High-level Youth Briefing with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC Chairman （By Xixi Sun)

Dr Pachauri is the chairman of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. At the beginning of this youth briefing, he started by saying that youth can bring change to the world. He said that we cannot possibly ignore what is happening around us. Scientific evidence proves that most warming in the past 50 years is most likely to be caused by human activities, and more details can be found from the 4th IPCC report.

IPCC has been seen as the “supreme body in science” and the “fountain of knowledge”. These big names have been challenged by its “enemies” and the leakage of emails has been under attack. Dr Pachauri emphasised that none of the illegally stolen emails were able to find its way into the IPCC 4th report and explained the IPCC assessment process a bit more. At every stage, the draft will be reviewed by a team and each comment will be addressed by authors directly. All governments will need to approve the report word by word, so there is no way that the report can be produced/supported by individuals. The robustness of the process ensures that nothing will be put down unless there is clear scientific evidence supporting it.

Dr Pachauri has mentioned that the costs of taking actions against climate change are in fact very low. With investment, the stability of agricultural production which is of vital importance will be improved, as well as higher food security.

At the end of his 5 minutes speech, he talked about how youth is associated with hope and idealism. He said that whenever there is a conflict in schedule between a youth-related event and some other events, he would always ignore the others and come to see the youth. As youth we are very delighted to hear that and we hope we can make our efforts to pass on our hope and idealism to the decision makers to foster change.

There have been a number of interesting questions coming from the audience. A youth representative from Singapore asked how much impact do youth have on negotiations. Dr Pachauri answered that the only way we get results is through grass root actions. As youth, we should take the messages from COP back home and carry on with our work back there. Copenhagen is not the end of world. There are more work that needs to be done. After all, our life extends beyond their next generations and we should drive for change.

Kenya youth mentioned the people who deny the work and efforts of youth and the criticisms and sarcasm. We were reminded that whenever new knowledge comes up, there will always be people rejecting it and since it is going to affect everything where people are making huge profits, there will be nasty comments coming up, meaning that they are taking exact notice.

This youth briefing has been very encouraging for us to hear and we sincerely hope that other decision makers can also listen to the voice of youth, the voice from the future and make changes, give us the real deal at COP15 that’s necessary for a sustainable, low carbon future.