At a Youth for Climate Summit, Greta Thunberg and fellow Youth Campaigners raised their voices to assert their dissatisfaction with the climate policies, which are reflecting mere words and not proper action. They added that much has been promised in the past three decades since the last landmark Earth Summit, but little has been achieved.
A UN report suggested this year that the earth is dangerously going towards an irreversible phase of climate which will push all the coming generations to a series of climate catastrophes.
Youth Climate activist, Greta Thunberg described the past thirty years of promises by the governments as, “Thirty years of blah, blah, blah,” in the opening session of a Youth4Climate event on Tuesday in Milan.
Thousands of Activists have gathered in Milan this week for a discussion with the policymakers about prospective solutions for climate change. Some 400 of the activists are from around 190 countries, reported Stephen Jewkes and Giulio Piovaccari in Reuters.
Thunberg said, “So-called leaders have cherry-picked young people to meetings like this to pretend they are listening to us, but they are not listening”.
“There is no planet B … Change is not only possible but necessary but not if we go on as we have until today,” she added.
The youth activists fighting for action against climate change are being challenged to come up with solutions for the upcoming climate catastrophe. The activists had taken it upon themselves to keep asserting the cause after climate change was made the most important global agenda at the 1992 Rio Summit in Brazil.
Rose Kobusinge, a youth delegate from Uganda said, “Young people need to start getting involved in the actual negotiations, We want 1.5 (degrees) and we won’t go beyond that.”
Britain’s COP26 President, Alok Sharma, said in a video message on Tuesday, “Now is the time for leaders of the biggest economies and the biggest greenhouse gas emitters to make much bolder commitments.”
Climate activists are demanding that the rhetoric must also be matched with action regarding climate policies. The use of fossil fuels has to be curbed as the disastrous impact has been increasing every year, with visibly a range of forest fires, thunderstorms, floods, heatwaves which peaked this year.
Oscar Soria of the U.S.-based activist network Avaaz said, “Money speaks, and if rich nations don’t restructure debt for poor nations and commit $500 billion for climate action from 2020-2024, there’s no point in wasting time at these meetings.”
The developed nations which pledged to give $100 billion a year to help developing countries with climate change are still short on the climate change goal of 2020.
Vanessa Nakata, a youth delegate from Uganda, said, “It was promised by 2020, and we are still waiting.”
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