Today was another very productive day for the IFMSA team, we made progress on literately every thing we worked on and the energy put into it was worth while.
In the youths working group on Article 6 – or the article that ensure education, participation and awareness of climate change (the principle that forms the basis for the first bid in the Low Emission report) fought a hard battle were some key countries wanted to remove the youths point made to the article. With some great help from Dominican Republic the group managed to push the text through the bottleneck, they review a proposal for a COP decision (Taken to the highest level of the negotiations). A deed the Chairman of Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI-where we negotiate on Article 6) was described as virtually impossible. The negotiators spend a lot of time discussing only the preamble but after a call from the Dominican Republic (leading G77 on Article 6) that they don’t have much time and that all the youth (there was a sea of blue!) are here to see them agreeing on a document so they shouldn’t let them down, the negotiators got down to business and came up with a really good text up for the COP decision.
A big moment for the youth here in Cancun and around the world!
While Charlotte was busy with the article 6 working group, Arthur and Nick were planning the “Health Day”. On Monday the 6.dec, WHO is holding two side events on climate change and health, we are going to help them out with logistics and hold our own “action”, this is a direct act to influence the ongoing negotiations.
Daniela, Sudhvir and myself started to work on a survey we are conducting within the COP16 directed towards delegated both from parties and NGOs. Our original plans were to gain knowledge about what negotiators knew about the link between climate change and health and how important it was for the negotiations. But after a meeting with «Friends of public health» (WHO hosted informal meeting were negotiators from different countries come and talk about how to increase awareness of the health message in the negotiations), a participant came up with a brilliant idea of making this in to some sort of publishable data. This basically means that we are conducting scientific research and have extremely limited time to do it. With the positive encouragement from both the WHO and Prof. Hugh Montgomery we went to work of making the survey. The next few days is going to be even more hectic as we`ll start surveying and thats the way we like it!
We are rocking this place, isn’t that the reason for why we are here? 😉
Cheers
Usman A. Mushtaq
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