Dubai: A 12-year-old girl from Dubai was awarded as one of the four global winners of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in celebration of the World Day to Combat Desertification on Sunday.
Celebrated worldwide every June 17, the UNCCD picked the essay of Kehkashan Basu, a resident of Dubai, from contributions of children and youth aged 25 and below. The essays tackled the future that the youth want for land and soil.
The competition was part of the run-up to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20 Earth Summit) which will be held on June 20-22 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Every year, 12 million hectares of land — an area thrice the size of Switzerland — are lost due to desertification, according to UNCCD figures. While fertile soil is the most significant non-renewable resource in the planet, it continues to be degraded by human activity and climate change, which inevitably affects 1.5 billion people globally.
With the theme “Healthy Soil Sustains Your Life: LET’S GO LAND-DEGRADATION NEUTRAL,” Basu’s essay was the only winning entry from Asia, Middle East and Europe.
Speaking to Gulf News from Brazil, Basu said: “Receiving a United Nations award is very very special. I think it is very important for children to be responsible for the future and we cannot let someone else take care of it on our behalf. Through my essays, I wish to shock people out of their complacency and take action.”
Basu, the youngest among the 700 delegates from 112 countries who attended the Youth Blast, the Rio+20 Conference for Youth, said that the youth group in the conference is “very concerned by the fact that they are not a part of the decision-making process.”
“There is a lot of frustration at the slow progress of negotiations and how every conference seems to only procrastinate and take the issues to the next one,” Basu said.
But social media has somehow helped deliver the youth’s message to the policymakers.
“These are being addressed by daily petitioning, mainly via the use of social media. The fact that senior dignitaries like the UN Under Secretary General came down to meet us at the Youth Blast is a positive sign of change. He urged us not to give up and that failure cannot be an option,” Basu said.
Asked what she had learned from the conference which she could share to her fellow youth in the UAE, she said: “My message to the youth in the UAE is that the future belongs to us. The time to act is now. The world cannot afford to hold Rio+40 in twenty years’ time.”
Basu is a child delegate who represented the Middle East as a Regional Ambassador for TUNZA Ecogeneration and a member of United Nations Environment Programme’s TUNZA or children and youth programme. In May, she won third place in the 2011-2012 International Schools Essay Competition titled “Dear Mr. UN Secretary General…” organized by the Living Rainforest, a UK-based non-government organisation.
