Thousands of activists from around the world took part in the Fridays for Future international meeting. Climate justice takes centre stage.
The global south played a prominent role at the latest international meeting of Fridays for Future, held in Turin from 25 to 29 July. As young activists repeatedly stressed, there is "no solution without climate justice" and therefore, to tackle the environmental crisis affecting the entire world — a crisis that has never been as evident as it is in the current summer — it is necessary to stand alongside the struggles of the world's most vulnerable countries.
The young people who took part in the Turin proceedings made this clear: it is not only polar bears, animal or plant species that are dying — human beings are dying too. To this end, they also coined an acronym: Mapa, standing for most affected people and areas, referring to the people who live in the areas most exposed to the consequences of climate change. Another acronym was added to this: Bicop, black, indigenous and coloured people. Because for the new generations of environmental activists, climate justice must pass through here: through environmental decolonialism, through the elimination of resource exploitation in the global south by countries of the north.
A message that cut across divides, passed from mouth to mouth among the Mapa like a chorus of voices in unison: "We depend on the global north, it's true, but the global north depends on us," said Patience Nakubalu, 24, from Uganda. "The global north, especially its political decision-makers, has no real experience of what the climate crisis is. We do. It's time they listened to us."
We depend on the global north, it's true, but the global north depends on us.
Patience Nakubalu, Ugandan activist
For one week, Turin became the global megaphone for climate issues. Dozens and dozens of activists took the floor at the various public events organised in Turin's Parco Colletta, dotted with tents, and at the Luigi Einaudi university campus.
Finally, the movement spilled out into a march through the city centre, where, in an unscheduled development, it had all begun: on the first day of proceedings, another protest movement, Extinction Rebellion, which had joined the Fridays for Future week, had unfurled a banner on the regional government building in the central Piazza Castello, bearing the words Welcome to the climate crisis. Drought — this is just the beginning. A gesture that resulted in 25 criminal complaints and 5 fogli di via (a foglio di via prohibits the banned individuals from returning to the municipality that issued it) — a demonstration of just how much institutions are underestimating the gravity of the climate emergency.
The march that arrived in the central Piazza Vittorio passed alongside the River Po, clearly struggling from a water standpoint. Local residents could not recall ever having seen so little water; those who had come from abroad could not believe that this was Italy's most important river. A nauseating smell rose from the riverbed, and many took photographs to bear witness — as if there were still any need — to the ever more visible effects of the environmental crisis.
On the same day, at the Einaudi campus, the editors of several national news outlets were discussing how this crisis is being reported by the media. In a word: poorly. The Fridays demanded of them not only greater attention to environmental issues and an end to burying these stories in brief items and inside pages, but above all that such stories be covered with greater care for the approach and the narrative. No more headlines that blame the individual: instead, the focus must be placed on the responsibilities of institutions and fossil fuel companies (which often provide financial support to the newspapers in question, and are therefore lauded whenever they choose to invest in extractive and polluting projects).
"Major outlets complain they don't have enough journalists trained on the subject," said Tommaso Perrone, director of LifeGate, intervening in the debate. "But this is a choice: rather than investing in and developing resources over the medium to long term, the preference is to put everything into short-lived articles, with headlines often more geared towards clickbaiting than to informing."
The urgency is palpable in every speech delivered by the activists. At public events, applause is replaced by hands waving silently in the air: there is no time to interrupt the arguments, and every word spoken is substance, not rhetoric. Those who attended the plenary sessions were able to witness a movement in the making, built from the ground up, powerful and honest. A movement that is a true reflection of a generation in which collaboration prevails over competition.
At the Turin meeting, Fridays for Future established that in future it will be more radical, because there is no more time to waste. "We don't need fine words. We need action," said Nansedallia Ramirez, a young activist from Mexico.