London, Europe Brief News – As world leaders are scheduled to gather in Egypt in November to discuss climate change, youth activists called for dealing with this long-running issue of “loss and damage”.
Poorer countries want rich ones to pay for damage caused by climate change and the extreme weather associated with it.
The issue was also a source of acrimony between rich and poor countries at recent talks in Germany.
Last week, almost 400 activists from 65 countries attended the ‘Climate Justice Camp’ in Tunisia.
Coming from some of the parts of the world that are most affected by climate change, they met with the goal of securing “a fair response to the climate crisis at COP27 and beyond”.
Experts called the recent floods in Pakistan which left almost 1,700 people dead a “wake-up call” on the threats of climate change.
“We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people currently living in shanty towns, sleeping in tents under the sky. There are dead bodies still floating in the water,” said Ayisha Siddiqa, the 23-year-old co-founder of Polluters Out and Fossil Free University, who is from a tribal community in the northern Pakistan.
“Women are pregnant and they will give birth into the flooded water. How has (climate change) directly impacted me? It is my reality wherever I look.”
Poorer countries want a new fund to pay for the damage from extreme events that they are unable to adapt to – such as fast rising seas.
