COP26: Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate — the climate poster girls heard at last

Until now, they have mostly done so outside the summits and conferences where big decisions are made. Today they are inside. That is because the importance of their role – and that of young people and public engagement more generally – is the key topic at COP26.

Yvonne Skipper teaches psychology at Glasgow University’s School of Education and thinks how to empower young people is as important as anything else being discussed on the Clyde during these weeks.

“I think we are incredibly lucky we have some really amazing youth leaders like Greta, Dominica and Vanessa who are getting their voices out there and leading the charge. They are saying ‘this is our future, this is our job to push, we are the ones who will be impacted’.”

“Seeing these wonderful role models from all over the world is really inspiring, incredibly empowering, especially when young people realise their peers are being listened to and taken seriously.”

It is easy to see COP26 as a hard-headed meeting of suits bargaining over billion-dollar deals over how to shave fractions of a celsius over average global warming.

But it is much more than that. Finding soft-power ways to mobilise and educate individuals, corporations and governments is every bit as important. And that is where public empowerment comes in, especially for the youth. This might sound wishy-washy and touchy-feely to some. It is anything but: somebody has to push for things to happen.

“These young people have such passion,” Dr Skipper explained. “Greta is a great speaker but there are plenty of others ones as well. They are saying they will not put up with this any more.”

Dr Skipper reckons the very sight of Ms Thunberg, Ms Nakate and Ms Lasota being taken seriously – the first two met Nicola Sturgeon earlier this week – has a galvanising effect. “I think we have a responsibility to listen to young voices. In different countries we value children’s voices differently. In some countries they are listened to, in others sidelined. It is great to have a whole day based on youth empowerment, and to see this diversity from different countries, not just Western Europe and North America.

“Their experiences of climate change are very different to the ones we are experiencing here.

“The first thing is to listen. This is not just young being given space, it is going people taking space. It is them saying ‘you have to hear us’.

“As Greta and others have been saying, it is not enough to talk. But it is not just about encouraging governments to hear young people but encouraging young people to see their actions make a difference.”

Mobilising youth can have local results. Dr Skipper cites young people pushing on recycling at home or even what is served in their school canteens. But it also has an impact on big policy areas like manufacturing and farming.

Climate is complex and it is scary. That can make it a hard topic for lots of us to engage with. Passionate young communicators, reckons Dr Skipper, can help us all understand what we need to do.

“How do we communicate what is going on? We can usually cope with simple messages like ‘recycle’ and ‘use less fossil fuels’ but when we get in to the nuances and complexities it is hard to understand,” she said.

“There is also the challenge of understanding the balance between what we can do as individuals – and we can do things – and what big businesses and governments can do.

“There is the other issue which is that it is such a big problem – sometimes the bigger the problem is, the harder it is to imagine we can fix this. It can feel like it is spiralling out of control.

“What this summit is about is how we as individuals and collectively can make change. That is maybe why young people are so focused on this because they have inherited a problem that has not been dealt with.”

But empowerment is good in itself, says Skipper.

Watching young men and women get a voice, even when others are trying to cow them, is sending a powerful message.