Climate: five weeks before COP26, youth mobilized again across the world

Published on : 09/24/2021 – 14:55

Thousands of young activists are mobilizing again, Friday September 24 in several dozen countries, to demand urgent action against climate change, five weeks before COP26.

This “global strike for the climate” aims to increase the pressure on governments in the run-up to this 26^e conference of the signatory parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which will take place in Glasgow from 1^er to November 12.

Demonstrations are planned in more than 1,500 sites around the world according to Fridays for Future, one of the movements behind the initiative.

This mobilization is the most important since the end of 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic put a brake on the dynamics.

“It’s been a very strange year and a half with this pandemic, but obviously the climate crisis hasn’t gone away,” Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg said.

“On the contrary, it is even more urgent today than it was before”, she underlined before participating in a parade in Berlin.

The protests have started in Asia and will continue in Europe and North America.

In Germany, two days before the federal parliamentary elections, the organizers expect the participation of hundreds of thousands of young people in some 400 parades.

At the same time, in England, the access road to the port of Dover was blocked by around 40 activists from the Insulate Britain organization.

“Nobody keeps their promises”

Almost six years after the Paris Climate Agreement, signed in December 2015, which plans to limit the average rise in global temperatures to below 2 ° C or even 1.5 ° C by the end of the century compared to pre-Industrial Revolution levels, state commitments remain well below targets, as the UN pointed out a week ago.

According to UN experts, the 1.5 ° C target is totally out of reach since at the rate of current promises, carbon emissions will be 16% higher in 2030 than in 2010, while scientists consider that it They would have to fall by 45% to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

“Everyone talks about making promises, but nobody keeps them. We want more acts,” Farzana, a 22-year-old environmental activist, told Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh.

In Pakistan, in the province of Balochistan, Yusuf, aged 17, underlines that the resumption of the demonstrations is vital to give new life to the mobilization. “Last time it was all virtual and no one paid attention to us,” he says.

But due to still very unequal access to vaccination against Covid-19, activists in the poorest countries will only organize symbolic actions with a few handfuls of participants.

With Reuters