MINDFULLY GREENIE: Greta in our midst

Atty. Gloria Estenzo-Ramos

She is 16 years old – yet, she has already captured the imagination and inspired millions to protest and to call governments and private sector to reduce greenhouse gases and respond immediately to the climate crisis.

Greta Thunberg started solo with a climate strike on August 20, 2018, missing her class and sitting by her self outside the Parliament in Sweden, distributing flyers on the need to fight change. Her act has since  become a global movement.

On March 15, 2019, 1.4 million young people from 100 countries took to the streets and demanded action to fight climate change.

Greta was 8 years old when she first heard about climate change. She found it surprising that life went on despite the fact that fossil fuels are threatening our  existence. At age 11, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and selective mutism, when meant she spoke only when necessary. In her words, “everything was black and white” and she could not understand about carbon emissions being allowed to continue and not given the importance it deserved.

University students are joining the global strike. Luisa Neubauer, a 22-year-old declared before cabinet ministers in Germany that “What we need our politicians and our government to understand is that everything they do today comes at a price for future generations,” and added that, “We are not doing this for fun, but because we don’t have a choice.”

The young are speaking the truth and no less than António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, acknowledged this. He said “Despite years of talk, global emissions are reaching record levels and show no sign of peaking. The concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is the highest it has been in 3m years. The last four years were the four hottest on record, and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3-4°C in the last 50 years. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying and we are starting to see the life-threatening impact of climate change on health, through air pollution, heatwaves and risks to food security.”

Our own Senate ratified the Paris Agreement on March 14, 2017, as we committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and abide with Nationally Determined Contribution as a roadmap to such a reduction. Yet, nothing much has been heard about it and instead the projects under the Build Build Program are seen as heavily impacting on biodiversity and our natural life support systems and our capacity to respond to impacts of climate change.

Are we even planting more trees and nurture the remaining mangroves, seagrass and corals that are all threatened by our excesses and abuse?

In Cebu, Metro Manila and various islands, we are facing a creeping water crisis and our mute response are indications of dire things to come.

We need more Greta Thundbergs and her peers’ activism in our midst. We have to unite and to take the grave challenges seriously.

As Greta remarked, “Everything has to change and it has to start today.”