Anna Rose from AYCC and Deepa Gupta from the Indian Youth Climate Network gave speeches at the closing plenary of the first day of the Conference of Youth in Copenhagen. The audience was 500 youth leaders from 160 countries. Here is Anna’s speech in full:
I was asked to speak today because I was part of a moment four years ago in Montreal, when a large number of youth from 130 countries came together at the UN climate negotiations. We held a youth summit, like this, and then we took the negotiations by storm.
It was the first time there had been a mass, globally co-ordinated and international youth intervention in the negotiations. We held actions, got on the front pages of news around the world, lobbied our governments, and shaped the debate back in our own countries. We helped organise what was at the time the world’s biggest rally on climate change – 40,000 people in the snow.
Our message was simple: our generation’s future is at stake. Our survival is not negotiable.
But perhaps more importantly, in Montreal, the seeds of the global youth climate movement were sown, and we realised that the work we were doing in our own countries, was the same kind of work young people were doing all around the world. At the time there were a few major national youth climate organisations but we were not really connected, even though we were doing similar campaigns to switch our campuses to clean energyMontreal changed all that, and spurred a wave of communication and sharing across the world. Every night during the COP we slept in an attic in a little house on mattresses pushed together on the floor – youth from every corner of the world, and we became close friends. We went through so much together, just like we will all experience during the next two weeks.
Those of us in Montreal went back to our countries and set up youth climate coalitions: the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. Then more started up: the Indian Youth Climate Network, and emails came in from other places wanting to set up their own coalitions: the UK Youth Climate Coalition, a network in Turkey, in Africa, Nepal, and more countries than I can mention. Suddenly, all over the world, there were youth climate coalitions and organisations. And then youth started playing a major role at the UN Climate Conferences: Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, and now this year in Copenhagen,
Each of us has our own struggles and victories in our journeys with our own coalitions. For the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, our membership has grown 1000% from 5,000 to 51,000 youth in the last 12 months. It has been such hard work for the past 3 years, but finally we are having both immediate political impact, as well as long-term cultural change. When we started we had a tiny group of us, and now we’re the biggest youth organisation in Australia.
This movement has spread many waves around the world. One of them is the Power Shift wave. What is a Power Shift? It’s a national youth climate change summit, and it re-frames the issue of climate change as an issue about youth.
First held in the United States in 2007, I was lucky enough to be there and witness six thousand youth standing up for a clean energy future and connecting with each other over three powerful days. Then we took it to Australia, and 1500 leaders of the Australian youth climate movement came together in July this year, followed by a historic flash dance on the steps of Sydney Opera House. A few days later, Chinese youth held a similar national youth climate summit, and India held one too, called Badlaav. Then the UKYCC’s Power Shift impressed us all with their own flash mob, before Canada’s Power Shift just 2 months ago October.
Our movement is now strong and we are indeed shifting power. I have seen us win – change our campuses, win legislation for renewable energy targets, influence politicians, business and community leaders, and most importantly empower the generation most affected by climate change – us – to build a better world.
We know that climate change is not a technical problem. It’s not that we lack the technology – it’s the political will that’s lacking. And how do we build the political will? We change hearts and minds, and we create a movement so strong that Governments have no choice but to take stronger action.
Everyone in Montreal that year is still involved in our struggle in some way. Some of us are organising youth climate coalitions, others are bloggers, local councillors, writers, and some have become mothers and fathers. It changed all of us, the same way that the next 14 days in Copenhagen will change every single one of us here, forever.
Martin Luther King said, “Unity is the need of the hour. Unity is how we shall overcome”. We can solve this global problem of climate change, but only if we solve it TOGETHER. If youth organisations around the world unite, and if we decide it is time, there is NOTHING we can not do. These two days are a huge opportunity for us – to learn from each other, to share experiences and make alliances.
The change we seek will not be easy. It has never been easy. We should not under-estimate what we are up against. We’re up against the most powerful lobby groups in history: coal, oil, gas, tar sands, aluminium, cement, mining, electricity generators and more. These companies are well-funded, and they are organised.
We’re up against the stereotype that our generation has nothing to say, or that if we do we should shut up and wait our turn until we’re old enough to be at the negotiating table. And we’re up against something inside of us all; the question we ask ourselves when we read the latest climate science about whether it is too late. But it’s not too late. We can feel it in the air. Our time is now.
So why do we fight, when every one of us in this room has at some point been told that what we’re trying to do is impossible? Because we have to do what seems politically impossible, to avoid the unimaginable.
What is the unimaginable? Those of you here understand, because you’ve seen it; you have lived it. We, the global youth movement, are collective witnesses to what is happening to our planet.
In my country, Australia, I didn’t realise it could get worse when my family had to sell their farm because of the drought. But then came the heat waves that killed elderly people in South Australia and Victoria, and then the first wave of mega – bushfires, in Victoria last year. Then came the flooding in large parts of northern Queensland and New South Wales, and then again this summer, it is heating up again, and the bushfires have begun.
Why do we fight? Because we have no choice, when faced with what we’re seeing.
Why do we fight? For each other, and for each other’s futures.
Why do we fight? Because sometimes we win. And because in Copenhagen, this year, we will influence these negotiations – and change the course of history. This is our time; this is our moment.
Our generation is the last with the chance to solve this. We are running out of time. All of you know how urgent this is. The next 14 days may well be the most important days of our entire lives. And in a way, we have all been preparing for this for a long, long time.
We have to go in expecting anything, and expecting everything. No-one knows what will happen here; and we have an opportunity to be an organised and strategic force that blows the winds of change into the Bella Centre.
And no matter what happens in Copenhagen, our movement will grow. The connections and collaboration that we make in Copenhagen will be bigger on a scale of thousands than Montreal. There are at least 500 youth leaders here, so many that we can’t even all fit in this room, and we come from all over the world. Each of us has our own networks back home, of thousands of young people. That means that if we work together, our actions can be at least 500 times stronger, and our reach 500 times bigger.
Bella means beautiful, which is appropriate, because this movement is beautiful. It is made up of the most compassionate, strategic, generous people I have ever met. You all have big hearts – because it takes a big heart to do this work.
We are not just focused on climate change and wind turbines. We understand that climate change is an issue of justice; and that is what we are fighting for: climate justice. This means the survival of all people, all species and all nations, and it means that the Global North must repay the climate debt that we owe to the Global South. It means that we won’t accept false solutions to climate change, like so called “clean coal”, nuclear, or offsets that have serious impacts on communities in the Global South while allowing Global North countries to keep on expanding their own carbon pollution. It means we will resist REDD schemes that lock Indigenous peoples out of their land. And it means we will stand in solidarity with each other – at this conference and for the rest of our lives.
We have to tell a powerful story, not just about what kind of future we want to avoid, but about the kind of world do we want to create.
People in Copenhagen will be talking a lot about “the future”. We have to remember, there is no “the future”.
There is a fundamental truth that our generation holds sacred: our destiny will be created not for us, but by us.
It’s up to us what our future looks like. It’s up to what we do in these next 14 days, and in the days and weeks afterwards.
If we can connect with each other, if we can stay true to our idealism, if we can hold on to our HOPE, then we will truly be the Earth’s last line of defence and we will solve climate change.
