The children of the Paris Agreement grew up with the promise that the climate crisis would be sorted by the time they left college but a decade on, the job is only starting.
They could rail at the generations before them but the youth voices at Cop30 in Belém, Brazil, suggest they’re looking ahead, mobilising themselves and trying to find solutions.
“We’ve grown up in a decade of ‘1.5 degrees’. I started secondary school when it was agreed and it’s a number we know so well,” says Trinity environmental engineering student Seán Dillon.
He’s referring to the global heating limit meant to have guided global climate action since 2015 but which has already been breached.
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“Hopefully this Cop can be something like that, that the next intake of secondary school students will be talking about Brazil the way we talked about Paris.”
Dillon (22) and Fatima Ismail, a 19-year-old from Cork studying sociology and the politics of science at University College London, are the Republic’s official youth delegates at the climate summit.
“One of our roles is to bridge the gap between young people in Ireland and the Government in regard to climate issues,” says Ismail.
The pair are attending official events, tracking key issues under negotiation and feeding observations back to the Irish negotiating team.
Ismail is tracking the “just transition” strands of the talks – how shifting away from fossil fuels and dealing with extreme weather events can be achieved in a fair way.
“I feel really strongly about putting human rights on the table,” she says.
“People should be at the centre of everything we do – how they deal with the changes that are happening, how they’re affected, how they feed into the conversation.”
Dillon is keeping a close eye on the “adaptation” strands – practical responses to climate change such as defences for flood-prone areas and irrigation for drought-stricken regions.
“They’re looking at how projects can be replicated in countries with open source, free databases so that money and time can be saved,” he says.
“The engineer in me is fascinated by this and it shows that Cop and climate action is not just for policy experts.”
The Cop process isn’t just for those who can physically attend, either.
James Duffy, a 17-year-old fifth-year student at Athlone Community College, was delighted to find a short film he made in Transition Year had made its way to Cop30.
It is part of the Youth Climate Report project, a UN initiative that showcases films on the interconnected themes of climate, biodiversity and environment made by young people from all over the world
Duffy’s film, about illegal dumping, shows the vast amount of waste generated by overconsumption and failures of society to manage it.
He called it The Choice because, as he says: “We have a choice in how we behave towards the planet and what we choose has consequences.
“The project has already had great knock-on effects. We started Tidy-up Tuesday, a litter pick every Tuesday.
“And before the project, I never really thought about dumping and the wider issues but now it’s on my mind constantly.
“If you can get people to really see a problem and think about it, you can change the way they behave.
“I loved working on this and the class did too, because they were doing something with their friends, something useful.
“Even if seems mundane – editing a film about rubbish – it can have an impact.”
A few years ago, before Covid disrupted everything, youth climate activists made a significant impact on the public consciousness with their passionate protests.
But while things have quietened on that front, Dillon and Ismail say it doesn’t mean interest is waning.
“The passion and moral compass among young people and what they want from the people in power is very strong,” he says.
“We’re seeing young people leading lots of protests for Palestine, for example. They’re maybe not talking about reusable straws any more, but they’re talking about more detailed climate issues, such as the links between the climate crisis and conflict. The passion hasn’t fizzled – if anything, it’s become more concentrated.”
Social media was crucial in mobilising youth climate activists, and Ismail says it still helps, but she places enormous value on person-to-person communication.
“How you talk to people is so important. If I tell someone, I’m going to educate you about climate and Cop30, that’s not going to work.
“That implies they don’t know anything. They do know, they live in this world where climate is changing, they have some connection to it.
“I have to find that connection and build a two-way conversation around it.”
After 10 years of the Paris Agreement and 30 years of Cops, the pair are determined that another decade is not wasted.
“I just hope that we don’t accept the normalisation of inaction on climate change, the normalisation of these events,” says Dillon.
“Cop can’t be just a staple in the calendar, that officials come to every year without achieving results. I hope they realise this is not just their job, it’s their imperative.”
