As part of the privilege of attending COY7, past Sunday 27th I had the great honour to attend the closing ceremony, where over 600 young people came from all over the world said good bye to the conference of youth and got ready to the COP17, the biggest international conference related to climate change.
After a very inspiring speech of the organizing committee president, it was clear for me how privilege we are for being here and, how much we must work within the next two weeks to represent IFMSA as it deserves. We have now the opportunity to make a real change, to make the end of COY7 the begining of a new era in environmental sustainibility terms, which for us, medical students, means bringing health impacts of climate change to a higher level that corresponds to its real effect.
Climate change is already a massive and devastating event that is already happening and affecting our healths and our loved ones, especially for those living in low and middle income countries. As future physicians we are the ones who will face all these health problems that could have been prevented, and our duty is to act now and in the short, middle and long term.
Being here as IFMSA representants is an honour and a wide responsability that means bringing 1.2 million voices to a United Nations Conference. Medical students, as young people, have the power to change and presure decision makersto take responsability on such a destructive process.
In this closing ceremony, everybody agreed on one thing: we must keep trying! We should fight for our planet, our health, our rights, our lifes and, leave a better place for our children to live. We may fail once, but we cannot stop trying, as we cannot stop treating a patient.
And that’s what IFMSA delegation is doing here, working hard to achieve three main goals:
- Help least developed countries adapt to the worst of climate change by strengthening the Adaptation Committees and Finance Mechanisms
- Increase the scope of the UNFCCC process to include water security and sanitation
- Increase global education, training and public awareness around the social and health impacts of climate change
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