After 25 years of hearing broken promises and empty rhetoric proposals, young people and indigenous peoples raised their voices at the Climate Summit in Madrid (COP25) to express their tiredness and anger at the inaction of governments and the leading economies of the world faced with the degradation of the planet by the climatic change. Each spoke separately, but the message was the same: they will continue to press on the streets, defending their territories, their rivers, their oceans, and their forests even risking their lives. And they won’t give up until “instead of hearing what we say, they finally listen to all of us at once.”
The journey began with a massive demonstration in Madrid, the Social Summit for Climate, where indigenous leaders participated, making visible the situation of their peoples and territories in the face of climate change. Gemma Barricarte and Joana Bregolat, activists of Fridays for Future Barcelona, said that the failure of politics is a “situation that plunges us into a real abyss and an increasingly difficult dilemma: how to execute a change of course when we live in a society that lives with its back to its own survival? How to shed light when the entire media apparatus is dominated by large corporations?” It is worth mentioning that CO2 emissions grew by 0.6% in 2019 due to the greater use of oil and natural gas.
