Cerys Jones
Over the past few years, the advocacy – and anger – of young people in the UK and across the world on climate change has been unrivaled. Are our leaders finally listening?
On Friday, COP26 held its ‘Youth and Public Empowerment Day’ – a day to consider how young people can be supported to fight the impending climate crisis. The official COP26 website cited ‘elevating the voice of young people’ as a key aim of the day – as well as highlighting the centrality of education to climate action.
The voices of those bearing the brunt of climate change have often been at odds with those in COP conference halls. While this is still the case, as was made uncomfortably clear to leaders by protesters at Fridays for Future’s Youth March, are there signs that governments are waking up to the interests of their future voters?
Young People Raise Their Voices
Since a 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began to go on strike from school to draw the Swedish Parliament’s attention to climate change, the ‘Fridays for Future’ movement has ballooned to an unanticipated level – including here in the UK.
In September 2019, hundreds of thousands of people – many of them young students – missed a day of education to demand greater action against the climate crisis. In a study in The Lancet, of 10,000 people aged 16-25 in ten countries, respondents ‘reported greater feelings of betrayal than of reassurance’ regarding the government response to climate change.
Are world leaders taking steps to allay their concerns – for example, with new promises on climate education?
Friday’s Headlines
One outcome of Friday was some commitment to the integration of sustainability and climate change in formal education systems. Many countries, including the UK, made national climate education pledges ranging from curriculum changes to sustainable schools and committed to revisiting them before COP27.
Many also committed to the integration of sustainability and climate change in professional training to create a workforce aware of the need for sustainable practice.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi unveiled the UK’s draft strategy for climate education, which included a Duke of Edinburgh Award-style climate change prize for students. a new Primary Model Science Curriculum with an emphasis on nature, and lower-carbon energy for schools. The finalised strategy will be published in April.
Given the recent worrying revelation from UNESCO that only around half of the world’s national education curricula mention climate change, climate education proposals are surely needed – but are they enough to satisfy young people?
Many Activists Left Unimpressed
It seems that the thousands who marched through Glasgow on Friday want more. Greta Thunberg, the face of the Fridays for Future movement, branded COP26 a ‘global north greenwash festival… a two-week-long celebration of business as usual.’
Thunberg called for ‘immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen’. Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who lost her daughter Ella as a result of air pollution, headed a delegation that delivered a letter to Alok Sharma calling for the end of new fossil fuel financing.
Various activists accused world leaders of neglecting the global south, where many people – especially in Indigenous communities – are already bearing the burden of climate change, as Samela Sataremawe explained to the Guardian. Sataremawe said that people in Brazil were ‘suffering every day from climate change’; Helena Gualinga, from the Kichwa People of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon, blamed US and European banks for ‘investing in Amazon destruction’.
Despite Downing Street chiding those who miss school for climate protests, young people refused to be spoken for on Friday. Greta Thunberg, and thousands like her, insist that their leaders’ words are empty. In a pre-election poll of 2019, more than half of respondents said climate change would affect their vote in the general election; this rose to 74% among those under-25s.
If this trend is anything to go by, climate change might become a key electoral issue in the UK – and if this is the case, the government may have to take far more drastic action to win the support of younger generations.
Featured image courtesy of Josh Barwick on Unsplash. No changes were made to this image. Image license can be found here.
cerysjones
Cerys is a first-year journalism student at the University of Sheffield with a special interest in news journalism and politics. She has been published in Big Issue North and is also an Instagram Editor at Empoword Journalism. When she's not writing, she is usually watching Manchester United - or her dog has his head on her laptop keyboard.