My experience of COP27 has been on that I will truly never forget. As much as I was honored to be in that space, the journey was a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions. I was never that much invested in politics but somehow with the work that I do as an intersectional justice artivist (Art – Activist), everything is interconnected. You cannot fight the injustices without being aware of the law, and how the government and politics work in your country of origin and your continent.
In my mind, I never really thought that in the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference I would still see people over 55 years walking up and down in a hurry to get to conference venues and partake in discussions rather than the youth between the ages of 18 – 30 whose futures are determined by people that might not even make it the next day. It was so depressing to see how we, as the youth, were sidelined in some events without representatives but impressive to see that even through all of that we still stood in solidarity as we were and still are passionate about our fight, as well as our strict on our demands on the matters concerning us.
If Gabriel and I did not have a guide as to which topics to follow and focus on the most, we would not have found COP as eventful and as informative and as responsive as it has been but just a lot more of an exercise COP (considering the distance between different pavilions). We followed topics on adaptation, loss and damage finance, do not gas Africa, Just Transition and other discussions on Gender and Climate Change and tried by all means to drift away from human rights and climate change since we thought it was not ideal to comment on them considering the fact that we might be in Africa but not in our country where we have freedom of speech because we are closer to home.
I loved how people, for the likes of Tasneem from CAN International, perfectly laid out the urgency of the JUST Transition and why we are calling on it. I also loved how other delegates were mentioning the lost and damaged history under the topic of loss and damage. They were mentioning how history is beyond repairs due to the effects of climate change and that if we continue being ignorant, a lot more is yet to be damaged. With adaptation, basically our workshop held by both Project 90 by 2030 fully covered adaptation and there was not much learnt as it was basically revising what I knew already from the workshops here.
The actions were successful! However, people from the host country were bothersome. Given a chance to attend COP again, I would highly grab that chance as hen you are there you get to rethink how things work in life and it’s a reminder pf how consistent your fight needs to be so that you can be heard. I still strongly feel the need for youth to fully take over the space of COP.
By Lisakhanya Mathiso