Climate Chance

Founded upon our Delegation to COP13 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2007, we are university students who wish to collectively help build a just and sustainable world. We are the organizers of the first Asian Youth Climate Summit in 2008 and were formerly known as the Hong Kong Climate Change Coalition, before we started establishing regional boards in Macau and other areas of China in September 2009. We are currently based at the University of Hong Kong. We are a party to the Youth Constituency officially recognized by the Secretary. We believe that climate change, like social and economic degradation, increased inequity and economic voltality, is a symptom of a pattern of unsustainable development of the Industrial Age, which is based on extraction, manipulation and transportation of natural resources towards centralized locations for consumption and profit consolidation, a system which assumes nature and human beings are objects. In particular, the process enacts self-objectification, which erodes relationships and communities as we manipulate each other. The assumption, in turn, is based on, as well as reinforces deeply embedded beliefs or mental models held by individuals that we are separated from nature or that happiness is external to us, which can be gained through material gains. Albert Einstein said that we cannot solve the problem with the same mindset which created them. And it is our desire to provoke dialogue towards questioning ourselves at the conference which will hopefully lead to examining some of the fundamental assumptions on which the current Kyoto Protocol or draft proposals or our current legal, economic, political institutions are based.