Survival is not negotiable

It was hard to miss the fact that the theme of today was youth at the Bella Center. In addition to peaceful demonstrations and an abundance of young people, the programme contained many events focusing on young people and the climate. One of these events was a press conference held in the afternoon where the European Youth Forum presented its cause.

Participants at the press conference included young people from Australia, Ireland, Kenya and Cameroon. Their slogan was ‘survival is not negotiable’. They spoke about what has been done in their countries to stop the environmental problems and how young people work to achieve this. I had the opportunity to meet the Cameroonian representative and asked her some questions.

Cameroonian Tamoifo Nkom Marie is the President of Association Jeunesse Verte du Cameroun (AJVC), an organisation working for the sustainable development of our environment and human rights. It was actually Tamoifo herself who founded the organisation in 1997.

Tamoifo Nkom Marie was very calm in this hysterically stressful environment, and very inspiring. She seemed to have done her homework and you could really feel her passionate interest in environmental issues. She has worked with environmental issues since the beginning of the 1990s and her ambition, then and now, is to raise young people’s interest in the environment. The issue has not been given enough attention, she said.

Can no longer thrust the seasons
The greatest threat to the climate is the fact that the world is changing and so I asked her if she could tell any difference in the environment in Cameroon today as compared to ten years ago. She then told me about Lake Chad, which has shrunk significantly over the past few years and how this has affected agriculture and people’s daily lives. Another agriculture-related problem, Tamoifo said with great concern, is that people no longer know when to sow and when to harvest their crops. They used to follow the seasons, but now that the ecological system has become unbalanced, they can no longer trust the seasons.
  “When I come home now, my mother will be confused and wonder what to do.” Because of this, Tamoifo Nkom Marie is calling for change and she would like to see it happen at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

In conclusion, I asked her what is the most important thing about COP15. She replied that the most important thing is to keep up the pressure on the leaders and to keep the problem itself in mind, and I could not agree more. We must continue listening to those who are vulnerable in the future as well and we must influence our leaders, because survival is not negotiable.

Pernilla Svensson, Linnéskolan, Hässleholm