Global South country bloc meetings late on Friday night and it was a stark reminder of who holds the power in these negotiations. The group was lamenting the lack of information that had been shared with them. One delegate remarked, “we’re sitting here debating our position on [adaptation], but for all we know final decisions have already been made and put in the text.”

Needless to say, we ended December 11th, feeling overwhelmingly disappointed in world leaders. But at the same time we were prepared to fight. At our meeting that night, we made plans to join some historic mobilizations on the streets of Paris to demonstrate the resolve and determination of the global climate justice movement. If there’s one thing we know for sure now, it’s that change won’t come from politicians conversing behind closed doors -- it’ll come from people mobilizing on the streets and out on the land.

PS -- As we mentioned before, the negotiations are in their final stages right now. For up to the minute updates, follow the Guardian’s live-blog or else we’ll be tweeting up a storm on our Twitter account. Fingers crossed for an 11th hour miracle, and talk to you all soon!  

- Canadian Youth Delegation