HELP US CHILDREN TO SAVE THE WORLD - Plant-for-the-Planet

We will manage it,
the Egyptians also manage it!
Theo Elfaizy-Phillips (10) on January 31th 2011,
the 7th day of the revolution in Egypt,
after a lecture of Felix at a school in New York
Each generation need
a new revolution
Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826, President of the USA)
Dear Adults, dear children,
if we children think about future then we think about
two main crises: The Poverty Crisis with 30.000
children dying of starvation every single day in an
incredible rich world. The Climate Crisis with one
small part, the rich part of the world exhausting the
most of the CO 2 and the poor part of the world, the
one´s that already suffer, will suffer even more in the
future.
We know that adults know exactly what challenges
we have and they know the solutions to these
challenges. We children often discussed why there
is so little action and we ended with three possible
reasons for this:
1. For most adults future seems to mean 20, 30 or
even 40 years. But for us children 2100 is still in our
lifetime. For adults it´s an academic question if the
sea level will rise for 1, 2 or 3 cm or 7 meters until
the end of this century. But for many of us children it
is a question of survival.
2. Many adults seem to hide behind the climate
skeptics the ones that say there is no climate crisis.
We children also often discussed about that topic.
But for all these people we have an answer: If we
follow the scientists that tell us there is a crisis and
if we act and in 20 years we fi nd out that they were
wrong, then we didn´t do any mistake. But if we
follow the skeptics and don´t do anything and in
20 years we will fi nd out that they were wrong it is
too late for us to save our future.
3. If you let a monkey choose if he wants one banana
now and six bananas later, the monkey always
chooses the one banana now.
We children understood we cannot trust that the
adults alone will save our future. We have to take
our future in our own hands. To do that we children
often made consultations, we often discussed what
we have to do. And in our most recent consultation
we asked ourselfes what would we do if we were
the heads of governments and we ended with a very
simple three-point-plant:
1. Carbon into the museum. We have to go down to
zero emissions until 2050. And the great thing about
this is that all the technology we need for zero emissions
already exists.
2. Bring poverty to the museum through climate justice.
We have to accept that if we don´t want to go
over the 2°C limit than we have a limited budget of
CO 2 we can exhaust. This, we have to accept. This
budget of CO 2 we can still emit is 600 billion tons.
So 600 billion tons CO 2 divided by the next 40 years
and divided by the world population which will soon
be 10 billion people equals 1.5 to CO 2 -budget per
year and per person. Who wants more, pays more to
the ones that exhaust less.
3. Let´s plant a trillion tress until 2020.
The US-Americans made it to the moon in ten years.
The Chinese planted 2,7 billion trees in 2009 and
to be honest a trillion trees is only 150 trees per
person. 1
In summer 2009, some of us had the chance to meet
Wael Abbas. He publishes the most visited blog in
Egypt. We learned how the young people connected
each other by social networking over many years.
Today, the young people in the Arabic world get rid
of the prevailing wrong systems that have been there
for many decades. Just as these young people in
the Arabic world, we children all over the world have
to join together and collectively get rid of this wrong
global system before it has completely destroyed our
future.
First Global Board
of the Plant-for-the-Planet Children Initiative
Alberto Anting Antonia Carolin Carolina
Clara Felix Jule Karoline Maiken Nour
Rufat Viacheslav Yugratna
1 Excerpt from the offi cial declaration of the children presented on 2nd February
2011 in New York in the UN General Assembly Hall at the opening of the
International Year of Forests.
2 3