What is happening in Brussels?

Malkolm Banker

The Let’s Take Care of the Planet Conference is a project aiming at creating dialogue between European youths and their counterparts from other countries in the EU. This dialogue will strengthen our already existing knowledge, and teach us new things that we can later share with our classmates and friends in our respective countries.

To accomplish this we delegates have participated in a number of activities that aim to teach us new things and enable discussion and debates between us, the teachers and others. These activities include discussions between the delegates about urgent environmental problems in their own countries, discussions and debates with an expert on environmental problems, production workshops and more. 

During the first activity we talked about environmental problems in our countries and later placed them on a map to get a view of where most problems concerning one issue are located. The activity culminated in group discussions about a few general environmental problems, where we then wrote “responsibilities” that we thought, and actions that could help us become and remain responsible.

Many people who work at the Committee of the Regions are experts on many fields of environmental issues. Small groups of delegates got to talk to one or two of these people about essentially whatever they wanted to, related to environmental problems and the function of the EU. This resulted in discussions that targeted the subjects of climate change, working for the EU and so on. I also believe that the experts got a useful view of the opinions of the young Europeans.

The last major activity that was conducted was the production workshops. There we got to make all sorts of creative things regarding the environment and solving problems connected to it. The result of these workshops can be seen here.

As a delegate, I can personally say that this conference has been incredibly giving and will be remembered for long, not only by me, but by everyone. We delegates believe that this has been an amazing opportunity to learn and discuss about environmental problems, and also plausible solutions. After the conference we will all surely bring back our new knowledge to our own countries, and share it with our classmates, friends and family. We have been given the tools to continue the work we started before the conference, and can now do it with newly found motivation.