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COP27’s world leaders have been finding Christian youth and faith organisations are finding their voices through protests.
The Christian youths have been at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) with an agenda of their own: to dramatise the hurt the environment is suffering and and, with it, the entire human race.
,Joe Bongay says the protests aim to draw attention to the need to care for the earth, in line with Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si’: on Care for Our Common Home.”
“When you sing about it, when you clap about it, it reminds people of their moral obligations toward caring for what we all share, which is the common earth that we all live in,” he says. The changing climate is affecting ordinary people across Africa.
The United Nations has predicted the drought in East Africa alone will cause over 50 million people to suffer from acute hunger by the end of the year.
“We are struggling to survive in terms of food, in terms of hunger, and so many other problems brought about by climate change. Africa is at a point where it can’t even feed itself,” Bongay says.
Rita Uwaka expressed discomfort with the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP27 event.
“The so-many corporations taking over the climate space are hijacking and manipulating the negotiation process, and we feel that these criminals fuelling climate crises need to be kicked out.
“It’s high time that there is sanity in COP. And the only way we can get sanity and justice is to make sure that these polluters pay but also (are) kicked out of the climate negotiations,” she says.
Uwaka is angry with leaders for seeking “false solutions” to the climate emergency.
“Take carbon credits for instance. It means you have to keep polluting in the developed countries, and then you come to Africa to plant trees to absorb the carbon, but you are not stopping pollution at the source. That is a false solution, and we reject it,” she says.
Agro-commodities companies “are in the negotiation space; they are fuelling a lot of land grabs in Africa – taking over forests, cutting them down and replacing them with plantations,” Uwaka points out.
“And this increase in deforestation as a result of agro-commodities expansion is fuelling climate change. But here, they are putting it as a solution.
Uwaka says local communities in Africa and other developing countries should be leading the search for solutions in which accessible and affordable renewable energy is encouraged.
“We want solutions like agro-ecology, where you put food production in the hands of the people. We want community forest management methods that put the management of our forests in the hands of communities.”
Bongay says he is opposed to the proposal that some kind of carbon insurance should be instituted.
“We can’t afford it.
“Developed nations that are getting the profits at the expense of humanity and the environment should be able to pay their climate debts and reparation to those who are most vulnerable.”
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