The future, and our environment, belongs to us

The year 2017 promises to be a watershed year for the global climate movement. With the adoption of the Paris Agreement last month, we have, for the first time, a framework that brings together all nations to address a common cause – mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects. More importantly, it pledges enhanced assistance for developing nations in addressing their specific challenges. A year earlier, the global fraternity laid out the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) with the objective of creating “a life of dignity for all”. The two pathways of sustainable development and climate change have now merged into one cohesive roadmap, wherein the challenges of the environment, social good and economic progress lay out the promise of a future where no one is left behind.

As the erstwhile United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said: “We are the first generation that can end poverty, the last that can end climate change.” We are fast reaching the point of no return and this places an enormous responsibility on all sections of civil society and its stakeholders to take actions in mitigating the current state of environmental degradation. The challenge lies in the implementation of the goals and targets that have been set forth in the landmark UN agreements.

How do we ensure that we effectively engage the marginalised and downtrodden? Our world today has the highest number of children and young people than ever before. The future, ostensibly, belongs to us, but we are helpless to change or influence the present that will determine the way we live. Our dignity, or rather indignity, is determined by the insatiable hunger of the global economic powerhouses that turn virgin rainforests into ugly mining pits and pollute the pristine water of our rivers with toxic chemicals, pushing thousands of species to the brink of extinction. This is the harsh reality that stares us in the face, but many of us choose to either look away or shrug helplessly thinking it is someone else’s problem.

This must change and this is why young people need to speak out and demand conservation of the environment and the right to live with dignity, because we are the citizens of tomorrow, but we will not live to see tomorrow if our today is not taken care of. We must act in 2017 and for all years to come.

— The reader is the founder of youth organisation Green Hope based in Dubai.