French-Russian University

The first stage of the First French-Russian Youth Forum started at the French-Russian University on November 25, 2021. The first part of the Forum was held online, due to the challenging epidemiological situation and preceded the face-to-face meeting, which will be held in Moscow in March 2022. Significantly, the Forum has been included into this year’s Action Plan for Inter-Regional Cooperation between Russia and France.The topic for this year’s Forum is “Environment, Climate and Global Change». Therefore, the organizers decided to focus the online event on the issues of sustainable development, based on the least possible transformation of the natural environment, which is currently the concept in the field of nature conservation. The FRU members from Russia as the host country prepared the agenda of the event and delegated 10 students each to participate in the Forum. About 100 students from Russia and France passed the screening competitions at their educational institutions, and will now participate in the first stage of the Forum.Five Russian FRU members chose five of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals to develop the Forum agenda and set up five Russian-French student teams, assigning one goal to each team. The students attended three lectures on November 25. The first one was delivered by M. Yulkin, expert of the International Sustainable Energy Development Center under the auspices of UNESCO, on the topic of “Global Climate Change, its Causes, Possible Consequences, Ways of Mitigation and Adaptation». The second lecturer, E. Tushev addressed the students with his lecture on the question “Is There a Solution to the Garbage Problem?”; and finally French entrepreneur M. Tempez completed the introductory part with an account of experience sharing in organizing business in Russia from the perspective of an FRU graduate. After the break, the participants split into five groups to meet their curators from the Russian universities, to get an introduction and start development of team projects to be presented at the face-to-face part of the Forum in Moscow in March next year.Over the next three months, the French and Russian participants will continue working on their cases online, after which they will share their findings and prepare a common document with their proposals. All participants of the Forum will receive certificates upon completion.