“We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors,
We borrow it from our children.”
Native American Saying

So who’s going to suffer the cataclysms of Climate Change? What I hadn’t fully realized is that 46% of the world’s population is under 24. That means they are facing the projections of catastrophe within their lifetimes. And they are children of the internet, It is easy for them to see that averting disaster will take coordinated global action, no single nation-state has the power to reverse the direction we’re headed in – it will take all of us (and them) working together.

But the dilemma for the world’s youth is that they have no voice at the table. Although they make up half of the world’s population, their age means that they have virtually no representation at crucial Climate Change negotiations.

Just two weeks ago, we traveled to Seoul, South Korea to support the TUNZA International Children and Youth Conference. The August 20th meeting was part of a larger engagement to bring a loud, focused, coordinated voice of world youth into the UN International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. They hope to gather one million signatures from youth around the world which they can present at the conference. The motto of this engagement is “Seal The Deal!” (in Copenhagen). www.sealthedeal2009.org (new window)

This engagement started with a website on which youth could post their thoughts about what the Youth Petition to the Copenhagen conference should contain. All of this input was rolled up into a two-page document that expressed what actions world youth wanted from national governments, from world citizens and from the world’s youth. The August 20th meeting in Seoul brought together 600 youth between the ages of 10 and 24 from around the world to review, strengthen and endorse the petition. They were joined by youth around the world participating in small groups from their own countries. These remote participants were able to view a live webcast of the meeting in Seoul, and to send in their own thoughts and edits to the group that was editing the petition in real time in the meeting room in Seoul.

The meeting convened at 2:30pm in Seoul, but that meant it began at 10:30pm in Cuernavaca, and 6:30am in Athens. The whole distributed group worked together for 3 1/2 hours and in the end (2 am in Cuernavaca, 10 am in Athens) they hammered out a final version of the petition that had everyone’s endorsement. The process was unprecedented and wonderful to be part of, and it caught wide accolades and coverage in the world press. (In the US alone, it was covered by the NYT, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and USA Today.)

Check out a brief video here. (new window)

The question that this engagement starts to answer is: How can you come to meaningful consensus effectively and affordably on a world-wide scale, in order to begin crafting world-wide solutions? The answer lies in good design. A key factor is effective leveraging of new technologies and possibilities of the internet. But to make that leveraging effective, the design has to take into account what can be accomplished at each stage of the engagement, and pick the tools and the processes that will have the most impact. The design process has to be responsive throughout. (We ended up changing the final deliverable from the Seoul meeting at a highly charged lunch meeting the day before the meeting.) Effective design makes the costs manageable for even far-reaching engagements, because the design team is relatively affordable, and if they can foresee the needs of the participants and put everything necessary into place, the engagement can be executed with technological options that are in reality very affordable.

So how will all of this turn out? This engagement is a significant step toward international cooperation and problem solving. Now the task ahead is collecting the one million signatures. The group’s website is www.uniteforclimate.org. (new window)

You can read the final World Youth Petition here: TUNZA_Youth_Statement.pdf (new window)

Or click here to check out a brief video: unep.covision.com/video (new window)

We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors,
We borrow it from our children.

Posted by Karl Danskin