In its endeavor to promote climate science literacy, the American Chemical Society sponsored students to attend the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP). The students aspired to engage their peers and communities in climate change discussions through blogs, social media networking, newspaper publications, and online column features. Having attended COP 18 in Doha, Qatar in 2012 as an ACS student delegate, I served as a mentor to the student delegates throughout the duration of the 2013 COP 19 project in Warsaw, Poland. I will discuss my experiences in attending COP18 and mentoring the students at COP 19 with a special emphasis on the development of outreach strategies employed by the students to better reach their peers and communities. As a young person, I helped represent an internationally encompassing party at the conference that consists of half of the world's population. The world's youth will have to face the consequences of climate change and manage a drastically different world if CO2 emissions do not peak by 2015. I mentored the COP 19 ACS student delegation in hopes that our collective actions inspire our elders, peers, and future generations to also be concerned about our role in addressing the civilization challenge issue of climate change.

ACS student delegates' outreach at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties

248th National Meeting (2014)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.