The DCNCC Youth Board meets for the first time!

On Easter Sunday, the Diet Change Not Climate Change Youth Board held its first meeting. Between school, activism, work, and family, our young people barely have time for themselves, and yet, they were happy to meet on a Sunday to officially start their work on the board.

A productive first meeting

After outlining their priorities as board members, the young climate champions discussed ways to take action. The discussion led to numerous ideas, including collective action at COP27 led by the Youth Board, a social-media campaign produced in collaboration with the youth-led campaign [email protected], and consolidating local partnerships in individual countries in order to increase awareness around DCNCC. All of these ideas will be developed together with Lana Weidgenant and Juliette Tronchon, our own youth colleagues at ProVeg International.

The Board will now work on a letter addressed to policymakers which will be uploaded to the website.This letter will set out the requests that the Youth Board will be making to national delegations and the COP presidency at COP27. They will explain why these asks are important to achieve, in terms of both the NDCs and the Paris Agreement itself. Once the letter is uploaded, youth activists from all around the world will be able to download the letter and send it to representatives and policy makers in their own countries.

The letter will be uploaded to coincide with Stockholm+50, the conference hosted by ECOSOC to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Afterwards, the letter will be shared on a massive scale at the UN Climate Change Intersessionals in Bonn, which takes place immediately after the Stockholm conference.

Next steps

While the Youth Board will decide for themselves how they want to move forward and what kind of actions they intend taking, ProVeg is on hand to offer guidance, assistance, and support. The key objective of the board is to give young people around the world a voice and make them not only heard, but also listened to. This is why one of the Youth Board members will be accompanying the ProVeg delegation to Stockholm in June.

Take a look at this blog to read more about the individual Youth Board members.

What can you do?

Take the pledge! Every time you eat a plant-rich meal and reduce your consumption of animal-based products, you're choosing a better and fairer future for our planet. Find out more and get started here.