Congress in the Forest 5: Youth Blast!

Though it was supposed to be the action project day 3 in Favela Penha, I decided to attend Youth Blast in Centro before it came to the closing day. 

Youth Blast was located at SulAmerica Convention Center. We took a van from Sitio de Pedras (our congresssite) to RioCentro, a city bus from Rio centro to Centro Novo and changed to a metro arrived at Estacio station (literally means 'Parking'). City buses are cheap, plentiful and go just about everywhere, with stops along all the main road. The bus rate to every destination is about the same - 2.75Reais one direction, -or 2.85Reais for air-conditioned bus. So, despite long journey (almost 2 hours) from RioCentro to SulAmerica Cenvention Center, we experienced how fast the bus driver drove his bus - and stopped the bus very quickly - which made me sick. Though English is not a popular language in Brazil, we still managed to find our direction to our destination - Brazilian are very friendly to help us even though we couldn't communicate with each other smoothly.

Youth Blast was an official Conference of Youth, a youth preparatory meeting for Rio+20 organised by the Major Group Children and Youth (MGCY) under United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). This event was aimed at empowering young people to effectively participate in Rio+20 and its processes. 

Many visions generated by youth for the future we want. Vote for three visions you want. A world without fossil fuels? Life cycle analysis for all energy procurement? There are solutions, why are we not implementing them? What are we waiting for?

Sustainable Production and Responsible Consumption: we all  have the responsibility to supervise and ensure our product consumption is sustainable and responsible to our nature. It doesn't begin from our government, but ourselves. We are the biggest consumers for meat and fossil fuel but we don't know how to return our nature. 

Nicolo Wojewoda's facilitating the '20 solutions' workshop to work out the 20 solutions for Sustainable Development.

Chris Castro, the Executive Director of IDEAS for US, gave his opinion on the SDG. 

This girl--I forgot her name, is very young (about 13 years old). She conducted a workshop on 'Water'.

A discussion on whether we should create a environmental organisation after UNEP, to create a operative council executive OR create one underneath UNEP? 

Four of the Eight Proposals of MGCY in Rio+20: Calling for ombudspersons at all levels, Upgrade of UNEP, Creation of Sustainable Development Council, Effective implementation and public participation in environmental decision-making. See full version in Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development (IFSD)

The kids from various countries contributed their drawings to voice out the things they want for the earth. 

 People from WYC came here to support the 20 solutions! 

There were not many participants attended the so called Official MGCY event... the conference hall was suddenly becoming too spacious. While in some rooms, workshops were fully attended, but some were left emptied. People come and go, come and go. The plenary hall was quite emptied all the time when we had a major discussion on the MGCY Objective working group. It was said that Youth Blast  failed to ignite youth outside (Read Youth Blast fails to ignite) since there were not many participation of youth. I personally thought there were not many Asian showed up at the conference, not only due to expensive flight expenses, but little knowledge about the Youth Blast event itself among the green circles,, not to mention how the publicity of this event reached to the media itself. 

I could say there were very very few people from Far East attended this event. Even there were a few Asian faces appeared, they were students who are studying in U.S, Canada or Europe countries, and representing some organisations from their universities. 

A new exposure. I ended my day by painting the banner to be exhibited at Rio+20!

Theme: Keep the oil in the soil, and the coal in the hole! 

This painting was made by an artist, this was where I met Kjell Kuhne from  Plant-for-the-Planet
He's been teaching in Kalimantan so I spoke Bahasa Malaysia with him~^^ 

Advanced readings: Major Group Children and Youth
Plant-for-the-Planet: Trees for Climate Justice: http://www.plant-for-the-planet.org/en/