After arriving in Bonn, I went to a “Power Shift” workshop with Charlotte today. The main organizer of the event is UK Youth Climate Coalition (UKYCC), and the participants are mainly from various youth organization in Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.
Power Shift is actually a capacity building event that brings together young people and youth organizations from all across a country to share the skills and knowledge they need to be effective, and innovative on climate change. It may include speakers, training, workshop, skills-shares and ends with a day of action to build energy and put some of the newly learned skills into action.
Power Shift events have been held in India, the UK, America, Canada and Australia, and the main goal of the initiative of UKYCC is to bring the whole project across the strait to the whole EU, so that the youth in Europe could mobilize a stronger action to advocate to European Union, pushing the European negotiators that we want to raise its ambition in tackling climate change, which is namely the “Push Europe” project.
The main goals set by Power Shift toward Push Europe are as follow:
1) More green jobs opportunity for the youth
2) More use of clean energy
3) Push EU to promise reducing carbon emission to 30% by 2020 no matter there is a deal in Durban or not
This will form part of a wider action in June and October when the EU Ministers for Departments of Environment have meetings in Brussels.
A quite interesting component I found in the campaign they organized is that dancing, music or flash mob were popularly used to attract people’s attention. I think it is a good strategy to utilize the creativity of youth so that the stakeholders can easily recognize they we youth do care about the issue of climate change and we do want to play a role in it.
For further information, you could visit the website: http://powershifteurope.eu/ ; http://pusheurope.eu/
Best regards,
Leo
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