​Buenos dias Canada!

Just a quick update from down here in beautiful Cancun (I've heard it's been snowing in Canada... pretty happy to have missed that).  I'm just about to start the second day of COP13 events, but I've got lots to update you all on.  

A week ago now was the Civil Society and Youth Forum, where young people from Mexico and across the world came together to talk about mainstreaming biodiversity, not only across the four main sectors being focused on here at the COP (Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry, and Tourism), but across Urban Planning as well, something that we though was important enough to highlight as well.  The forum, overall, was great, but instead of going over specifics parts of what happened, I instead want to focus on the general atmosphere.  Even with the supposed cultural and language differences and barriers, that arise at a large international meeting such as this, it was incredible to see that we all have the same problems, and all want the same solutions.  The problem of sustaining and protecting biodiversity is one that crosses borders, and was honestly pretty incredible to see.

After that I attended the Science Forum, which was also good.  The forum also focused on mainstreaming biodiversity, but only across the four main sectors.  The general feeling that came out of the forum was that biodiversity science needs to be used and incorporated into policy more by decision makers, and that science needs to incorporate local and indigenous communities, as well as be accessible to them.

Finally, the COP13 officially started on Sunday night, but I'll get into more of that in the next blog post.  If you have a hankering to know more about the proceeding right now, be sure to follow us on instragram, twitter, and facebook.  You might also want to follow GYBN on all of those platforms as well, as they have far more people in their media team than just me.

Hasta luego,
Thomas McAuley-Biasi