At COP27, hundreds of young activists for the planet gathered on November 10 in the ‘Children and Youth’ pavilion to express their concerns about global warming and to ask governments for real action to put an end to climate change.
The legacy of Greta Thunberg, the young activist who was on the front page of newspapers around the world for being the visible face of the new generations concerned about climate change, arrives at COP27 with dozens of children and adolescents who demand urgent measures from governments against climate change.
In the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheikh, in the ‘Children and Youth’ pavilion, Licypriya Kangujam, an 11-year-old girl, has been an environmental activist for four years when she went to the natural disaster conference organized by the UN in Mongolia.
Kangujam says that he was born “in the city of Manipur, full of biodiversity” but grew up in Bhubanewswar, where his “life was hit in 2018 and 2019 by two cyclones that killed thousands of people”. Later, she says, she moved “to Delhi, where the air is unbreathable and the heat waves unbearable.”
Since then, she has been motivated to seek policies that help curb climate change and that there is a development model where respect for the natural environment and people are the center and where climate justice has a prominent place on the leaders’ agenda. global.
Javier Vera, a 13-year-old Colombian who has been fighting for the environment since he was nine, also came to this COP27 pavilion. He began his animal rights activism and then took a much more global stance on climate change, prompted by the fires that swept through the Amazon rainforest three years ago.
A message from youth to world leaders
Licypriya Kangujam stated that “sacrificing the lives of millions of children for the failures of our leaders is unacceptable; instead of spending billions of dollars on wars, they should invest them in ending poverty, in education and in the fight against climate, as well as the The world would be a very different place.
But the young woman and her colleagues feel that children are not heard in the upper echelons of COP27. “Even though we are here, our voices are silenced because we are not given the opportunity to share our message with world leaders in any session.” “They continue to ignore us, that’s why young activists have to take to the streets against the inaction of world leaders, but we must do it peacefully, violence is not an option.”
For her part, Vera says that “the governments of the world have not yet understood that our future and present are in their hands,” and asks that they take action so that they are not remembered “as those who allowed an attack on life, a great damage against the planet”. For the Colombian, “governments are not being serious”, since “there are many commitments that are not being fulfilled” while “time is running out”.
A global impact from the local
The activist of Indian origin took action and founded the organization The Child Movement, with which she seeks to mobilize society to act for climate justice. In addition to this, she carries out activities such as planting trees, cleaning beaches and carrying out acts of awareness.
It also opened ‘Plastic Money Shop’, a store where single-use plastics can be exchanged for free for rice and other imperishable products, while the organization reuses these plastics and turns them into roof tiles or tires.
For Kangujam, “today’s actions will decide tomorrow’s future. Children are the main victims of climate change. We have to take action and abandon false promises”
On the other side of the world, the Colombian founded the organization Guardians for Life, made up of schoolmates, with which they have carried out activities that invite people to become aware of caring for the natural environment, such as cleaning parks and planting trees.
A COP27 initiative
Egyptian Foreign Minister and COP27 President Sameh Shukri appointed Omnia el Omrani, a woman from Cairo, as the event’s first youth envoy.
“We need to be part of the decision-making process, but it has to be in a meaningful way, not symbolic,” Omnari told the EFE agency. For her, youth “are receiving the most disproportionate impact” of climate change and are “the most affected demographic group on Earth.”
Omnari brings the voice of young people to the top echelons of the summit with requests, concerns and proposals. “Something I would like to see is more youth at the COP, not only as observers or civil society – which are also important because we need to maintain our independence – but also to have official youth delegates representing their countries,” he says.
In the absence of Greta Thunberg at this summit, who did not attend as a form of boycott because she considers that Egypt does not respect the most basic human rights, the delegate said that “it is a personal decision to share what you feel about Egypt, about the COP or on human rights”. However, she recalled that, even though Thunberg did not attend the summit, “that does not mean that her work, her activism and her influence are not there.”
According to UNICEF figures, some 1 billion children are at “extremely high risk” of suffering from the climate crisis. Added to this is the fact that more than a million of them die every year due to environmental reasons, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The United Nations reports that 16% of the world’s population, some 1.2 billion people, are between 15 and 24 years of age.
with EFE
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