It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and I am racing through the streets of Poznan, Poland, desperately balancing my desire for punctuality with the need to walk gingerly in order to minimize the discomfort and blister-induced wincing associated with putting a grad student into “business attire” for two straight weeks.

I’m in Poland as a member of the Canadian Youth Delegation (CYD) to the 14th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14). CYD is a nonpartisan project of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition.

That’s the long way of saying I’m a 23-year-old at a conference that aims to negotiate a new international climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

This morning I am scheduled to meet with Canada’s climate change ambassador, Michael Martin, at 7:30 a.m. Already I know this meeting is unlikely to directly impact Canadian negotiating position, but I still go because there’s a chance I will learn something I can use later on. Such is the nature of this beast.

In the universe of international climate change negotiations, influence and impact are difficult to assess. A range of actors are involved in the decision-making processes and much of the discussion happens behind closed doors. Although youth delegates make up only a minority of environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) participants, we have a key advantage here: we are free from the organizational interests and expectations that constrain the actions of everyone else. We can still speak honestly and from the heart.

We are also the people who will inherit the outcome of these negotiations. This is especially true for the young people here from the south where the impacts of global warming are already being felt.

Science overwhelmingly tells us that we need to stay as far below the two-degree warming mark as possible if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. This means that developed countries will need to reduce their emissions by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Right now, there is no sign that we will have an agreement capable of doing that by the time the deadline next December rolls around. In order to meet that deadline, the negotiators here in Poznan must agree to give the working group chairs the mandate to produce draft legal text for the new agreement and, ideally, also agree to a target for all developed countries. So far, and thanks to countries like Canada, little progress has been made on these key issues.

Canada is regarded at the conference as one of the top climate villains. Not only has Canada not met its own greenhouse gas emission targets under the Kyoto agreement, but our country is also now working tirelessly to block progress on a new agreement. Canadian negotiators usually do this by supporting positions they know will be completely unacceptable to most other countries. For example, Canada is one of only a few developed countries that have refused to come forward with its own post-2012 emissions reduction target, and only a few days ago Environment Minister Jim Prentice was quoted in La Presse making the preposterous suggestion that Canada would encourage the much-maligned practice of using intensity-based targets instead of actual emissions reduction targets in the final agreement.

In the past, even as a relatively small country, Canada has consistently punched above its weight in the international arena. Canada’s decision to abandon this historical leadership role is a considerable blow to the urgent effort to mitigate global warming.

Although influence at these conferences isn’t always direct or clear, one thing I have learned from my experiences here is obvious: if we want to move Canadian negotiators, their politician bosses need to move first. On Wednesday, Minister Prentice will be arriving here in Poznan, and the Canadian Youth Delegation will be working hard to push him to adopt a more proactive role.

But it is clear that the real power needed for change comes from back home. It’s not too late for Canadians to let him know that we want our country to take action that we can actually be proud of on the international stage.

For more on the climate change conference, you can check out the Canadian Youth Delegation blog at http://www.tigblog.org/group/cydpoznan.