Faith, Fury, and Joy in Glasgow

Rowan Ryrie writes from Parents for Future Global, at COP26

“Because I gotta have faith, faith, faith

I gotta have faith, faith, faith”

As a local mum put on the George Michael song, the heavens opened - again. We were marching through Glasgow during COP26. Drenched by the deluge, we “climate mamas” started dancing and singing, waving our gorgeous street-puppets of a Phoenix and her chicks through the air. It was as if our love – the reason we were all there – was lifting the puppets up despite the downpours: we had to have faith that we could change things and protect our children from the prospect of having to fight each other to survive on an unlivable planet.

We had come to Glasgow from all around the world to deliver to the gathered leaders a letter signed by almost five hundred organisations from forty-four countries representing millions of parents the world over. Many of these organisations, such as parent teacher associations, were entering the climate space for the first time. Together this was the biggest global mobilisation of parents on any single issue in history, to ask leaders to stop betraying our kids. We had a single, clear message: “We demand that you stop financing for all new fossil fuels now.”

The previous morning, at 7am, five of us had managed to make it through the near impossible hurdles set up to prevent climate campaigners from accessing the hallowed Blue Zone. We had finally been given a meeting with the COP president, Alok Sharma, to present our letter to him. We were from two organisations working together to coordinate this new global movement: Parents for Future Global, and Our Kids’ Climate.

With us was the amazing Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, a London mum who lives along the busy South Circular Road and whose nine-year-old daughter Ella died of asthma in 2013. As a result of Rosamund’s dogged campaigning, an inquest ruled last December that air pollution was a cause of Ella’s death: this would now be recorded on her death certificate, a world first.

Now Rosamund was in Glasgow, sitting next to the president of COP26. She began our meeting by playing him a soundscape of a child with asthma struggling to breathe. As a mum I know this terrible sound only too well: I’ve been in and out of hospitals myself, over the past six months, with my three-year-old’s respiratory infections. Another mum present, Amuche Nnabueza from Nigeria, told “Alok” – as he asked us to call him – that “this is a normal soundscape in Nigeria, where I come from.”

We played the recording for two reasons. First, we wanted the COP president to connect to us, parent to parent. Second, we wanted to connect air pollution to the climate crisis. As our letter puts it: “Our children are being poisoned by toxic pollution from burning fossil fuels with every breath they take. That burning is also the key driver of the climate crisis, which is ruining our children’s futures and destroying our only home.”

The effect of air pollution on their children’s respiratory systems is something that parents experience and hear (as in that soundscape) in a visceral way. Our research at Parents for Future has shown us that air pollution is an issue that can speak outside of the climate bubble, and engage people who still find climate breakdown too remote. It enables parents to speak personally about the tangible here-and-now effects of fossil fuels, and is thus a way to get others to think about the harm done by burning carbon – not just to our beautiful planet, but to our childrens’ lungs.

So many mums have entered the climate movement because of the way they have had to listen to their children suffer. At the same time that Rosamund was playing her soundscape to Alok, two other leaders of our movement present in Glasgow were participating in a New York Times live event. The film-maker Kamila Kadzilowska described how all three of her sons suffered from respiratory illness in Poland, where almost all domestic heating is still coal-fired, and how one of them has significant ongoing problems probably due to her own smoke inhalation when she was pregnant.

Bhavreen Khandari, the formidable co-founder of India’s Warrior Moms, spoke of how her teenage twins already had the lungs of elderly smokers, born and raised as they were in Delhi, where every third child has damaged lungs. She made a point of comparing the AQI (Air Quality Index) of Delhi that morning where her children were – over 500 – to Glasgow, where the world’s leaders were meeting: 20.

Once you start thinking in terms of a lifetime – your childrens’ lives, the number of years they have left, and the quality of those years – it starts to feel a lot more immediate. This is what brought me, personally, into the climate movement.

My background is as a human rights and environmental lawyer, but I had never worked on climate – it felt just too big to grapple with. But in 2018 – when my second daughter was tiny and my firstborn was just starting school – something changed. When a child starts school, it forces you to think in years, and to plan for at least the next twelve of them. This was at exactly the time the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published, with the news that we had twelve years to do something.

Twelve years! Suddenly there was a number, and it tracked, exactly, my daughter’s twelve years at school. At the end of them, she would be sixteen or seventeen, still too young to vote and make a difference in any systemic, political way. I realised I needed to incorporate fighting for my daughters to have a liveable planet into my definition of caring for them both; I couldn’t let those years go by and stay silent.

I live in Oxford, and I went to the first big school strike protest here in February 2019. I watched young teenagers who seemed terrified (and also amazingly determined) and I thought: “I’m an adult. If they can step outside their comfort zone, so can I.” So I got in touch with Fridays for Future on an international level with two objectives: to see how I could support them, and to figure out the best way to engage other parents.

Kids have shown us their immense power, and the urgency of the issue for them: many children around the world are already on the frontline of climate impacts and millions more will be. But we, their parents, have significant power we can use collectively if we choose to do so: we are voters, employers, employees, and some of us are leaders.

And, those of us with the real power in the world to change things – presidents, captains of industry – are also parents. At Parents for the Future UK (and our sister group Mothers Rise Up), we have already seen the power of this. In our meetings with executives from Lloyds of London, which insures the fossil fuels industry, we felt their positions start to shift as we engaged with them as parents. We heard admissions of their own concerns, and those of their children, about climate breakdown.

Alok Sharma has actually talked about making the connection between climate breakdown and his children’s future. But when we met him, speaking to him as parents, he responded as a politician. He told us how much he felt had actually been achieved, and trumpeted the COP resolution that developed countries would no longer provide subsidies for fossil fuel exploration abroad. As the two Brits in our group, Rosamund and I had to insist that this was not good enough. Our government had to stop all fossil-fuel exploitation back home, right now, too.

We mums left that meeting with a feeling of disconnect, and a sense of just how difficult our job was. And this, perhaps, is why that moment of dancing to George Michael’s “Faith”, on the rainy streets of Glasgow the following day, felt so important. It might be hard to connect meaningfully enough with those inside the Blue Zone – inside boardrooms and cabinet war-rooms and negotiating chambers – for them to make the urgent changes needed to save our planet. But we can connect with each other, in the kind of mass global movement that can force those with power to take action and place love at the heart of climate activism.

My joy, at that march through rainy Glasgow, was not just at being physically present with brave mums from around the world, most of whom I had never met in person even though we had been working closely since 2019. It was also at being welcomed, as a new bloc in the movement, by the others there: youth, indigenous people, seasoned activists, the NGOs. The trust and collaboration in the parent climate movement makes me proud of this group of fearless women. The sense in Glasgow of togetherness and power that comes from being part of a movement claiming its voice again after the hiatus forced by the pandemic was palpable. 

With that energy we can carry on fighting with more confidence in our own power as parents: most of us, remember, have never been campaigners before. Coming home from Glasgow, we feel we can mobilize more parents the world over and build momentum that can no longer be ignored.

And we can take Alok Sharma up on his invitation to remain in touch, and keep on trying to reach him, parent to parent. Already, in Glasgow, we saw the moving results of such engagement. Last year, in preparation for the COP summit that didn’t happen, we launched a campaign called “Make Paris Real.” Part of the campaign was for parents to send leaders postcards written or drawn by their children. One of the recipients was Frans Timmermans, Europe’s climate policy chief, who at Glasgow was instrumental in bringing about the conference’s last-minute deal, weak though it was.

At a plenary, Timmermans held up his cellphone to show a photo of his one-year-old grandson, just sent to him by his son. In 2050, Timmermans said, he would most probably be dead, but his grandson would be 31. “If we fail,” he said, his grandson “will fight with other human beings for water and food.” He summed up how many of us in the parent climate movements feel and why we are so passionate about this work: “This is personal, this is not about politics.”

Rowan Ryrie is a mother of two, lawyer and movement organiser with the global Parents for Future movement. Her work focuses on global grassroots intergenerational movement building, climate mobilisation and creative campaigning. With support from Equation Campaign she has co-developed a Parent Climate Fellowship programme to help diversify leadership within the climate parent movements and support emerging leaders, particularly women.

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