What I want to achieve at the pre-COP26 Youth4Climate summit

Ahead of the pre-COP26 Youth4Climate, 16-year-old Pakistani delegate Zainab Waheed outlines what actions she wants leaders to take to address the climate crisis. (Courtesy of Zainab Waheed)

16-year-old Pakistani delegate Zainab Waheed outlines what actions she wants COP26 leaders to take to address the climate crisis.

On a warm evening in May, I was getting ready to go to sleep after a busy day leading a virtual climate change conference when I checked my email one last time. And there it was, a message from the U.N. Secretary General’s Youth Envoy congratulating me on being selected as Pakistan’s delegate for the pre-COP26 Youth4Climate summit in Milan this September!

While I was so excited to receive this tremendous honor, I also knew it was a tremendous responsibility. The pre-COP26 Youth4Climate summit gives 400 young climate activists the opportunity to tell world leaders what actions and policies we think they should take to tackle climate change. As the delegate from Pakistan, it’s my responsibility to represent my peers and share their innovative ideas to address this crisis in addition to sharing my own.

My climate advocacy started at the age of 13 when I began to develop social media campaigns to mobilize Pakistanis to plant trees in their communities. I started speaking out because climate change is already having an effect on my country and the world — and I knew the emergency was only going to amplify in impact and magnitude in the future. Without urgent action, one-third of all life on Earth is under threat of extinction and rising sea levels will displace 10% of the world population by the end of this century. Countries are already subjected to rising sea levels and ever greater storms. In Karachi, rainfall in 2020 broke an 89-year-old record high and turned Pakistan’s most populous city into a river. Ever-increasing temperatures caused locust swarms in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan, causing issues of food security. These crises motivate me to push for a change as I lead afforestation drives in my role as the ambassador of Pakistan Horticulture Authority and run climate awareness campaigns on the internet.

In her role as the ambassador of Pakistan Horticulture Authority, Zainab leads afforestation drives and runs climate awareness campaigns on the internet. (Courtesy of Zainab Waheed)

At Youth4Climate, I am focusing my advocacy efforts in four key areas: securing quality climate education for every student, finalizing the Paris Agreement Rulebook, updating and reaffirming the Doha Work Programme and ensuring countries have access to the resources to make adaptations to deal with the damages from climate change. I want to ensure that leaders integrate the outcome document of Youth4Climate in their COP26 negotiations and that this conference does not fall prey to tokenism like many others. Here are my main objectives as the Pakistani delegate for the pre-COP26 Youth4Climate summit:

Securing quality climate education for every student. During sessions around the summit’s fourth thematic area, a climate-conscious society, I will be discussing with my fellow delegates from around the world the best methods to integrate climate literacy in national education curriculums, create climate-centered capacity-building programs for teachers with an emphasis on technology and ensure that girls can access this climate education on equal terms with boys. By establishing climate change as an immediate, personal threat to every individual and by emphasizing the climate emergency through climate-centered debates, declamations, speeches, music, essays and art festivals, we can ensure students understand the crisis and are able to address it.

Finalizing the Paris Agreement Rulebook. When world leaders signed the Paris Agreement in 2015 — which commits all parties to keeping the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels and to taking all measures to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C — they gave themselves three years to finalize the rules of implementation, also known as the Paris Agreement Rulebook. However, six years on, the rulebook is still not finalized. I want to call on officials attending the pre-COP26 summit to agree on a finalized rulebook that sets timeframes for national climate commitments while strengthening transparency requirements to hold countries accountable to those commitments.

“By establishing climate change as an immediate, personal threat to every individual and by emphasizing the climate emergency through climate-centered debates, declamations, speeches, music, essays and art festivals, we can ensure students understand the crisis and are able to address it.”

— Zainab Waheed

Updating and reaffirming the Doha Work Programme. Securing climate justice for youth is another main priority for me as a Youth4Climate delegate. Article 6 of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change focuses on enabling society to be part of the solution to climate change. In 2012, parties adopted the Doha Work Programme to achieve this, which commits the parties to educating and training the public, providing equal access to information and promoting public and international engagement in connection to climate change. The Doha Work Programme expired in 2020 so at COP26, I want to make sure leaders adopt a robust and funded replacement for it. The replacement should ensure meaningful participation of young people in climate action through training and capacity building to ensure young people can bring our revolutionary ideas to the table locally, nationally and internationally.

Ensuring countries have access to the resources to make adaptations to deal with the damages from climate change. Climate change disproportionately affects people in lower-income countrie who have contributed least to the current crisis — and the wider global community hasn’t done enough to support them. Even though countries pledged to contribute $100 billion per year by 2020 to the Green Climate Fund to support climate action in developing countries, only $10.3 billion had been secured by 2020. As a delegate at Youth4Climate, I plan to secure accountability measures to ensure countries fulfill this pledge.

As I prepare to head to Milan for the Youth4Climate summit, I am spending my days and nights refining my suggestions and adding new ones, hoping that the Youth4Climate summit is a pioneer in meaningfully incorporating young people in political decision-making processes — and isn’t another tokenistic youth event.