Hello everyone, my name is Rose Stevens, I’m 15 years old and currently in year 10 at Cathedral School in Llandaff.

I am writing this blog for you because I have been selected as one of the six Climate Change Champions for Wales for 2010. We are a group of young people who will inform people about climate change and the simple steps they can take to help Wales reduce its carbon footprint. We will also help represent the views of young people at meetings of the Climate Change Commission for Wales.

We went to Forest Farm in Cardiff for the official launch of the 2010 Champions , they have managed to hugely reduce their carbon footprint as a company. The centre is run by BTCV, an international volunteering organisation that supports conservation initiatives across the UK. The Environment Minister, Jane Davidson was present along with reporters and journalists from the Welsh media. It was a great day and we learnt lots about climate change.

I decided to enter the competition to become a Climate Change Champion when I heard about it at a ‘Countdown to Copenhagen’ youth conference that I attended with my school’s eco-committee. As part of my competition application, I wrote an article entitled ‘Discussing and Deciding: Copenhagen Conference’. I was then selected to go through to the semi-finals and went to an interview in Cardiff. A few days later I received a letter telling me I had been chosen to be a Champion, I was very excited and pleased!

As a Champion I will be going around my local area of the Vale of Glamorgan giving easy and simple advice on how people can reduce their carbon footprint and help stop the causes of climate change. Along with my fellow Champions, I will be talking to as many young people in Wales as possible to get their opinions on climate change and what we should be doing about it, then feeding these back to the Welsh Assembly Government.

As part of my application, I also had to submit an idea for a project relating to climate change that I would work on throughout the year. My project will be producing a big mural around the Cardiff area and I‘m aiming to get as many schools as possible involved in painting it. It will be bright and colourful and will give people a vision of a better, greener future to hope for.

Tip of the Month

Change all of your old light-bulbs to new energy-saving ones. If everyone in the UK installed one energy saving light bulb, we'd save enough CO2 to fill the Albert Hall nearly 1,200 times and they save you money on your electricity bills too.

The Climate Change Champions is an initiative run by the Welsh Assembly Government to give Welsh teenagers an opportunity to have their voices heard on the climate change subject. The Climate Change Champions will spend a year ‘in office’ talking to their friends, families and local communities on how they can take simple steps to reduce their carbon footprint while saving money at the same time.