‘We owe it to our kids’: parents from 16 countries demand urgent climate action
Parents and grandparents around the world are mobilising in support
of the youth strikes for climate movement that has swept the globe.
Under the banner Parents for the Future, 34 groups from 16 countries on four continents have issued an open letter. It demands urgent action to fight climate change and prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5C, beyond which scientists say droughts, floods and heatwaves will get significantly worse.
“What our kids are telling us is what science has been telling us for many years – there is no time left,” the letter says. “We now owe it to them to act.”
“Parents – we are everywhere in society: in classrooms as teachers, in fields as farmers, in factories as workers, in hospitals as healers, in boardrooms as CEOs, in legislatures as policymakers,” it says. “We have the power to build this safe, just and clean future for our kids.”
The groups involved come from countries including the UK, Germany, US, Australia, India and South Africa. In the UK, the Mothers Rise Up group will march in London on 12 May, international Mother’s Day, and protests are expected in other nations.
Under the banner Parents for the Future, 34 groups from 16 countries on four continents have issued an open letter. It demands urgent action to fight climate change and prevent temperatures rising by more than 1.5C, beyond which scientists say droughts, floods and heatwaves will get significantly worse.
“What our kids are telling us is what science has been telling us for many years – there is no time left,” the letter says. “We now owe it to them to act.”
“Parents – we are everywhere in society: in classrooms as teachers, in fields as farmers, in factories as workers, in hospitals as healers, in boardrooms as CEOs, in legislatures as policymakers,” it says. “We have the power to build this safe, just and clean future for our kids.”
The groups involved come from countries including the UK, Germany, US, Australia, India and South Africa. In the UK, the Mothers Rise Up group will march in London on 12 May, international Mother’s Day, and protests are expected in other nations.
One of the instigators of the global action by parents is Helene Costa, from Parents For Future Seattle in the US and a mother of two. “If we don’t act for our own children, who will?” she said. “What we are seeing through the global youth mobilisation and this international letter from parents is the emergence of a transnational conscience around climate actions. That makes me very hopeful.”
Eve White, a mother of two from Tasmania, Australia, and part of Australian Parents for Climate Action, said: “Climate change will make my kids’ lives much harder than my life has been in many ways. This is incredibly unfair, especially as scientists have been warning us about this for decades and the solutions are available. So why aren’t we acting – urgently?”
In New Delhi, India, Bhavreen Kandhari, mother of twin girls, said: “My government needs to urgently focus on climate breakdown and the role of trees, coal, construction and their impact on our air and water as well. Our children are going to pay the price for our mistakes and that is not acceptable to me.”
Tim Habraken, a father of two from Rotterdam in the Netherlands, said: “For ages, parents grew up with the idea that their children would have a better life than theirs. Currently, we are seeing a world that not only will very likely be worse for our children, but potentially uninhabitable. We should ask: when our children hold us accountable in the future, and ask us what we did, can we live with ourselves?”
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