Cork Climate Conference .....Alannah Sexton 4.4

On Thursday, the 21st of October 2021 Transition year students attended the Cork Climate Conference.(via zoom)

The day was filled with incredible, inspiring speeches and everybody left the GPR with motivation to raise awareness and join the fight against climate change.

The morning we were privileged to listen to the amazing, Evelyn Acham, Abigael Kima and Bishop Kevin Dowling. Amy O’ Brien was inspiring before she even began talking. She is a 16 year old Irish activist, who spoke intelligently about her work and passion, climate change. Prof. John Sharry spoke to us about the challenging emotions that climate change activists experience and taught us techniques to transition climate distress to climate action.

After a short break, we spoke to Prof. Peadar Kirby introduced us to the different ways in which systems structure our lives, in society, at home, at school, etc. He also explained the links between our values and behaviour about the climate and biodiversity crises to these systems.

In the evening we participated in a workshop and completed lots of activities in our groups. We found reusable materials in our classroom, contributed to a word cloud pole and developed our imaginary island’s economy.

Our final speaker was Theresa Rose Sebastian and incredible college activist, who hasn’t been to visit her family in almost three years because of the flooding climate change has inflicted upon the country. She was amazing and a very aspirational finish to the conference.

I would like to share a short summary about the two speakers I personally found most interesting.

“We are suffering from some of the worst impacts caused by the climate crisis such as prolonged droughts, devastating floods, landslides, hurricanes and heavy rains. Lives, homes, business like agriculture -which employs 60% of Africa’s population- have been destroyed. This has left families with no food, water, shelter, school or health facilities. It has left them suffering and in pain of an uncertain future for their children.”  

- Evelyn Acham's letter to world leaders as part of the ‘Our world in your hands’ project.

Evelyn Acham was the first speaker of the day and the Ugandan activist opened the conference with an inspirational and passionate speech. 

She spoke ardently about the physical effects climate change has had on her country in the past years. As you can see from the above quote Uganda, like many other African countries, has personally experienced the horrific effects climate change can have on the environment. The torrential flooding in Uganda has taken many lives and yet, we never hear about it in news articles or on the TV.

Evelyn spoke about how fighting for climate change was much bigger than people understand.

“We are fighting for climate justice,

 We are fighting for social justice,

 We are fighting for education justice,

 We are fighting for gender equality justice,

 We are fighting for racial justice.

She spoke about Africa’s 3% Carbon admission, one of the lowest in the world per land mass; but yet, Africa is still one of the worst affected continents. She spoke about how, although we are not directly affected by climate change right now, it will be a problem if we don’t act now.

“Where there is privilege, there is oppression.”

Evelyn finished her speech with an incredible line, I would like to share.

“I believe that some of the people watching have the power to help us, to speak up and to talk to the leaders.”

The third speaker we had in the first section was Bishop Kevin Dowling. He spoke about the drought in South Africa, it’s been on-going for 7 years and is the worst drought in over 100 years. He spoke about the lack of water and sanitising facilities and diseases such as TB and HIV aids which are widespread across the continent but the medical treatment necessary only reaches 50% of patients.

He spoke about how climate change is not gender neutral, and tends to affect women who live in poverty the most.

Bishop’s ending quote was the one that stood out to me most and I encourage you all to read it twice and really think about what he’s saying.

If there is to be peace on Earth, there must be peace WITH Earth.”Some memorable quotes:

“Just because we are privileged doesn’t mean we are immune.”

• “ The actions we take in this decade will decide our future, it is already deciding people’s present.”

• “There is not a line when talking about people’s lives.”

“If you don’t care about climate change, you must just not have enough information.”