Children and young people must be at the heart of dealing with the climate crisis, the UN and campaigners have said as climate talks in Madrid enter their second week with little concrete progress.
Young people, including Greta Thunberg, played a leading role in protests at COP25 over the weekend, and on Monday appeared at the conference to put pressure on negotiators to come up with a plan for reducing greenhouse gases and tackling the impacts of climate breakdown.
Penelope Lea, a 15-year old from Norway, was the first climate activist chosen to be a Unicef ambassador. She said: “We need to keep giving the decisionmakers the power to make the changes we need to see. People have a right to knowledge, and an obligation to get knowledge. Some say we have to wait for people to get ready for change. But we need to make people ready. These are some of the things the youth movement is trying to do, and have to do to ensure progress at COP25.”
She spoke as governments including the intended conference host Chile, the co-hosts Costa Rica and Spain, and several other countries signed up to an international declaration that the climate emergency was a crisis for the rights of children. The organisers, including Unicef, hope this will encourage countries to include special consideration for children in their climate action plans.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, applauded the young activists. “I understand the despair and rage that so many young people and older ones too are feeling. All of us know the facts and so far there has been far too little real action. Children and young people have a right to participate. We need to implement the principle of intergenerational equity that the Paris agreement sets out.”
Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland, said: “The children have called out the adult world, called us out very effectively, as this is a grave injustice. When I was growing up I did not have that shadow [of climate breakdown]. It’s not fair that we have made children have that fear.”
Unicef warned that climate breakdown would reverse the gains made in recent years in protecting children and enshrining their rights in law.
More than 500 million children live in areas judged to be at extremely high risk of floods, due to cyclones, hurricanes, storms and rising sea levels. In the Caribbean alone, the number of children displaced by extreme weather events has risen sixfold in five years, with more than 760,000 children displaced between 2014 and 2018.
(January 1, 1959)
The physicist Edward Teller tells the American Petroleum Institute (API) a 10% increase in CO2 will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. “I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”
(January 1, 1965)
Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee states that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Summarising the findings, the head of the API warned the industry: “Time is running out.”
(January 2, 1970)
Shell and BP begin funding scientific research in Britain this decade to examine climate impacts from greenhouse gases.
(January 1, 1977)
A recently filed lawsuit claims Exxon scientists told management in 1977 there was an “overwhelming” consensus that fossil fuels were responsible for atmospheric carbon dioxide increases.
(January 1, 1981)
An internal Exxon memo warns “it is distinctly possible” that CO2 emissions from the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population)”.
(January 1, 1988)
The Nasa scientist James Hansen testifies to the US Senate that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now”. In the US presidential campaign, George Bush Sr says: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect … As president, I intend to do something about it.”
(January 2, 1988)
A confidential report prepared for Shell’s environmental conservation committee finds CO2 could raise temperatures by 1C to 2C over the next 40 years with changes that may be “the greatest in recorded history”. It urges rapid action by the energy industry. “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation,” it states.
(January 1, 1989)
Exxon, Shell, BP and other fossil fuel companies establish the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group that challenges the science on global warming and delays action to reduce emissions.
(January 1, 1990)
Exxon funds two researchers, Dr Fred Seitz and Dr Fred Singer, who dispute the mainstream consensus on climate science. Seitz and Singer were previously paid by the tobacco industry and questioned the hazards of smoking. Singer, who has denied being on the payroll of the tobacco or energy industry, has said his financial relationships do not influence his research.
(January 1, 1991)
Shell’s public information film Climate of Concern acknowledges there is a “possibility of change faster than at any time since the end of the ice age, change too fast, perhaps, for life to adapt without severe dislocation”.
(January 1, 1992)
At the Rio Earth summit, countries sign up to the world’s first international agreement to stabilise greenhouse gases and prevent dangerous manmade interference with the climate system. This establishes the UN framework convention on climate change. Bush Sr says: “The US fully intends to be the pre-eminent world leader in protecting the global environment.”
(January 1, 1997)
Two month’s before the Kyoto climate conference, Mobil (later merged with Exxon) takes out an ad in The New York Times titled Reset the Alarm, which says: “Let’s face it: the science of climate change is too uncertain to mandate a plan of action that could plunge economies into turmoil.”
(January 1, 1998)
The US refuses to ratify the Kyoto protocol after intense opposition from oil companies and the GCC.
(January 1, 2009)
The US senator Jim Inhofe, whose main donors are in the oil and gas industry, leads the “Climategate” misinformation attack on scientists on the opening day of the crucial UN climate conference in Copenhagen, which ends in disarray.
(January 1, 2013)
A study by Richard Heede, published in the journal Climatic Change, reveals 90 companies are responsible for producing two-thirds of the carbon that has entered the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age in the mid-18th century.
(January 1, 2016)
The API removes a claim on its website that the human contribution to climate change is “uncertain”, after an outcry.
(January 1, 2017)
Exxon, Chevron and BP each donate at least $500,000 for the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
(January 1, 2019)
Mohammed Barkindo, secretary general of Opec, which represents Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Iran and several other oil states, says climate campaigners are the biggest threat to the industry and claims they are misleading the public with unscientific warnings about global warming.
More than 160 million children are living in areas with high levels of drought, with severe impacts on their development and exposure to disease. That number is expected to rise dramatically, so that on current trends as many as one in four children around the world will live in areas of extreme water stress, according to the UN.
Diseases, including mosquito-borne illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, are forecast to spread to new areas as a result of global heating. Children under five are likely to be most at risk.
Air pollution, which is made worse by coal-burning power stations, fossil fuels burned for transport and biomass burning in homes without clean energy sources, also hurts children disproportionately. Breathing toxic air can stunt children’s lungs permanently, and has a long-term impact on their health, brain function and development.
Toxic air contributes to the deaths of about 600,000 deaths of children under five every year, from pneumonia and other respiratory problems. But the measures needed to tackle the climate crisis – replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy, creating green spaces and planting trees – would also help to clean up dirty air.
Gautam Narasimhan, a senior adviser on climate change, energy and environment at Unicef, said: “From hurricanes to droughts to floods to wildfires, the consequences of the climate crisis are all around us, affecting children the most and threatening their health, education, protection and very survival. Children are essential actors in responding to the climate crisis. We owe it to them to put all our efforts behind solutions we know can make a difference.”
