Two College of the Atlantic students, Jessica Glynn of Madison, Wisconsin and Juan Pablo Hoffmaister, of San Jose, Costa Rica, formed two-thirds of the delegation representing the United States at the Tunza International Youth Conference held in Bangalore, India. The conference was hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme, Bayer AG, and the Centre for Environment Education in partnership with India's Ministry of Environment and Forests.
At the Tunza conference, 250 youths from 75 countries focused on the global implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. These eight goals were identified at a United Nations conference in 2000. Among the goals are eradicating poverty and hunger, promoting global gender equity and ensuring environmental sustainability. Conference participants are leaders of local and regional organizations, ages 15 to 24. The belief is these active citizens will continue their focus and mutual cooperation into the future.
"It is essential to involve youth," says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, "We attach great importance to youth as a key sector in bringing about change. Young people are far more open to new ideas and have the energy and enthusiasm to take them forward." He believes that youths are the ones best able to tackle the kind of new thinking needed to solve some very old problems.
"The environment demands creative thinking if we are to solve the problems of dirty water, degraded forests, and declining wildlife," Toepfer adds. "The Millennium Development Goals underpin UNEP's work in tackling these and many other problems. I am sure our youth leaders will bring imagination to bear and concrete proposals to the table on how they and the wider world can realize their implementation."
Glynn, who is currently in Kosovo working with a local women's network and doing research on women in Kosovar civil society, is the founder of a Maine chapter of the national youth organization, SustainUS. She believes that youth involvement is a given. "The world needs to recognize the important, innovative contributions that youths are making to the field of sustainable development and other pressing global concerns," she says.
From their experiences at COA, Glynn and Hoffmaister hope to contribute a fresh perspective to the millennium goals. "One thing that College of the Atlantic has taught me," says Hoffmaister, who has been working on environmental and child welfare issues since he was 12, "is that in order to really make a difference in the world, we can't hang back and wait for change. This conference will take what youth are doing around the world locally and give it momentum to make change on a global scale." See more testimonials |
