Saturday 6 November 2021, Global Climate March in Glasgow, UK.
It was preceded on the 5th by the Youth for Climate march. Organised by Fridays for Future* Scotland, it was joined by young school strikers from all over the world and many activists from the Global South. Fridays for Future or FFF, also known as Youth for Climate, is the global movement of school strikers for climate.
The two demonstrations, which call for real action against climate change and its disruption, and for climate justice, aim to put pressure on the 26th COP (Convention of the Parties, which brings together the signatory states of a United Nations convention on climate change). This summit is being held in the Scottish city with 196 countries present, and 40,000 participants.
On Friday 5 November, near the University of Glasgow, a meeting at 11am in Kelvingrove Park for the start of the Fridays for Future event. We are in Scotland, but today the huge red and blue umbrella we have been lent will only be in our way because it is not raining. Surprisingly, compared to what happens in France, it is practically the police who give the start. They waited until there were no more photographers in front of the procession (which would be 8,000 people) and asked them to stand on the sides or behind while remaining on the pavement! This can go on for a long time.
A young activist with blue hair, kilt and megaphone organises the troops from the inside. Journalists and other witnesses are shooting at the head of the procession (which has not yet started). They try to catch a glimpse of the initiator of the FFF movement, the young Swedish woman, Greta Thunberg, now 18 years old. At the COP in Madrid, she had to leave the parade, being unable to move forward, blocked by the crowd that wanted to see her (see our "COP25" report). This time, a blue cordon delimits a portion of the procession where she can blend in and where no press professionals are tolerated; held by the young demonstrators, it protects her from the assaults of the curious and the journalists (which makes the latter furious).
Taking advantage of our experience in the Spanish capital, where we had lost sight of each other even before the start of the demonstration (of about 500,000 people according to the organisers!), we decided that here the miss would remain attached to the first few metres of the blue cordon. Even if she never managed to see her, Greta was there. At one point, she had threatened to boycott COP26, to protest against the injustice of the absence of many countries that do not benefit from the Covid-19 vaccine.
In late September, at a pre-CoP meeting in Milan, and again in late October at the G20 in Rome, Italy, she described these summits between countries as "Thirty years of blah blah blah"; a "blah blah blah" that was much repeated on the placards of the demonstrators in Glasgow. The majority slogans (the same as at the previous COP) chanted along the route were: "We are unstoppable! An other world is possible" and "What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now! Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!)
On 2 November, together with 14 other young climate activists from all over the world, such as Vanessa Nakate (Uganda), Dominika Lasota (Poland), Mitzi Tan (Philippines), Greta (again) launched a petition that collected 1.5 million signatures. The letter delivered to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls for the climate crisis to be declared « Level 3 global emergency » -the highest category of the United Nations- as he had done for Covid-19.
In George Square, the arrival point of the event, on the sound stage set up for the occasion, she declares Cop26 a "failure" and a "greenwashing festival" and calls for drastic emission reductions.
Without a press pass, Thomas will not be able to get close to the stage to photograph the speakers like his colleagues. He found a way around this by negotiating at length with the man with the walkie-talkie in charge of security, who finally allowed him to perch next to him on the base of the statue of the Queen on horseback. This allowed him to photograph Greta once again, in the backstage area, protected from the camera by her young friends, before going up to speak.
Like her and other young climate activists, several messengers took to the microphone: Indians from Latin America and North America, Tibetans, islanders, etc.
They all speak of their difficulties in living with the disasters caused by climate change (drought, flooding and submergence of land, storms) and also by the voracity of the companies (often foreign and European) that continue to extract oil, gas and minerals and to do this by monopolising land and displacing populations. All the speeches were simultaneously translated into sign language.
The next day, for the Global Climate March, the weather is much less clement. Our umbrella struggled for an hour against the rain and the gusts of wind and then, after being turned over twenty times, became useless. So we took to the water like the majority of the 100,000 demonstrators (according to the organisers, 50,000 according to the police, i.e. 10 times more than yesterday) who were not discouraged for all that.
In the procession, there are also strikers from RMT, the largest British transport union, who have been on strike for months to demand better wages. The same demand was made by the refuse collectors who, a week before the start of the Glasgow COP, had also decided to go on strike.
The demands of this Climate March are the same as yesterday, but the majority slogans today are "Lands back" and "De-De-Decolonise! There is even a campaign with the words "Decarbonise and decolonise".
The demonstration also goes through the business district (like for example Vincent street ) but it will go past Square George and end in Glasgow Green, the city's oldest park. There, as evening falls, we listen again to the testimonies and demands of the peoples of Africa, island countries, indigenous peoples of North and Latin America, associations dealing with migrants, etc. In the crowd, there were Tibetan and Palestinian flags, on stage, musical interventions with rappers or a Chilean singer punctuated the speeches, but no Greta like the day before...
Saturday 6 November 2021, Global Climate March in Glasgow, UK.
It was preceded on the 5th by the Youth for Climate march. Organised by Fridays for Future* Scotland, it was joined by young school strikers from all over the world and many activists from the Global South. Fridays for Future or FFF, also known as Youth for Climate, is the global movement of school strikers for climate.
The two demonstrations, which call for real action against climate change and its disruption, and for climate justice, aim to put pressure on the 26th COP (Convention of the Parties, which brings together the signatory states of a United Nations convention on climate change). This summit is being held in the Scottish city with 196 countries present, and 40,000 participants.
On Friday 5 November, near the University of Glasgow, a meeting at 11am in Kelvingrove Park for the start of the Fridays for Future event. We are in Scotland, but today the huge red and blue umbrella we have been lent will only be in our way because it is not raining. Surprisingly, compared to what happens in France, it is practically the police who give the start. They waited until there were no more photographers in front of the procession (which would be 8,000 people) and asked them to stand on the sides or behind while remaining on the pavement! This can go on for a long time.