(London) “I’m not going to COP27 for a lot of reasons”, including human rights, Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg said on Sunday in London during a question-and-answer session for the launch of her Climate ledger.
Posted at 8:40 p.m.
“The space for civil society this year is extremely limited” at the 27e UN climate conference, the 19-year-old campaigner argued at the closing of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, where she received a standing ovation.
On Twitter, she had already expressed her solidarity with “prisoners of conscience in Egypt before COP27”, which opens on November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The COPs, the previous one of which was held in the UK in Glasgow, “are not really about changing the system”, but about encouraging incremental progress in the fight against climate change, argued the climate activist the most famous in the world.
They “are mostly used as an opportunity for leaders and people in power to get attention, for all sorts of greenwashing (communications operations to pretend to be doing something about the climate crisis when they’re not)” , she continued.
So “as they are, the COPs don’t really work, unless they are used as an opportunity to mobilise,” continued the young woman, both serious and humorous.
Released on Thursday The big climate book includes around a hundred contributions from climate and other experts, including economist Thomas Piketty, WHO boss Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and writer Naomi Klein.
All royalties from Greta Thunberg will be donated to her eponymous foundation and then distributed to charities related to the environment.
The activist says he wanted to write this book during the pandemic to “educate people, which is a bit ironic given that my thing is school strikes”, joked the one who had started to demonstrate in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Again and again on Sunday, she called on everyone to become an activist, knowing that there are “many different ways” to do so.
“The time for small steps is over and we need drastic changes” and according to her, to obtain this change from leaders of governments or companies who have a stake in the status quo, “we need billions of activists”.