Norwegian activist Greta Thunberg criticized the United Nations COP27 Climate Conference, which will be held in Egypt during the first days of November, after assuring that it will be held in a country that “violates many basic human rights.” She viewed the summit as an opportunity for “people in power” to “lie and cheat.”
Greta Thunberg strongly questioned the next UN COP27 and anticipated that she will not attend the meeting in Egypt.
While promoting her new book ‘The Climate Book’ at the London Literature Festival, the 19-year-old activist said the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference is an opportunity for “people in power” can use “‘greenwashing’, lying and cheating”.
Thunberg criticized that the summit takes place in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, “a tourist paradise in a country that violates many basic human rights.”
“The space for civil society is going to be extremely limited… It is important to leave space for those who need to be there. It will be difficult for activists to make their voices heard,” she said.
Thumberg captured global attention when she was just 15 years old, in 2018, after organizing school strikes in Sweden, becoming a benchmark for youth environmental activism.
During the presentation of his book, he denounced that the “sustainability crisis” is a “crisis of information that does not arrive”. The activist’s new publication includes explanatory articles from more than 100 global climate experts.
“I wanted it to be educational, which is a bit ironic since school strikes are my thing,” he added.
He also referred to recent protests by the environmental group ‘Just Stop Oil’, in which some of its members threw food at works of art, such as a van Gogh piece in London’s National Gallery. They question whether protecting art is more important than protecting the environment.
“People are trying to find new methods because we realize that what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t worked. It’s reasonable to expect these kinds of different actions,” he said.
A climate summit that “does not portend anything new”
More than 30,000 delegates from some 200 countries will meet from November 6 to 18 in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, in the southern Sinai Peninsula, to discuss plans to tackle climate change and put test the UN resolution that seeks to combat climate change.
A United Nations report published last week warned that most countries are not fulfilling their commitments to reduce carbon production and greenhouse gas emissions, which will increase by 10.6% by 2030 compared to levels 2010, according to the report.
Scientists have said that greenhouse gas emissions would need to be reduced by 43% by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, if the “situation is not to get out of control”.
“Climate change is not giving us room to breathe … Science tells us that we are not on the right track at all,” said Egypt’s chief climate negotiator, Mohamed Nasr.
According to the UN climate agency, only 24 of the 200 countries that attended the COP26 talks in Glasgow have submitted their updated emission reduction plans.
Nations such as Chile, Mexico and Turkey have announced that they will publish their new plans during the conference in Egypt, although it is not clear whether major developing economies such as China and India will present a report.
“The chance of China making another major move before COP27 is low,” said Li Shuo, a China climate expert at the environmental group Greenpeace.
According to experts, the cooling of relations between the United States and China “does not bode well”, in addition to the consequences that the world is experiencing due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the dizzying rise in food and fuel prices.
They denounce the arrest of 70 people in Egypt before COP27
Around 70 people have been arrested in Egypt on the eve of COP27, in a country where public demonstrations are de facto banned and which will limit civil protests during the summit to a reserved space next to the conference center in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Previously, the Egyptian Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms had warned about the arrest of at least 22 people who encouraged demonstrations against President Abdelfatah al-Sisi during the summit.
According to this NGO, the Supreme State Security Prosecutor’s Office accused them of “publishing false news, improperly using social networks and being linked to terrorist groups”, while some of those targeted were detained while recording videos “calling for demonstrations and spreading them through WhatsApp and Facebook pages that encourage participation” in the protests.
The same organization denounced that the Egyptian security forces are checking the mobile phones of passers-by in the center of Cairo, a city that has had a large police deployment in recent days after calls to take advantage of the summit to protest against the Government. Egyptian.
In 2019, more than 3,000 people were arrested for participating in protests in Egypt, many of whom are still deprived of their liberty and awaiting a final verdict.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported that up to 60,000 people have been detained in Egypt for political reasons since President Abdelfatah al-Sisi came to power in 2014.
With Reuters, EFE and local media
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