Greta's mates: The responsible generation

Thursday, 26 September 2019

OPINION: A few years ago, my daughter visited Auckland Zoo with her primary school. When she got home, she raced into the kitchen and started going through the cupboards. She was hunting for palm oil.

Almost breathless with indignation, she told us how demand for this versatile, high-yield vegetable oil was decimating rainforests, driving many wildlife species towards extinction, and uprooting indigenous people and rural communities from their land.

What we learned from our eight-year-old was that there is no mandatory labelling of palm oil in Aotearoa New Zealand. If it says vegetable oil on the ingredients list, it's most likely palm oil.

So, no more Griffin's biscuits or Doritos corn chips for us. But Tip Top ice cream and Whittaker's chocolate are proudly palm oil-free. Phew.

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Iris Duquesne of France, second from left, is joined by other child petitioners to announce a complaint they will file before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child to protest lack of government action on the climate crisis last week in New York. Greta Thunberg is on the left.

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For the next few years, my daughter implored grownups to avoid palm oil. She even made a little Lego stop-motion video about it.

What I've learned from being a parent is that kids are great educators. But they are reliant on us adults to make change. We are the ones with the power and money.

This week, 16 young people from across the world – Alexandria Villasenor, Ayakha Melithafa, Carl Smith, Carlos Manuel, Catarina Lorenzo, Chiara Sacchi, Ellen-Anne, David Ackley III, Deborah Adegbile, Greta Thunberg, Iris Duquesne, Litokne Kabua, Raina Ivanova, Ranton Anjain, Raslene Joubali, and Ridhima Pandey – are trying to hold five of the world's leading economic powers accountable for inaction on climate change.

They're petitioning the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child to find that climate change is a children's right's crisis, and that Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey are recklessly perpetuating life-threatening climate change, violating children's rights to life and health, as well as the cultural rights of those from indigenous communities.

They want these powerful countries to lead by example, reducing emissions as fast as possible. They also want them to use all available legal, diplomatic, and economic tools to make sure that the major emitters – China, the United States, the European Union, and India – also reduce their emissions.

I hope these incredible youngsters succeed in their petition. It's not our children's responsibility to fix the climate crisis, it's ours.

Dr Siouxsie Wiles MNZM is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland and a Deputy Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini, a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence.