As young people across the world are anxious about whether COP26 will deliver results, youngsters in China have attended the ClimateX Summit hosted by the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate (GAUC) and have come up with a Global Youth Climate Declaration, calling the youth to be “better implementors, better researchers, better advocates and better cooperators”.

The GAUC Global Youth Summit on Net-Zero Future (Climate x Summit) kicked off on October 25th. The ClimateX Summit aims to mobilize young leaders to the world build a Net-Zero Future and call for real actions besides words. 

The Climate x Summit gains widespread support from diversified stakeholders, including Bloomberg LP as the convening partner, academic support from Elsevier and Springer, COP26 venue support by C-Team affiliated with the Vanke Foundation, and technical support by Global MOOC Alliance.

Xie Zhenhua, Special Envoy on Climate Change Affairs, China delivered speech at the opening ceremony. Xie expressed his admiration in seeing, for the third year in a row, the cooperation between world leading universities to unite their powers to provide a platform for global youth to cooperate and mobilize their talents to achieve a zero-carbon future.

Tsinghua University President Qiu Yong also delivered a speech. “I hope that everyone takes advantage of this exchange and learning opportunity to interact in-depth, enlighten each other, improve together, and empower themselves,” Yong said in his speech.

Minouche Shafik, Co-Chair of GAUC and Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science made a speech at the opening ceremony.

Climate change threatens the entire world, nature/biodiversity and climate change are closely interconnected with one another. The summit held the first virtual event on October 26th and focused on how climate affects biodiversity. The event was organized by Oxford Martin School and Dr Cecile Girardin, an Ecosystems Scientist at the University of Oxford and Imperial College delivered a keynote speech.

The summit also collects short videos for young people aged 16-30, inviting them to tell stories about climate change, share youth climate commitments, and advise leaders of all countries.

This event was featured the premiere of the ActNowFilm on October 26th, after a panel discussion chaired by the Chair of the COP26 Universities Network, Alyssa Gilbert from Imperial College London, followed by young climate campaigners sharing their first-hand experiences.

To mark the 15th anniversary of the publication of The Economics of Climate Change, on October 27th, during the event, Nicholas Stern reviewed the progress of global climate governance and took a look forward to the prospects of success at the COP26 and beyond.

A virtual meeting was also held on October 27th, and organized by Columbia Climate School Columbia University in the City of New York, where young scholars from around the world explore the synergy between Climate and Energy.

They have also hosted an award ceremony to encourage the youth to create innovative solutions to combat climate change.

The summit is a collective endeavor by GAUC’s 15 member universities, with the strategic partnership of COP26 Universities Network, a growing group of around 80 universities in the UK, the hosting country of the COP26.

This summit has about 30 diversified events, bringing together the collective power of 15 universities in nine countries across six continents.

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