#FlashCOP: SFYN brings COP28 closer to home.

Slow Food Youth Network planned something different for this year’s COP: #FlashCOP, their new campaign to bring the most famous climate conference closer to home, and spread more climate crisis awareness after empowering trainings. 

The campaign is born because of the need to speak up on the controversies surrounding the COP conference, and in particular, COP28, happening in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The selected President for the meeting is Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, the CEO of an oil company called Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

 As ironic as it sounds, the leader of a fossil fuel company (the main contributors to climate change) may have an evident conflict of interests with the whole purpose of the assembly. Other than that, the country plans to expand its oil and gas capacity with a $150 billion investment. How could it not affect the conference’s agenda?

SFYN (Slow Food Youth Network)’s campaign is here not just to educate youth, but to empower and inspire individuals in the collective battle against the climate crisis, highlighting the role of our food system as a solution.

FlashCOP consists in mobilising and training youth to make the wider audience aware of the solutions and opportunities of this battle, by setting climate tables right in front of iconic landmarks in major cities and rural areas around the world to bring the essence of COP closer to home. Raising awareness is made possible by being visible in the streets and by igniting accessible conversions about the climate crisis. Those interactive spaces, envisioned as desks, benches or booths, serve as hubs for engagement, and will help connect with by-passers, which will be educated about the climate crisis and invited to make climate commitments (showed below) and inspired to advocate for best practices and climate demands to local governments and municipalities, holding policy makers accountable for their role in this battle!

The event  has been held on November 25th, in the run-up to COP28: more than 50 communities all around the world hosted a #FlashCOP event. The participants  covered all continents and are visible in the event’s map here. 

Starting from more standard FlashCOP events, like the online round table on ‘’climate change and local food system’’ with farmers and environmental activists open to the public andorganised by SFYN Tunisia, other communities adapted their celebration to their own culture and needs. 

‘’ (…) We participated in Radio talk shows within the campaign period and created awareness on the role of youth in the fight against Climate Change. As part of a Climate Change mitigation measure,we organised some indigenous tree planting activities throughout the period using seed balls. Lastly,we organised clean up initiatives in Nakuru City (…) and as well organised awareness creation walks within the town Center and engaged with bypassers’’’ – says Elphas from SFYN Kenya.

As part of the empowering training that SFYN wanted to offer, a series of free weekly webinars were hosted through October and November. They covered various aspects from the climate crisis to public speaking and political engagement: each of them had an expert host speaking. From Shane Holland, chairman of Slow Food UK speaking about how Conferences like COP work, to Gabriele Volpato, university professor at UNISG, teaching us about the climate crisis’ impact on the food system. But also interactive webinars on public speaking and engagement with Linda Vermaat and climate crisis’ victims stories told by people part of our network. The webinar recordings are still available in the FlashCOP toolkit for everyone to listen.

For those who wanted to join as individuals, SFYN encouraged everyone to organise their own kind of FlashCOP: simply by inviting people over for dinner, or organising a documentary screening, and doing anything to spread awareness in an easy and accessible way.

All the networks could make use of the materials in the #FlashCOP toolkit: a place to find all the visuals of the event, such as slogans, logos, funny sentences to print, but also cool call-to-action signs for individuals, and others for policy makers.

Other memorable #FlashCOP events include native trees-planting in Brazil in the Xingù region, climate tables in front of ‘La Rifa’ Chocolateria in Mexico to offer chocolate and invite bypassers to join conversations on the food system starting from the cacao industry, and another online event with 6 PhD students from Morocco all working on the valorization of local food products, and  talking about how climate change affects the field of their studies.

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THE FOLLOWING INFO IS NOT FOR PUBLICATION
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Images and designs to use 

Find imagery to use at this link: 

Media from the events: YOUR EVENT – Google Drive

Visuals of the campaign: VISUALS / DESIGNS – Google Drive

Media enquiries and further information 

For all media enquiries contact  

Laura Odorisio [email protected] 

Alessia Pautasso [email protected] 

Slow Food is a global grassroots organisation that envisions a world in which all people can access and enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it, and good for the planet. Slow Food involves over a million activists, chefs, experts, youth, farmers, fishers, and academics in over 160 countries.