Jean Paul Brice Affana, Karuna Rana

Jean Paul Brice Affana, Karuna Rana

The Commonwealth Youth Climate Change Network (CYNC) was created in 2009 and is a youth network from commonwealth member states that aims to empower young people and collect ideas, solutions and common actions to address climate change. Karuna the Indian Ocean Coordinator of CYNC tells Climate Home that earlier in June 14-15 youth from CYNC met to discuss what they wanted to see at COP21. Commonwealth youth decided to have a global partnership on climate change where young people hold their governments accountable to climate change. They also discussed creating a youth vulnerability index to showcase how climate change affects youth as victims to climate change and to create solutions as agents of change. Finally, they discussed gender, health and human rights and proposed a joint program working with the UNFCCC to address these areas. Karuna explains that almost 60% of Commonwealth states are small and/or small island states. Therefore oceans are a huge issue for them and they are advocating for national policies to implement sustainable ocean governance and enable young people access to jobs through the blue economic concept.