TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Charis Charalambous
The Local Conference of Youth (LCOY) on Climate Change took place for the first time in Cyprus in October 2022,
ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) which was held in Egypt in November 2022. Conferences of Youth (COYs) are official annual gatherings of youth across the globe, aimed at facilitating discussions on relevant and pressing climate and environmental issues. They serve as a venue for youth to receive capacity building and policy training, exchange knowledge and experiences, create networks with specialists in the field and advocate their ideas and demands towards official representatives. The outputs of LCOY events (i.e. policy recommendations addressed to various local/national/regional stakeholders) are fed into the COY and consequently to the UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP) conference.
The specific aims of the Conference were:
1) Enhance the knowledge of local and international youth in Cyprus, on climate and environmental issues, as well as build their capacity in policy lobbying, leadership, campaigning, and movement/advocacy building
2) Come to agreement on strong positions on pressing issues in Cyprus that urge the local, national and global leaders to address the climate crisis and raise their ambitions for COP27
3) Create more spaces for the youth to work together to advance their climate and environmental advocacy work.
The event was designed with a hybrid format, in order to accommodate the online participation of interested youth that were unable to attend in person. Thirty-six (36) participants, of which 16 were online, joined the two-day event. The conference program included 12 guests which gave keynote speeches or expert presentations, not including the guests of the evening Diplomat-Youth Cocktail gathering sponsored by the Embassy of Italy in Cyprus.
The participants represented a variety of backgrounds – young activists, secondary and tertiary education students, young professionals, experts and youth representatives - from Cyprus, Hungary, Uganda, Iran.
High-profile guests of the event included the Australian High Commissioner, the (CanadSpecial Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Deputy Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Cyprus, the Deputy High Commissioner of the British High Commission, and the Country Director of British Council Cyprus.
Participatory and engaging methods were used to help the participants get to know each other better, be energized, bond as a group, practice their brainstorming skills, share their first reactions to the Study Guides they had received on the theme of their working group, receive input from expert observers and collaborate to draft policy recommendations with the use of appropriate language.
The Conference program was structured on 3 core elements:
1) Capacity-building through expert presentations on climate activism and climate policy drafting
2) Working groups for the collaborative drafting of policy recommendations on three different themes
3) Presentations of draft policy recommendations and feedback from experts.
The combined drafts were submitted to YOUNGCO (the children and youth constituency to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - UNFCCC) and sent to the COP27 organizers.
I worked as a full-time member of the facilitators team for this event. This included preparation meetings with the organizers, setting up the agenda of the event and the flow of the working groups, preparing the location of the event, and drafting of the final report based on the evaluations of participants.
In total, I worked for 6 full days for this event.