Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg said Friday that she plans to skip the COP26 climate summit in November in Glasgow, Scotland. In an interview with AFP, she said the uneven rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine would mean countries could not participate on even terms.
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“With the extremely inequitable vaccine distribution I will not attend the COP26 conference if the development continues as it is now,” Thunberg told the news agency.
The 18-year-old climate activist said the same on Twitter while confirming a BBC report on the same issue.
“Of course I would love to attend the Glasgow #COP26
But not unless everyone can take part on the same terms,” she tweeted.
Railing against the so-called “Global South”, a term generally used for low-income nations, Thunberg tweeted, “Right now many countries are vaccinating healthy young people, often at the expense of risk groups and front line workers.”
She further added that “inequality and climate injustice” are already at the heart of the climate crisis and “if people can’t be vaccinated and travel to be represented equally that’s undemocratic and would worsen the problem.”
“Vaccine nationalism won’t solve the pandemic,” she tweeted, adding that “global problems need global solutions.”
COP26 was postponed last year and is scheduled from November 1 till 12.
As COVID-19 is surging across the world, Thunberg opined that even “if COP 26 has to be delayed that doesn’t mean we have to delay the urgent action required.”
Thunberg said there was no need to wait for conferences “to dramatically start reducing our emissions.”
“Solidarity and action can start today,” she tweeted.
She also spoke against a digital solution as “high speed internet connection and access to computers is extremely unequal in the world.”
“In that case we would lack representation from those whose voices need to be heard the most when it comes to the climate crisis,” she tweeted.
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Thunberg, who began campaigning against climate change in 2018 at the age of 15, has earned Amnesty International’s top human rights prize and the Swedish Right Livelihood Award, often presented as an alternative Nobel.
In 2019 she was named person of the year by Time magazine.