Saturday, November 6th, 2021
Gaps between rich and poor
Protests in Glasgow call for climate justice
Half-time at the climate change conference in Glasgow. The interim results look sobering for many. Thousands upon thousands of people put pressure on the decision-makers in global protests. They no longer want to accept “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah” and are now finally calling for action.
Thousands of people around the world have re-emphasized their demand for more climate protection with large-scale protests. As part of a global day of action, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through the Scottish city of Glasgow, where the world climate conference COP26 has been taking place for a week. Equipped with banners, flags and signs with climate messages as well as rain jackets against the British weather, the protesters there called for more climate justice for people in poorer regions of the world at the halfway point of the conference.
While the sky cleared a little in the afternoon, the organizers of the “COP26 Coalition” spoke of more than 100,000 participants in the protest march in the Scottish city. The police initially did not provide an estimate of the number of participants.
Many thousands of people came together for climate academies elsewhere in the world, including in Amsterdam and many British cities. “System change, not climate change!” Read a large banner at the head of a protest march in London. Similar messages were also found elsewhere. Everywhere participants shouted one of the most famous slogans of the climate movement: “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” According to the organizers, more than 300 actions were planned for Saturday around the globe.
“The era of injustice is over”, wrote the “COP26 Coalition”, which is a network of different organizations and campaigns, on Twitter. “We need climate protection that works for all of us, not just for the people with the most money in their pockets.”
Actor Elba calls for Africa to be heard
Many countries, for example in Africa, Asia and South America, are already feeling the climate crisis very strongly – even though these countries, with their far lower emissions, have contributed significantly less to climate change than industrialized countries such as Germany and the USA. The climate movement Fridays for Future therefore demands that richer countries do significantly more for the climate and also provide enough money so that poorer countries can cope with the consequences of climate change.
In line with this, the British actor Idris Elba (“Luther”) called at the climate conference to give more consideration to the voice of black people in the climate debate. Politicians and the media would risk leaving out an entire continent that is “central to the solution” of the climate crisis if they do not include the voices of African people in the public debate, said the 49-year-old in Glasgow at an event on sustainable food production .
Like his wife Sabrina, Elba is an “ambassador of good will” for the UN Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Like him, the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate emphasized that the global south was “at the forefront of the climate and supply crisis”. But that is not reflected on the front pages of the newspapers, she criticized. Last year, Nakate accused the media of racism because she was cut out of a photo with other prominent climate activists such as Greta Thunberg and Luisa Neubauer. Elba also referred to this photo, which was taken at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020: The media would “not only cut out Vanessa, but an entire continent,” he said.
Neubauer: “More or less empty speeches”
At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, around 200 countries are fighting over how the goal of limiting global warming to a tolerable level of a maximum of 1.5 degrees can still be achieved. The planned end of the conference is November 12th.
Already on Friday, thousands of people at a climate academy in Glasgow demanded more speed from the states in terms of climate protection. The leading climate activist Greta Thunberg from Sweden had again expressed criticism of the conference in a speech to the demonstrators. It is “a greenwashing festival of the global north, a two-week celebration of business as usual and blah blah,” she said. She should also be present at the protest this Saturday.
Thunberg’s German colleague Luisa Neubauer also drew a devastating interim balance after a week’s climate conference. “As expected, a lot revolves around more or less empty speeches,” said Neubauer of the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”. The acting Minister for Development Gerd Müller also criticized what has been achieved in Glasgow so far. “The emerging resolutions are not sufficient to achieve the 1.5 degree target,” he told the editorial network in Germany.