Second International Youth Symposium for Biodiversity planned for July 2009

The Second International Youth Symposium for Biodiversity is being planned for Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on July 5-9, 2009.

The 3 Presenting partners to date are the Macoun Marsh Biodiversity Project, St. Laurent Academy, and HabitatNet.

This initiative has been welcomed by Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Montreal-based Convention on Biological Diversity, who stated that “Young people have a central place as bearers of tomorrow’s solutions. Their engagement is essential if we are to reduce the loss of biodiversity and ensure the future of life on Earth.” We are contributing to the United Nations 2010 Biodiversity Target.

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity committed themselves to the 2010 Biodiversity Target. This target is to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth.

The purpose of our symposium is to invite students (Grade 6 to 12) from around the world to submit biodiversity project proposals to attend. The focus of the symposium will be:

• to welcome students from around the world, and to celebrate the work they are doing at home regarding local biodiversity efforts.
• to experience Canadian biodiversity with a Bio-Blitz (A Biological Survey with local scientists and naturalists)
• to develop methods to implement the Global Youth's Accord for Biodiversity that was created by nine (9) nations during the First Youth Symposium in Mexico in 2005.

For more information, visit www.biodiversitymatters.org

Youth Conferences During COP

There were several children and youth events running parallel to the official COP-MOP(1) meetings and events in Bonn Germany. Here's a taste of what happened:

• Three hundred young activists, aged between ten and eighteen years old, attended the Kids for Earth Ancient Forests Festival in Bonn on 19 May. The highlight of this event was a meeting between conference delegates and youth activists in the lunchbreak of the first day of COP9. It was held on the main stage of the CBD campus.
  This event provided our young forest and climate activists with the opportunity to present their banners and a song to political decision makers from all over the world - and to address their hopes, wishes and demands to those with the responsibility for the well-being of future generations as well as the power to make a change.

• The Go4BioDiv youth summit brought together 50 youths ages 18-25 from around the world. The summit had two parts: a 10-day wilderness camp in Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald (16-25 May) and 5-day conference in Bonn (26-30 May). Download the information brochure.
  Go4BioDiv was the official German youth event organised by the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit" (GTZ) GmbH, on behalf of the Federal German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

• Over seventy passionate young environmentalists from from Europe, Africa, South America and Central Asia for the Biodiversity on the Edge (COP9) international youth conference. The event was held 13-19 May in Bonn. There were diverse biodiversity-themed workshops, inter-cultural evenings and excursions into Bonn and its surroundings, among other things.
  The conference was co-organised by the German Youth Association for the Protection of Nature (NAJU) and Youth and Environment Europe (YEE).

(1) COP=The Convention of the Parties is an international meeting focused on the Convention on Biological Diversity. MOP=Meeting of the Parties is an international meeting focused on biosafety issues outlined in the Cartegena Protocol.

Contests

UN agency holding video contest to raise awareness about global hunger
UN News Centre , 22 November 2007 The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is inviting filmmakers, students and other Internet users to take part in a new international competition called “Hunger Bytes” in which contestants are asked to make the best short “viral video” that raises awareness about the subject of global hunger. The contest ends on 16 October 2008. Read the full article and the competition details. Watch some of the video submissions on YouTube.