The Youngest Negotiating Team at COP26 has a Message for Other Countries

When Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez went to his first round of U.N. climate negotiations as part of Panama’s delegation in 2015, his colleagues told him not to talk about his age, in case it made other countries’ representatives take him less seriously. At the time, he was just 22. Now, aged 29 and the lead negotiator for Panama at COP26 in Glasgow, he won’t shut up about it. “I like to say my age in every room I go into,” Monterrey Gómez says, standing in a windy concrete alley at the edge of the summit’s sprawling warren of meeting rooms, where 197 nations are trying to reach a consensus on how—and how fast—the world should cut its greenhouse gas emissions. “I want it to make the other negotiators uncomfortable. They need to remember that it’s our generation and younger generations that will be most impacted [by their decisions.]” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Panama claims that its negotiating team at COP26, comprising some 15 people with an average age of 29, is the youngest ever to represent a country at a U.N. climate summit. Though the U.N. does not hold records for the ages of negotiators at the summit, they almost certainly skew older than that. Malik Amin Aslam, a climate adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister, talking to the Washington Post on Sunday, estimated that the average age of those inside negotiating rooms was around 60. “We’re talking about 2060, 20...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Londontime Source Type: news