elissasmith.ca

This week my friend, Juan Pablo Hoffmaister (no, not John Hofmeister the President of Shell Oil), is participating in the 3rd MOP of the Cartagena Protocol in Brazil. The Cartagena protocol is an international agreement on the handling, transfer, and use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). It was negotiated as a supplement to the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity.

Not sure who took this photo.

Juan Pa and a few of his friends from the College of the Atlantic are running a blog entitled “Where Did My Genes Go?“.

My partner, Matthew Carroll, is doing the digital organizing for the Ban Terminator Campaign. “The Ban Terminator Campaign seeks to promote government bans on Terminator technology at the national and international levels, and supports the efforts of civil society, farmers, Indigenous peoples and social movements to campaign against it.” I’m really proud that Matthew is doing all the digital organizing for them! It’s a big job but someone has to do it.

Tim Anderson, a young Canadian, writes about his experience and perceptions at the World Social Forum:

“Here are some more observations from Venezuela and the 2006 World Social Forum (WSF), held in Caracas. I went to Caracas in December, during the National Assembly elections (en route to Cuba, where I was studying the health system and the HIV program) and again in late January, for the WSF. I went to a lot of WSF sessions, but really I was just as interested in what was going on in Venezuela, and in the growing links between it and the other left governments of Latin America.

There was indeed a lot of blurring of lines between the ‘project’ of the WSF (’another world is possible’) and the project of the Chavez-led, socialist MVR (Movement of the Fifth Republic). This was the criticism of both the bourgeois opposition and the anarchists. For myself, I found the blurring rather natural, for a WSF held in Venezuela. If we are looking at ‘other’ worlds, ie. other than imperialism and neoliberalism, Venezuela represents the most interesting alternative in recent decades. Here is a popular socialist party which has come to government and has maintained power through elections, has wrested control of the country’s natural resources from the oligarchy and the MNCs, confronted the empire, given a major priority to education, health and housing programs for poor people, increased levels of participation, resisted a US backed coup and is still faced by an aggressive Bush regime. It also faces an hostile domestic and international corporate media, which accuses it of every crime under the sun.

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My amazing friends at energyaction.net set up a blog
“It’s Getting Hot In Here” to serve as an outlet for the youth perspective in Montreal for the first Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol.

This round of UN climate negotiations is a historic event that will shape the course of human history and we aim to compile in real time a record of the events (official and unofficial) through the words, photos, videos and recordings of the many activists, campaigners, lobbyists and advocates who are participating in the Climate Negotiations.

Here is an article that I found very interesting. The article critically analyzes the transportation of electronics to developing countries.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123285,00.asp

I was at the UN in New York for two weeks on the Canadian Government Delegation to a meeting that negotiated water, sanitation and human settlements. I should have posted my report months ago but I forgot about it until now.

Here it is!

Energy Action Youth Leadership Summit
Rating: *****
A whirlwind of activity. 12 hour days. Packed agendas. (Com)passionate people. 80+ amazing young activists- surpassing my every expectation of the ability of youth.

General Information about Energy Action

Energy Action is a coalition of 17 organisations from across North America – all either youth-led or with an active youth engagement within the organisation – focussing on climate change and related issues such as renewable energy and environmental justice. The specific areas people focus on in the work of their individual organisations varies widely from university student organisers – demanding clean renewable energy on their campus – to indigenous youth activists fighting dirty energy projects in their communities, and youth working on the Jumpstart Ford campaign, pressuring the USA’s biggest auto manufacturer into improving fuel efficiency (which with bigger and bigger SUV’s instead of small efficient cars, is now no better than it was in the 1930s). Work on the coalition began about a year ago, and it was officially launched in June 2004. It has been gathering momentum since then, and the conference this week – setting the direction for the work of the coalition – attracted over 80 youth from across the USA and Canada. Together we defined the major campaigns that energy action will be undertaking throughout the course of the next few months, we agreed upon the general structure of the organization and elected a council and steering committee.

Climate Justice

In the words of Clayton Thomas-Muller, Oil and Gas campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network, “climate change is the civil rights issue of our generation”. Across North America, communities of colour, indigenous and low-income communities are being directly and disproportionately affected by the pollution from dirty energy generation such as coal-fired and nuclear power plants. Around the world, it is the communities who have already been so horrifically affected by the environmental and social consequences of fossil-fuel extraction to feed the addiction of the over-developed countries, that will bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change. In recent years, many governments, and some mainstream environmental organisations have failed to take into account the social injustices associated with climate change – this has even led to the promotion of scientifically dubious ’solutions’ to climate change that . Recognising this organisers and participants at the summit worked hard to push Environmental Justice to the fore- front of the participants minds. Environmental Justice was a theme at the EA summit. We adopted The Climate Justice Declaration. The document was created in a workshop at the Environmental Justice Conference, it is a compilation of 3 other documents. There are 14 principles that EA will form the core values of the network.

Structure

The network is considered to have an organic, continually developing operational structure. There are 7 major players, they operate via consensus. The council,consisting of the membership, defines the goals, priorities and direction for Energy Action. The steering committee makes with day-to-day decisions to do with the operation of the network, they are mandated to carry out the decisions defined at the summit. As for staff, not enough funding has materialized to hire any staff members- so we haven’t specifically defined their roles yet. Regional networks are based upon the needs of the region. There are 4 campaign committees; political, campus, corporate and community.

Campaigns

I focused on the campus campaign committee, so my knowledge of the other proposed campaigns isn’t deep. The major campus campaign is the “challenge”. The purpose of the challenge is to collectively achieve an emissions reductions goal. Campus groups will be encouraged to share experiences and reward actions with regards to emissions reductions. Actions such as completing a retrofit and buying green energy will count as an emission reduction. Education and audits will be tallied in some other way. Our first step is to decide on an emissions reduction goal. The corporate committee is pushing for lower emissions vehicles. It is involved with the Ford Campaign. Campus and Corporate campaigns will coordinate efforts in general and especially on Fossil Fools day. The Political committee is primarily concerned with organizing around Kyoto coming into force on February 16th and the US Energy Bill.

Next Steps for Elissa

-Set up a conference call for Canadian delegates to debrief.
Attend campus committe conference calls
Talk to Laura about YENs participation on the council.
- Report back to YEN/YRTE/SYC
- Write something on co2zilla about the conference- as a story.
- Do workshops on EA for OPIRG-Guelph and Guelph Renewable Energy Group.
- Help Alysia plan for YC3. Do a workshop about EA.
- Keep up involvement with Renewable Energy Group of Guelph Students for Environmental Change. Prepare for Board of Governors meeting in March, propose 11 million $ retrofit. Work on student Levy for green energy at university.
- Work on Campus Challenge.
- Help Jessica work on the structure of the Artic Youth Council
- Strengthen my position at CSD 13 re: links between future human settlements and climate change.

My experience at the Twelfth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development was extremely rewarding and I learned a great deal about international decision-making, UN processes and the roles that civil society, especially youth can play on the global level.

As 2004 was a review year for the CSD, discussion centered on reflection and reporting of best practices and lessons learned in the key themes of water, sanitation and human settlement. Within this context, I worked with the 20-30 other youth caucus members to advocate for youth related sustainable development concerns through statements and interventions in the plenary, discussion with members of national delegations and other major groups, and written documents and campaigns. Our points included:

· The importance of education as a tool in promoting sustainable development, and the need for development and implementation of national Strategies on Education for Sustainable Development by member states.

· The need for greater caution and monitoring when engaging private sector partners in water, sanitation and housing provision.

· The role that youth can and do play as leaders in the implementation and promotion of sustainable development practices and initiatives, highlighting work that is already being done through youth led projects around the world.

· The importance of consultation and engagement with local communities (particularly marginalized groups like women and youth), who are the primary stakeholders in the design and application of development initiatives, to ensure projects are culturally sensitive and effective.

· A push for the inclusion of youth in more official delegations in the future, especially those from Southern countries, providing for more equal and adequate representation of the various voices and concerns of young people in the CSD.

During the two weeks I also had the opportunity to interact with officials in the Canadian delegation, gaining incite into Canada’s involvement in the implementation of Agenda 21 (Earth Summit, 1992) and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (World Summit on Sustainable Development, 2002) both at home and abroad through development assistance. It was interesting and perhaps disheartening to experience the bureaucracy in which the Canadian government and UN as whole operate, as it provides a major barrier to realizing many of the recommendations and goals set out in past years. In spite of such limits a great deal has been achieved through both the CSD and Canadian government and in many areas targets are being achieved or remain within reach. The CSD is a unique and effective process within the UN system as it is capable of unifying international actors and stakeholders from both government and civil society around the common goal of sustainable development.

Here is the address to the UN webcast where I say the official youth statement. The time is at about 2:36 when I speak but you might want to listen to the whole row of major groups (there are 9) because I helped to write the speach (with Pieter from the northern alliance for sustainability).

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Elissa Smith,
Environmental Science
University of Guelph