Sitting in the Classics Café in January sipping a thermos of coffee, a relaxed Kyle Gracey (MS,’10 expected) gave no outward appearance of the flat–out run he had maintained during the month prior, leading a thousand–strong international youth effort at the 2009 Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference.
During a mid–year climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, Gracey and other core international youth leaders realized the time was ripe to organize a coherent youth movement with a sustained presence within the climate change debate. In Copenhagen, he was gratified to see their efforts help generate marked growth in youth participation, nearly triple the rate of the 2008 climate conference in Pozna'n, Poland, with 1,500 youth this year representing more than 100 countries.
“Just seeing the size and diversity of what we had to work with was really exciting,” said Gracey, a dual master’s student in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies’ Master of Science in Environmental Science and Policy program and the Physical Sciences Division. “And we recognized, wow, we actually do have a significant movement here.”
Gracey spent three non–stop weeks in December helping to train international youths, coordinate youth presentations to the U.N., track negotiations, meet with potential fundraisers, run an exhibit booth, chair events, do press conferences, field media calls, and meet continuously with U.S. and international youth leaders, as well as attending several meetings with the State Department representatives at their behest.
Gracey got a taste of just how hectic the conference would be the day before it started, when U.N. representatives asked him and other team leaders to pull together a last–minute presentation for opening day. Eight of them feverishly drafted into the night, preparing a talk on the importance of international financing to help poor countries combat climate change, which became the major focus of the conference.
“I wondered if this was a preview of what life was going to be like for the next two weeks, every day,” said Gracey. “And it was.”
In addition to being one of 27 U.S. youths chosen to represent SustainUS, which facilitates youth involvement in international policy, Gracey was part of a core group of 10 international youth leaders from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Kenya, Malaysia, and the United States who organized and raised funds on behalf of the international youth climate movement.
A major boost in their pre–convention organizing efforts came with a grant of hundreds of thousands of Euros from the Netherlands to set up a Conference of Youth at Copenhagen. With that funding, the organizers held a Young and Future Generations Day during the convention and hosted 50 young people from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and South East Asia, who otherwise might not have been able to attend.
Gracey hopes that this year’s youth movement success has laid the groundwork for continued growth into the future.
“My focus was on increasing the capacity of new people to be involved in the process and take on these leadership roles, and expanding the scope of what we do so that there are more roles to be filled as we grow in size and capability,” he said.
And while Gracey noted that the international youth movement played a positive role as “one of the civil society actors” that helped move along the process of the convention goals, he added that the negotiations fell short of accomplishing the change that’s needed. Although more countries did commit to pollution reduction at the convention, he said the challenges are great.
“The United States also has made notable progress,” he said. “It is just that we are so far behind where we need to be that the notable progress would have been great if it were 15 years ago.”
With his eye to graduating this spring, Gracey will not play as big of a role in the youth movement for the 2010 climate convention in Mexico, as he has the last three years, but he will go in an advisory capacity, continuing to help the youth movement grow.
“There is a lot more that we could be doing,” Gracey said of the youth movement. “We are not as big and powerful as we could be,” he added. “There is more we need to be doing to shift the issues that we are seeing that aren’t where they need to be.”
