All the world’s environmental activists are sweeping through New York this week for protests and an unprecedented youth summit, who have come to pressure world leaders at the UN to revise their climate commitments upwards.
In addition to now famous Swede Greta Thunberg, 16, 500 other young leaders from South America, Europe, Asia and Africa will arrive for the first UN youth climate summit on Saturday.
Many will land just in time to join a hopefully massive protest on Friday, coordinated with hundreds of others around the world. Friday became the day of the “school climate strike”, an initiative launched by Greta Thunberg in Stockholm last year, which has spread like wildfire around the world.
The following Friday, September 27, during the UN General Assembly, another coordinated global strike will take place.
New York, which will also host a week of side climate events, has allowed its students to skip class.
This image of children and adolescents bottling the streets of New York for “our burning house” will be the preamble to a special climate summit next Monday at the UN, with a hundred heads of state and government, including Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel.
Many leaders subscribe to the idea of a climate emergency, but they will be expected on the concrete details of their climate plans, with two central questions: when will they close their last coal plants? And when will countries turn off the taps on other fossil fuels, gas and oil?
Harvest of bad news
Sixty countries should announce strengthened climate plans, according to Alden Meyer, expert of the American NGO Union of Concerned Scientists, but a priori not the large emitters, he told AFP.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” continues Alden Meyer. The real deadline is the end of 2020, when the Paris Agreement will force signatories to review their copy. But we will watch for the signals sent, particularly by China.
For the moment, only Morocco and The Gambia have commitments “compatible” with the objective of the 2015 Paris agreement, according to the Climate Action Tracker.
To have a chance of stopping global warming at + 1.5 ° C (compared to the 19th century), the world would have to be carbon neutral in 2050, according to the latest consensus of scientists commissioned by the UN.
We are far from it. The past year has brought a harvest of bad news. Never before have humans released so much carbon dioxide into the air than in 2018. This summer’s heatwaves made July 2019 the hottest on Earth since 1880. The past four years have been the hottest four. .
And studies have found that the polar caps are melting even faster than previously thought.
Beyond “Greta”
Among the 500 young participants of Saturday’s summit, the UN invited 100 all expenses paid, by offsetting the carbon emissions of their flights: an eco-entrepreneur from Mauritius and another from Indonesia, founders of associations in Argentina or Guatemala, environmental activists …
Some are seasoned in the cogs and bureaucratic jargon of international negotiations, like the French Côme Girschig, 24.
“Greta has opened a door”, he told AFP, asking: “It’s very good to have the youth in the street who say they are anti-capitalist and want to change the system, but we put what instead ? “
This moderate ecologist is vegan and anti-aircraft, but not absolutist: “If everyone eats less meat once a day, it is more effective than if 5% of the population is perfectly vegan”. He wants the young movement to go beyond extremism and give birth to concrete proposals.
From Brazil will arrive on Friday João Henrique Alves Cerqueira, 27, involved in various NGOs for five years. “I’m a little skeptical, this is not my first UN conference,” he told AFP. “But something is happening right now.”
As for “Greta”, he confides his admiration, but adds: “It would be great if the world heard other voices, coming from the South and from the indigenous communities”.
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