United Nations, 26 September (IPS)-The general meeting of the UN at a high level (22-30 September) is an opportunity for the world to call together the most urgent issues of the day, from multilateralism, global financing, gender equality, non-recoverable diseases and AI-Governance.
Climate change is also an important problem this year, because countries present their nationally established contributions (NDCs) prior to COP30 in November. During this year’s climate summit, held on 24 September, more than 114 countries spoke at the general meeting to present their NDCs for the UN Secretary General and leaders from Brazil, the hosts of COP30.
Although these climate action plans are an indication of their dedication to climate change, countries must further show their efforts through action.
For some young people, such as the 15-year-old Zunaira, there is a decoupling between the statements of leaders and the actions they actually take. Even in climate forums such as COP29: “There [were] Only policy measures … only indicated statements, but there [was] No real action. “
“In every country it is, you know; they only speak empty words, and empty promises are made with us as young people and children,” she told IPS.
Unicef’S Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) measures the climate risk for children, aimed at both their exposure to climate and environmental hazards and their underlying vulnerability. The index evaluates 56 variables in 163 countries to determine which countries children with the highest risk of climate effects place. It estimates that there are currently around 1 billion children living in it High risk countries.
Zunaira believes that world governments and leaders must include the voices and perspectives of children in planning effective climate policy. She noted that perhaps only three percent of Member States who attended COP29 actually included and listened to children’s voices in their policy discussions.
This is also not a new question, because she noticed that other proponents of youth climate have called for increased child involvement in earlier conferences, but this was hardly reflected in negotiations.
Zunaira is in New York to participate in UNGA via Unicef’s youth lawyers Mobilization Lab, an initiative that recognizes the performance of the youth lawyers of UNICEF and offer children’s lawyers the opportunity to network and share ideas and experiences.
The 15-year-old climate lawyer from the province of Balochistan of Pakistan shared her research into the consequences of flooding on the education of girls, based on her experiences in 2022.
The floods of Pakistan from 2022, who met more than 33 million people and killing 647 children, destroyed communities that were not built to adapt to the extreme changes caused by climate change. The relationship between extreme weather and climate change is clear to Zunaira and other young people like them, even if some members in the community do not immediately recognize it and write it off as just a natural phenomenon.
Through a policy research program organized by Unicef Pakistan, Zunaira investigated the impact of the flooding on the education of girls when she was only 12 years old. She visited Sakran, one of the flood -sensitive areas in the state, where she interviewed people in a nearby village in the Hubdistrict of Balochistan. Here she spoke with 15 high school girls. She described how the destruction of the floods literally washed away the huts that used to be their schools.
According to Unicef, her findings “emphasized that floods had worsened educational inequalities” and “[forced] Girls in temporary hiding places and disturb their education. “
“The study also emphasized a few promising interventions and called for a better disaster parrotness in schools and flood -resistant infrastructure to protect girls’ education. The research underlined the urgent need for integrated strategies that combine climate spring with gender equality.”
Zunaira noted that with the destruction caused by the floods, there was no school for many children to return to. She and many other students lost to training because of the disruptions. In some cases, the next nearest school would be a maximum of 25 miles from where some students lived, so there is apparently little justification to send them back to school.
There is also a need to invest in building climate resilient infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather conditions such as flooding. Local communities need both investments and the means to fulfill this, otherwise there can be little reason to build up a new school again, only to see that it is being washed away again. (Frld).
Zunaira’s message to world leaders is that they have to encourage children and young people and include it in climate discussions. They should also not reduce the lived experiences for statistics and must be conscientious of the lives that have been changed or lost forever due to a climate disaster.
“You should think about this … It is not just a statistics. It is something that life has lost, and thousands of houses and thousands of people, you know, are displaced and lost their lives. So this is something that the world leaders need to know: that they are not only statistics; they are really life.”
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