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Letters | Coronavirus pandemic must not drown out children’s voices on climate change
- Although the pandemic has knocked climate change off the global political agenda, it remains a far greater threat to humanity. Children and youth’s futures are most at stake, and they must be heard when leaders address climate change
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Why you can trust SCMP
The climate crisis is already a menace to countries in the Asia-Pacific battered by extreme weather events. But as much worse is to come for future generations, it is also a child rights crisis. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child enshrines children’s rights to survival. It explicitly mentions “the dangers and risks of environmental pollution”, including global heating.
But in a region that is already the world’s most disaster-prone, home to three of the biggest carbon-emitting countries and 99 of the 100 most polluted cities, such rights are being flushed into a pit of toxic waste.
These rights are undermined by every missed opportunity to rebuild the region’s currently stalled economies on cleaner, greener foundations. And our children had been making their voices heard – until Covid-19.
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The global pandemic has shifted attention away from, and silenced much of the child- and youth-led buzz around the climate crisis that captured public attention last year. Our analysis of social media finds the number of online conversations about climate, which steadily rose during 2019, declined sharply in 2020 when Covid-19 emerged.
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Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg makes emotional speech at UN Climate Action Summit
Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg makes emotional speech at UN Climate Action Summit
But although it has been knocked off the political agenda by the pandemic, the climate crisis remains a far greater threat to humanity than Covid-19.
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