Young People’s Battle Against Climate Change.

September 2022, Analytical Brief
Author(s): Luis Tamayo Pérez and Antonio Sarmiento Galán

Abstract >>>

For centuries, young people have been the drivers of social change. In the words of the French sociologist Rene Lourau “Young people are the social instituent, the one that avoids the stagnation of institutions, which is something that naturally occurs in all societies”. Humanity’s struggle involving work on global warming is another example. The whole of humanity requires ‘enormous collective thinking’ and it is the youngsters who are promoting it.

In this article, the authors briefly review the actions that some of them have taken worldwide with the hope that young people who read this article will be inspired to realize their own initiatives.

Introduction

“COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today, but we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term”.

Patricia Espinosa, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary

As we all know, Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a serious problem that threatens to end our civilization sometime during the second half of the century. Accompanied by the Sixth Mass Extinction of Species and the global spread of pollution are two concurrent events amplify its effects. The AGW constitutes the most urgent global phenomenon that humanity has faced through its history. According to Kohlberg (2014), the impacts that AGW will have only comparable with the massive extinction of the species that occurred 65 million years ago in the Paleocene-Eocene.

Despite the bleak outlook, there have been very few truly effective actions that humanity has taken to curb the phenomenon. Humanity requires ‘cathedral thinking’ (Krznaric, 2020), a clear far-reaching vision, and a shared commitment to long term implementation, otherwise it will not be able to thwart this threat.

In our time, something that some of us considered impossible, is happening. Many youngsters around the world have begun to mobilize to try to stop the socio-environmental consequences of a predatory civilizational model that threatens to end humanity’s material conditions of existence by the end of the present century.

Those who are leading that change that is awakening consciousness are young people. One of them is Greta Thunberg, a little girl who started her fight when she was only 16 years old and diagnosed with Asperger syndrome (an autism spectrum disorder) … How is this possible? Let’s analyze it carefully.

Our complicated socioenvironmental situation

For two centuries, humanity has grown depleting the Earth’s resources and affecting all its ecosystems. This might seem fairly innocuous but has grim implications and is based on a misreading of the underlying causes of the current crisis. As these escalate, people must be prepared to challenge and reject the overpopulation argument. The overpopulation argument is simply a dangerous distraction. Focusing on human numbers obscures the true driver of many of our ecological woes which is the waste and inequality generated by modern capitalism with its focus on endless growth and profit accumulation.

The industrial revolution first married economic growth with burning fossil fuels in the 18th century in Britain (Malm, 2016). The explosion of economic activity that marked the post-war period known as the “Great Acceleration” (IGBP, 2015) caused emissions to soar (Blasiak, 2020) and largely took place in the Global North (Stephen et al., 2015). That is why richer countries such as the US and UK, which industrialized earlier, bear a bigger burden of responsibility for historical emissions (Irfan, 2019).

Disproportionate impact of corporations should also be considered. It is suggested that just 20 fossil fuel companies contribute to one-third of all modern CO₂ emissions (Taylor and Watts, 2019) even though industry executives have known about the science of climate change since 1977 (Hall, 2015).

Inequalities in power and wealth and access to resources— not mere numbers— are key drivers of environmental degradation. The consumption of the world’s wealthiest 10%  (OXFAM, 2015; Colarossi, 2015) amongst upto 50% of the planet’s consumption-based CO₂ emissions (Wells and Touboulic, 2017). The poorest half of humanity contributes only 10%. With a mere 26 billionaires now in possession of more wealth than half the world, this trend is likely to continue (OXFAM, 2019).

Issues of ecological and social justice cannot be separated from one another. Blaming human population growth— often in poorer regions— risks fueling a racist backlash because blame from the powerful industries that continue to pollute the atmosphere is displaced. Developing regions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America often bear the brunt of climate and ecological catastrophes despite having contributed the least to them. The problem is extreme inequality, excessive consumption of the world’s ultra-rich, and a system that prioritizes profits over social and ecological wellbeing. This is where we should be devoting our attention.

After the signing of the Paris Agreement (2015), the arrival of the denialist President Donald Trump and the consequent departure from the agreement, the emergence of the leadership of the President of France Emmanuel Macron, and the presentation of the Special Report on the Increase in Terrestrial Temperature of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the resurgence of the High Ambition Coalition during COP 24 in Katowice, Poland—reiterated at COP 25 in Madrid 2019—the beginning of the Talanoa dialogues, the UNESCO announcement on May 6, 2019 on the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction with the entry of a quarter of them to the Red List of Threatened species, “as a civilization, we are facing the greatest self-induced global collective challenge, which puts at risk the permanence of all species on the planet (including ours)” (Rueda, 2019).

According to these affirmations, a little over a year ago, on October 8, 2018, the group of experts on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a desperate warning. If measures to reduce greenhouse gases are not carried out worldwide (CO2, NOx, SO2, just to mention the main GHGs), we will reach a tipping point (the point of no return) in just twelve years. This implies that after that limit all the measures that we implement will be useless to stop runaway global heating of the only inhabitable planet in the solar system and its surroundings.

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) generated by the increase in GHGs and its associated pollution have already begun to affect human communities:

  • It is well known that the crisis in Syria (which led to an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Syrians to neighboring nations and even to Europe) had as one of its main causes the long drought that its rural areas suffered between 2007 and 2010. Prior to that AGW-generated drought, Syria was a stable nation that had not been affected by the Arab Spring —a broad movement that raised citizens of many nations in that region against the ruling oligarchies. The prolonged drought generated by the AGW forced a million Syrians to abandon their lands to take refuge in cities that were quickly destabilized. And a crisis was created that covered the streets with blood and forced countless citizens into exile.
  • In Tuvalu, Kiribati and other islands of the South Pacific, once true paradises on Earth, the inhabitants were forced to begin the evacuation of their countries because Global Warming has increased the sea ​​level by almost one meter more (due to the melting of a large part of the world’s glaciers, the Arctic, the Siberian tundra, Greenland, and Antarctica), compared to pre-industrial times. These islands barely exceeded sea level with the slightest increase in waves, they were literally swept away by the ocean. Their crops and their freshwater deposits were flooded and contaminated with salt water. Consequently, entire communities with ancestral practices and traditions had to seek refuge in other countries that are also poor and did not want them. They were not willing to give them land or employment.
  • Inhabitants of Thule, an Inuit community in northern Canada had to migrate due to the excessive increase in cancer and other degenerative diseases among the population. The cause of this was that their ancestral basic diet consisted of consuming seal fat which is heavily contaminated by the products that the industrial countries throw into the sea in the form of plastics and chemical substances ranging from pesticides to chemical fertilizers, heavy metals, and other toxins. These are incorporated into the marine food chains poisoning them and are accumulated in the fatty tissues of fish and marine mammals. All of which goes to the Inuit who consumes these. They now have no choice but to emigrate and abandon their homeland.
  • Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh people is already suffering from large number of refugees who are increasingly flooding the banks of the Ganges and Brahmaputra. Today, a large number of 2,000 environmental refugees enter Dhaka daily. In Dhaka and in other parts of the world, the humanitarian and ecological crisis has already begun.
  • Cape Town South Africa is the first major capital in the world to experience widespread water stress. Its government has mandated all citizens to limit their water consumption. Since February 1, 2018, no one has the right to spend more than 50 liters of the vital liquid per day.
  • Mexico, due to its geographical, economic, and sociocultural situation, is a nation that has been classified by the INECC (National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change) as very vulnerable to the effects of the AGW. So many of the effects of this phenomenon have already begun to be noticed. These include droughts, floods, hurricanes, decrease in agricultural production, biodiversity loss, etc.— with the consequent exodus of an increasing number of environmental refugees to the country’s central highlands and to other countries.

Delgado, Imaz, and Beristain (2015) indicate that solid waste has multiplied by four in the last fifty years and an enormous figure (1.1 billion tons in 2011-2012) is expected to double by the year 2025. At the same time, they report that 10% of the wealthiest populations on Earth consume 40% of the total energy and 27% of the materials.

The consequences of all these problems are uncertain. “This extraordinary increase in humanity’s demand for resources and energy has caused great transformations in the ecosystems and in the physical and biogeochemical cycles at the local and global levels, the consequences of which have not yet been determined in all its extension”(Delgado, Imaz, Beristáin, 2015).

Regarding the vital element, according to Water International, in the 20th century the population multiplied by four and the extraction of fresh water by seven so humanity turned to overexploit aquifers. It is also true that in 2008 there were already 500 million inhabitants of Earth facing water stress due to a population growth that reached seven billion in 2011 and will increase to nine billion in 2045. It is possible that 2,800 million inhabitants will suffer water stress by 2025. However, Water International indicates that the problem is not just technological since humanity already has technologies for the proper management of water (such as desalination and sustainable reuse) capable of providing good quality water to everyone. The problem is fundamentally education and citizen organization.

On the other hand, many countries like México use huge quantities of the vital liquid to produce water-intense food to be exported. Thus, water is being sent abroad freely and the situation is getting even worse in these countries.

And those are not the only problems that could be solved through public policies. As the EAT-Lancet Commission pointed out in New York in 2019, humanity is capable of feeding more inhabitants, 10 billion, but this would require abandoning unsustainable meat consumption and the innumerable variants of consumerism. Fortunately, many are beginning to join the environmental movement in order to avoid the catastrophe. Only those who are affected economically by the measures required for sustainability (the ‘deniers’) oppose the urgent civilization reconversion that should have already become global. Today, humanity urgently needs to change its civilizational model for one that can lead us in the direction of sustainability and conviviality (Illich, 1978).

A movement driven by youngsters

Young people have from the beginning, led the environmental movement in the West. Those we now consider ‘veteran environmentalists’ began their actions and proposals in their youth, and some in their very early youth.

In the far-East things are different. The culture that Zen Buddhism brought to Japan and Bhutan made these people much more inclined to accept these concepts than other nations who required greater efforts to understand them. The pioneer of environmentalism in Japan, Kumagusu Minakata, is a good example of this. Another example is the “mottainai” (repentance for wasting) generated in the years of the Edo Dynasty (1603-1868). Today, this is the basis of a culture that makes recycling, reduction and reuse its form of life.

In the late fifties and early sixties of the last century, some of the young people who fought against nuclear weapons testing in America started the environmental movement in that country. Former presidential candidate Barry Commoner is the best example of this generation. But he’s not the only one. In their respective nations, John Bohlen, Irwing Stone, Aldo Leopold, Rajendra Pachauri, Vandana Shiva, Rachel Carson, Nicholas Stern, William Catton, Serge Latouche, Nicholae Georgescu Roegen, Donella Meadows, Joan Martínez Alier, James Hansen, Petra Kelly, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and many other environmentalists across the globe began to prepare their strategies. Around the same time, in Germany, many brave young people opposed the expansion of nuclear power plants and many of them broadened their aims to the AGW phenomenon. The Grünen, Greenpeace, and the World Wildlife Fund are associations that emerged from such efforts. A few years later, other environmentalists join them: Johan Rockström, Jorge Riechmann, Naomi Klein, Amparo Martínez, Antonio Sarmiento, Raúl García Barrios, Úrsula Oswald, Gail Bradbrook, Roger Hallam, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Yayo Herrera, Flora Guerrero, Wangari Maathai and many others, who started joining the movement at younger and younger ages.

It is for this reason, it was not surprising to hear the voice of the then little Severn Suzuki rise up at the Rio de Janeiro Environment and Development Summit (1992) to try to alert us all to the terrible consequences that the AGW would bring. Since then, more and more young people have joined the fight against the degradation of the planet:

At just over ten years of age, Félix Finkbeiner, a young German launched the Plant-for-the-Planet Project (2007) which has already planted more than a million trees around the world.

Boyan Slat, who, after watching the film Plastic Planet (Werner Boote, Österreich, 2009) and finding more plastic than fish when diving in the Mediterranean decided to abandon his studies in aerospace engineering and dedicated himself to eliminating plastic from the oceans, creating, in this way, The Ocean Cleanup (2013).

Ash Pachauri, who is a PhD in decision behavior and has a master’s degree in international management, became the leader of the POP Movement, an organization that has undertaken over 20,000 workshops, events, and activities globally to reach out to youth and communities to promote health and sustainable development.

Vanessa Nakate concerned about the unusual increase in temperature in her country (Uganda), was inspired by the actions of Greta Thunberg and began in 2019 demonstrations outside the Ugandan parliament to demand from congressmen of her country, effective actions to stop climate change.

Xiye Bastida, a young Mexican woman who had to emigrate with her family to New York due to the climate crisis, has today become one of the main voices of young New Yorkers who fight against the climate crisis.

Eleonora Isunza Gutiérrez and Gustavo Martínez Ballesté created in Cuernavaca, Cinema Planeta, the first annual environmental film festival in Mexico in 2009. This festival has become the most important disseminator of the sustainability culture throughout the country.

Marino Morikawa, a Peruvian scientist of Japanese origin who has specialized in the development of technologies for the recovery of water bodies, has been working since 2018 to decontaminate Lake Titicaca.

Patricia Gualinga, the defender of the Ecuadorian Amazon, a young woman whose story shows how dangerous it can be to oppose the powerful destroyers of Earth, not only governments but also large transnational corporations.

Three movements deserve special mention for, they are opposing neither more nor less than the factual powers of their respective nations on the legal plane. These are cases of Urgenda in The Netherlands, the Nature and Youth Movement in Norway and Fridays for Future led by Greta Thunberg in Sweden.

Urgenda’s fight against the Dutch government

Many of the best environmental initiatives have taken place in Europe. The Dutch capital, Amsterdam, is very prolific in this regard. Not only is it home to countless projects that make caring for the environment their priority, but it is also seen at the headquarters of Greenpeace. However, like every western nation, the Dutch government is also infiltrated by the lobbyists of the world’s major corporations, delaying urgent action to stop the AGW. It is for this reason that in 2008 Marjan Minnesma, a brilliant environmentalist and Professor Jan Rotmans founded Urgenda, an association created:

[…] with the goal of using legal action to accelerate our society to become a sustainable society, starting in the Netherlands.

Nowadays, Urgenda represents 800 individual citizens who, on June 24, 2015, achieved an incredible victory:

 […] the District Court of The Hague ruled that the government must cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 (compared to 1990 levels).

But the victory is not final yet:

Even though we have known about anthropogenic climate change for a few decades now, the reaction of the state was still to appeal the decision. In 2018, the Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Urgenda using human rights on which climate change coincidentally has quite a large effect as their core argument. Following this, the state appealed to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country. As of today, no verdict has been reached.

The Nature and Youth Movement in Norway

A group of young Norwegians question their government for its lack of coherence. From their point of view, it is not possible to “fight against climate change and, at the same time, extract oil”. For this reason, Thor Due and other members of Norway’s Nature and Youth Group—environmentalists under the age of 25—are debating in their countries’ courts to try and force their governments to leave its oil resources underground. 

Thor and his fellow activists want to set their countries on a new course—to force one of the wealthiest countries in the world to abandon its largest source of income. They say that oil and gas being extracted from Norwegian waters to be sold to the rest of the world is contributing to devastating climate change. Norway is Europe’s second biggest oil producer after Russia. These activists contend that by issuing new licenses for oil exploration in the Arctic in May 2016, the state breached its own constitutional obligation to ensure a clean environment for its citizens and for future generations. The group, together with members of Greenpeace Norway, lost the initial case. The court ruled that Norway could not be held responsible for pollution beyond its borders. They also lost a subsequent appeal with the court still ruling that the state was not in contravention of its constitution, although it did this time agree that Norway should be held accountable for its foreign emissions.

The whole world is looking forward to the Norwegian Supreme Court’s ruling since the labor party withdrew its support for oil exploration offshore the Lofoten islands in Norway´s arctic (Holter, 2019). In this sense it may also be important to note that the declaration of their neighbor Denmark stating it will stop new oil and gas extraction from the North Sea (Sanders, 2020).

Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future

Greta Thunberg has been key in awakening environmental awareness. She has achieved what many others could not. She woke up the young people all over the world from their apathy. 

Greta Thunberg is a young girl whose voice comes from the future and she brandishes to wake us all up. She taunts to politicians, statesmen, and big businessmen about their greed, unconsciousness, and senseless lack of vision for the future.

Fortunately, many young people listen to her. They are beginning to organize themselves, although they are still not enough … the forces they oppose are enormous—the owners of large corporations and ecocide governments— those that got rich thanks to the current state of things. Thanks to Greta, the desperate voices of the still unborn, the victims of Climate Change, those that are forcefully displaced and have become environmental refugees—due to our consumerism and unconsciousness—are also starting to be heard.

From Asperger to ecofeminism

At a conference at TEDx Stockholm, Greta Thunberg said that she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a pathology of the autistic spectrum that, in her case, results in selective mutism. Such mutism reminds us of the suffering of the Ion of the Socratic dialogue of the same name:

Socrates “how do I explain what is happening to me? When someone talks about some other poet, I do not pay any attention to it and I feel incapable of enunciating anything worth anything, I simply drowse. But if anyone mentions Homer, I am immediately awake, with an attentive spirit, and the ideas come to me in abundance” (Plato, 1981).

If being silent in the face of gossip or stupidity is ‘selective mutism’ then … blessed be it! It would allow us to speak only when our intervention makes sense and we can open a space for valuable silence.

Greta has selective mutism that does not prevent her from listening and intervening when necessary … which she does with great skill and efficiency. Her words are valuable and forceful and for this reason she has given us phrases of overwhelming clarity:

We can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules must be changed. Everything needs to change — and it must start today.

The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutionsAll we must do is to wake up and change.

Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.

You say you love your children above all else and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts when the most important facts clearly mean nothing to our society?

Some people, some companies, some decision-makers have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.

Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire because it is.

If you still say that we are wasting valuable lesson time, then let me remind you our political leaders have wasted decades through denial and inaction.

For way too long the politicians and people in power have got away with not doing anything at all to fight the climate crisis and ecological crisis. But we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer. We will never stop fightingwe will never stop fighting for this planet, for ourselves, our futures and for the futures of our children and grandchildren.

Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfill something, we can do anything. And I’m sure the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid the climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.

This is the year 2019. This is not the time and place for dreams. This is the time to wake up. This is a moment in history where we need to be wide awake.

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.

There is hope — I’ve seen it — but it does not come from the governments or corporations, it comes from the people. The people who have been unaware are now starting to wake up, and once we become aware, we change. We can change and people are ready for change.

Considering all the statements above, we cannot help but recognize that Greta Thunberg is one of the best current exponents of ecofeminism, a vast movement that recognizes the role of women in the fight to defend nature, the civilization, and the ecosystems.

For just over a year ago, little Greta started the School Strike for Climate in Stockholm, later called Fridays for Future—which are some furious demonstrations held every Friday at the entrance of the Swedish Parliament to demand truly committed measures from legislators to stop climate degradation. Little by little, more and more young people have joined this simply saying: “Why study for the future, when there may not be one? Why spend so much effort on education when governments do not listen to those who are educated?”. Slowly at the beginning but always firmly, associated and coordinated movements have been taking place throughout the planet. In some countries, there have been simple ‘climate marches’. There have been conferences, symposia and even alternative Summits to those organized by the World Bank, the G7, and the G20 where young people express their inconformity with some politicians and businessmen who promise a lot but do very, very little… while the climate phenomenon worsens and living conditions on Earth deteriorate.

In this regard, it should be remembered, as stated in the Fifth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) presented in 2013, that carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas massively produced not only by power plants that use coal, but by all internal combustion engines, remains intact for more than 500 years in the upper layers of the atmosphere, continuously heating our planet. This means that in the year 2250, the Earth will still be warming because of gases emitted since the first industrial revolution of the mid-eighteenth century.

Little Greta Thunberg, with her Fridays for Future and other actions has generated a worldwide movement where young people demand that their nation’s rulers modify the predatory civilizational model that threatens to rob them of their future.

As Joel Bakan (2004), Naomi Klein (2014), and Robert Proctor (2008) show, there are dark forces in the world interested in keeping things unchanged, in keeping everything as it is, even if the future may be terrible. Such forces—which have been enriched by a blind and consumerist civilization— are very powerful and manifest as deniers, those who deny the existence of Global Warming and its consequences and do not hesitate to threaten little Greta and everyone who dares to challenge them.

As indicated by Dr. Jorge Riechmann when answering the policeman who jailed him for participating in the Fridays for Future march in Madrid on September 20, 2019. There are few better expressions of the basic nihilism in our society. We enter an ecocide that will bring a genocide. We devastate the biosphere transforming Gaia into the ‘inhospitable planet’ that Wallace-Wells analyzed. And instead of reacting against the insane systemic dynamics, we assume that existing (dis)order is alright. Even if everything is lost, in addition to praying (broadly speaking, which also includes writing poems or drawing or singing in choir), we still must fight the same way that those admirable young people are doing. In recent months, they have peacefully revolted against those who are depriving them of the future and the resistance networks that have braided @EsXrebellion and 2020 Rebellion by the climate.

Fortunately, Dr. Riechmann is already out of prison. The movement is growing. And all over the world young people are beginning to wake up. We all must join their fights and support them by providing precise demands addressed to our authorities so that they comply with what innumerable nations committed themselves to, when they signed the Paris Agreement (2015)—drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by promoting all forms of clean energy and reduce insane meat consumption, implement zero-waste programs, revolt against irresponsible consumerism and go in favor of local food production. Self-limiting, is not only fair, but is necessary for the wellbeing of everyone. We should not let them steal the future of our children and grandchildren.

Conclusions

What brings hope is that young people from countless nations are fighting to reverse the present state of the environment in our planet. In a few years they will receive it as we did. But they cannot accomplish this alone. They are still very few because there are many countries that have not yet awakened and politicians who can only be described as disastrous, have excluded themselves from making urgent changes that the preservation of the human species requires. We can only hope that in the globalized world their initiatives will be accepted globally and will reach the majority not only in their own countries, but in the entire world.

It is very encouraging that the youngsters themselves are leaving their apathy behind and are changing their consumption habits. Brave and determined young people, like Marjan Minnesma, Felix Finkbeiner, Bojan Slat, Ash Pachauri, Vanessa Nakate, Eleonora Isunza, or Greta Thunberg will wake them up.

Keywords: Global warming, Youth, Social change.

About the Authors
Luis Tamayo Pérez PhD, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Centro Universitario, Querétaro, México [https://uaq.academia.edu/LuisTamayo]

Antonio Sarmiento Galán, PhD, Instituto de Matemáticas, Unidad Cuernavaca, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Chamilpa, Cuernavaca, México

Photo credits: Image used in the banner via Canva.

Climate Ambition and Sustainability Action: The Climate Ambition and Sustainability Action (CASA) series, brought out jointly by the World Sustainable Development Forum (WSDF) and the Protect our Planet (POP) Movement, seeks to highlight a topical issue relevant to the realization of the sustainable development goals and climate actions. Through briefs, discussion papers and articles, the CASA series aims to contribute to the discursive process of sustainability by engaging with civil society organizations, thought leaders and political leaders. This discussion paper is a part of CASA Partner Series which seeks to showcase research and thought pieces by partner organizations of WSDF and POP Movement. This piece was published by the National Maritime Foundation in the article section of their website and is hosted on the WSDF website with due permission.

 Endnotes

  1.  COP26 Postponed, United Nations, Climate Change, 1 April 2020: https://unfccc.int/news/cop26-postponed
  2.  EAT is the science-based global platform for food system transformation.
  3.  Aparicio (2017).
  4.  BBC News (2020).
  5.  https://periodic.mx/club/xiye-bastida-activista-mexicana-greta-thunberg-america/
  6.  https://ecoinventos.com/marino-morikawa/
  7.  Ferrer (2019).
  8.  https://www.urgenda.nl/
  9.  Mc Govan (2019).
  10.  Welin (2020).
  11.  TEDx Stockholm, diciembre de 2018.
  12.  COP 24 en Katowice, Polonia, 2018
  13.  World Economic Forum, Davos, January 2019.
  14.  European Parliament, Brussels, April 2019.
  15.  Extinction Rebellion London, UK, April 2019.
  16.  Houses of Parliament, UK, April 2019.
  17.  US Congress, Washington DC, September 2019.
  18.  UN Climate Change Summit New York, September 2019.
  19.  COP25 Madrid, December 2019.
  20.  In our days an anti-Greta has appeared –Naomi Seibt—, who even receives a salary from Heartland, a denialist association linked to Donald Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/02/23/meet-anti-greta-young-youtuber-campaigning-against-climate-alarmism/
  21.  Like Donald Trump, who believes that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (6 November 2012).

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