photo courtesy Deepa Gupta
DCL
One of the stand-out speakers of the activist community during COP15 was Deepa Gupta, co-founder of the Indian Youth Climate Network. Founded in the spring of 2008 with three members, the IYCN has since grown to having thousands of members in 15 of India's 28 states. I recently had a chance to talk with Gupta about how she got involved in climate change activism, what the IYCN has been up to, and where does the climate movement go after the disappointment of the Copenhagen Accord.
PLANET GREEN: How did you get involved in climate change activism?
DEEPA GUPTA: In my second year of university in 2007, well very briefly in 2006, I signed up to my enviro-collective. I didn't really do that much in my first year; I helped out here and there. Then what happened was the environment collective on campus had two people and I sort of became the default environment officer on campus.
Simultaneously I was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers full time. At the end of 06 they announced they were going carbon-neutral. I had taken a lot of interest, asked a lot of questions about it, then a manager asked me to speak to the entire business assurance division about climate change--which was a pretty big deal. As a result I got onto the business development team for climate change for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Australia.
PG: How does that bridge into the Indian Youth Climate Network?
DG: Two things: Growing up I always wanted to work on development issues, move to India and work on corruption, development issues, things like that. At the end of 07 the Australian Youth Climate Coalition sent their first youth delegation to Bali for the COP [Conference of the Parties]. At that point I didn't really know what they were doing, but I was like, "If you meet any young people from India, let me know."
Little did I know that there weren't that many young people who would attend COP at that time. There actually weren't any Indian young people, but I did get to meet a guy called Kartikeya who was part of the US youth delegation. After they got back, I got in touch with him. We were both thinking on the same wavelength. We both wanted to see an Indian youth delegation go to COP14 in Poland.
At the same, we knew there were some Indian young people who cared, but they were working in such a distributed manner, we felt there was a need for something that could unite all the different bodies that had young people with them working on the issue, so that we could work a lot more strongly as a nation.
PG: What does the IYCN do? What sort of activities are they involved in, beyond, obviously, going to the COP?
DG: In addition to going to the COP, we make submissions to the COP, as well as our national government on policy. We also support youth movements in the countries surrounding us, so in Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives, et cetera. We help them whenever they need resources, ideas, or support in doing their work.
We have Climate Leadership Training, one of our flagship programs, where we train people on the impacts and the solutions to climate change. Then we train them on the different skills they'll need to take action locally, things like public speaking skills, how to start a project group, or media skills. That has kickstarted a lot of different eco-groups, either on campus of even starting their own NGOs in their community.
We do a national youth summit every year, and do regional summits as well, where young people from around the state or around the country come together. Sometimes it's about young people brainstorming ideas or vision and policy. Whereas other times its been just week-long trainings, where people learn from both each other and different trainers.
At the start of last year was the Climate Solutions Road Tour, where we drove three solar-powered electric cars, a waste vegetable oil van and biodiesel-fueled truck across India, from Chennai to Mumbai and up to Delhi.
We also have the Climate Solutions Project. A lot of the solutions [to climate change] already exist, right in our own country, but we wanted to highlight it and train young people to actually start implementing them. As a result of the Climate Solutions Project we've started helping young people install composting units, or solar lanterns in villages, biogas plants, different sorts of solutions.
PG: How is climate change viewed differently by the young people you've worked with in India versus Australia?
DG: I'll start with India, and categorize young people into urban middle/upper class and lower class both urban and, mainly, rural.
Generally when we speak about climate change in India we link it very closely to the impacts people are already seeing. Each state already has its own unique impacts it's already started facing. For a lot of people they've never heard of climate change--or maybe heard of it at a school level and don't fully grasp it yet--but when someone explains why all these changes are happening, it clicks with them. People are seeing the impacts and being given a reason for it means that they adopt it very quickly and believe it. They feel the immediate sense of urgency, because, for them, it's about water, it's about food, it's about losing their homes on the coast.
With the upper elite class, those that are rich and comfortable, there is a sense of apathy. Not with all of them, but I would say at least with half of them I often do get a sense of apathy in wanting to take action, because their priorities are often different. Whereas with other people, their livelihoods, or their family's livelihoods are more immediately affected.
In Austhttp://cm.howstuffworks.com/article-template.php?step2ralia, my experience is very similar to with the upper class of India. There are a small portion of people who are really passionate, who are also, I think, globalists in their thinking, thinking beyond themselves and outside the square they live in.
For a lot of young people in Australia and upper class India it's all about trying to get a job and buy the next thing. There's a far stronger consumerist attitude, a lot more focused on living today to the fullest and not worrying much about tomorrow. I have faith that there is some way, that we just haven't found, to connect to those people.
Deepa Gupta speaking at the Vigil for Survival, held after NGO access to the Bella Center was severely curtailed by the UNFCCC.
PG: We both spent two weeks in December in a very dark and damp Copenhagen. How disappointed were you with the outcome? Can you take any sort of positive thing away from it?
DG: The morning after Obama's announcement of the Copenhagen Accord, I had almost every negative emotion you can describe. I was sad. I was very demotivated and depressed. I was just really angry--angry at the injustice of how it had happened. It was really challenging to take.
The Vigil [for Climate Survival] for me was one of the most special moments. I felt like it was like a renewal of the vows for many people--that it doesn't matter what comes out of Copenhagen, it is still the height of our social movement. A height of any social movement in history. It was huge, the number of people we mobilized.
But what I was left with: I was probably expecting to see far too much, to see all the countries come together and come out with a solution. Our planet has never been faced with such an issue before, where we have to come together as one unit, as one planet. We've always grappled with things as countries or as regions; we don't even yet know how to think as one planet. It's really a hard concept for a lot of people to grasp. What I realized, a lot of these people aren't ready yet. If you don't understand [thinking about things as one planet] it's very hard expect a global deal.
Also, if there had been a deal, I don't know if there would have been buy-in from the people. If we're going to create a true revolution, it's going to need not only buy-in of politicians, but it's going to need buy-in of all the workers, of all the universities that are going to have to train up all these people, of every mother.
Gupta addressing a crowd of what began as 50,000-100,000 marchers, who walked about four miles from downtown Copenhagen to the Bella Center at the end of the first week of climate negotiations during COP15.
PG: After COP15 and after it's come out that there are some mistakes in the 2007 IPCC report, it seems, at least in the US, there's been a backlash against anything related to climate change. Have you experience any of that in your work?
DG: Post-COP15 I've now spent one month in India and one month in Australia and have had polar opposite experiences. In India I've found that a lot more people now know what climate change is because of Copenhagen and were really appalled that nothing came out of it. I feel like they are almost more convinced about the urgency of taking action. But again, that's just my experience of the people that I've interacted with. Here in Australia, if I think about the broader public, there's been a lot of skepticism and just plain confusion. People just don't know what to believe any more. They felt like they believed in it and now they're being told something totally different. They've lost trust in everyone.
PG: So, with two months since COP15 behind us, where do we go from here?
>DG: The way I'm looking at it now, say looking at a 50-year timeline, in the next two to three years we need to stabilize emissions; the US is still by far the biggest influential country in these negotiations, far more than even India or China. In the next ten years though, I have faith that India is going to play a key role in showing the world how a transition happens. Because the majority of our country hasn't developed yet, it has the opportunity to redefine development.
For us, as activists, where to from here? For a large part it has to become a lot more domestically focused, personally connecting with more people. With this current bought of climate skepticism, we need to get people to understand this issue. The media has been used and abused. It's a form of communication, but it's also the source of confusing a lot of people, because their getting too much information chucked at them. Moving forward we've got to get moving on the ground, implementing solutions on the ground. We've got to start talking to people face to face so that they can trust and understand why climate change is so important.
The only other part is that we've got to become a lot more focused on the vision for the future. Us as activists often get very focused on the problem and play that same fear campaign that a lot of skeptics and politicians do as well. We need to show people what that beautiful vision looks like, where we're going. Unless people see where they are going they are going to be really afraid. But if we can show that to them it will build up a lot more faith in the movement.
