YEYS Experience

On March 18th 2021, over 200 students and teachers from EU member and candidate states came together to discuss the climate crisis our society is currently facing. YEYS, short for Your Europe Your Say, organized by the European Economic and Social Committee, gives students the chance to actively participate and share their ideas to contribute to a more climate-friendly Europe. Over two days, YEYS 2021 gave seven members of our LMRL

MEGA club the privilege to be a part of an informative and interesting conference. Due to the actual pandemic and the travel restrictions, students could not travel to Brussels as usual, and the conference was held via Zoom.

Many important actors in this battle participated by taking the floor and explaining their work and how our generation can actively participate in climate politics.

The goal of the two days was to imitate the COP26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) and to come upon resolutions to reach net-zero by 2050 to hold global temperature rise

below 1.5C. The different resolutions were presented by eight different committees:

• Clean Tech

• Conventional Energy

• Industry & Commerce

• Land, Agriculture, & Forestry

• Climate Justice Hawks

• Developed Nations

• Developing Nations

• Emerging Nations

Speakers of each group needed to present solutions, matching the goal of their council but also matching the goals determined by the European Green Deal. These solutions were considered by a programme called EN-roads climate interactive. After two days of fruitful debates, we achieved our goal! We managed to reduce global warming to 1,4°C by 2100 in the simulation.

The resolutions collected were being presented in the final plenary session.

All in all, these two days have been extremely informative and gave us further education on diplomacy, international relations and of course the importance of climate action. Besides the occurrence of technical issues due to the virtual holding of the conference, it was an inspiring experience, held by inspiring people.

We are very grateful to have contributed to this amazing event.