?In the coming future, these problems will become bigger and bigger and today's youth are the ones who will be there,' says the leader of Nepalese Youth for Climate Action
BANGKOK (AlertNet) – Dipesh Chapagain is only 25 but says he is already seeing the biggest challenge of his generation unfolding before his eyes.
Rainfall patterns in his native Nepal are becoming erratic, causing drought or heavy rains and threatening the livelihoods of thousands of farmers, he said.
Snow cover in the nation’s famed Himalayas is decreasing, reducing the lifeline of water for the people downstream who rely on it for food, drinking water and keeping warm, he said.
Some glacial lakes – which hold trapped water from glacier melt - are close to bursting, threatening catastrophic damage to villages, agricultural land and hydropower projects below them, said Chapagain, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in environmental science.
And “a lot of the species are disappearing from the earth. I don’t know if my children will be able to see in the future some of the species that are here now,” he added.
WORSENING DISASTER RISK
“As a youth, I still have about two-thirds of my life ahead of me but the frequency and severity of the disasters is increasing. In the coming future, these problems will become bigger and bigger and today’s youth are the ones who will be there tomorrow, not the old people,” he told AlertNet.
As a result, “climate change is the biggest challenge of our generation,” said the co-founder of Nepalese Youth for Climate Action (NYCA), the first such youth group in Nepal.
Hugely geographically diverse Nepal, with areas ranging from just 60 metres above sea level to Mount Everest’s 8,800-metres, is one of the most vulnerable countries in South Asia to climate change.
But as one of the poorest countries in the world with about a quarter of its population living below the poverty line, it has limited capacity to address the impacts.
This week, at the opening ceremony of the Second Asia Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum, Chapagain, who is also a programme coordinator with non-governmental organisation Clean Energy Nepal, recounted the story of a Nepalese farmer whose rice plants dried up in the field due to drought.
The farmer has less than 10 kg of rice to support his family until the next planting season, Chapagain said.
TOO LITTLE PROGRESS
Meanwhile, two decades worth of global climate change negotiations “have not delivered real and meaningful outcomes due to the weak political commitment of global leaders” and the problems and risks associated with climate change have grown, he told the audience of government officials, activists, researchers, consultants and United Nations staff.
In an interview with AlertNet, Chapagain, who attended the UN-led international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 and Durban in 2011, said he is unhappy with the way the talks are going.
“Every government, they’re only focusing on their own agenda,” he said. “(Solving climate change) needs some sacrifice from each country but until now I couldn’t find any of that.”
One of Chapagain’s complaints is about the timeframe for the “Durban Platform,” agreed at the last minute in the 2011 meeting.
While the deal would for the first time impose emission caps with legal force on all major polluters, it won’t be signed till 2015 and won’t become effective until 2020.
“If we’re facing this many problems in 2012 and we’re only starting action in 2020, I don’t know whether some of us will survive in those eight years,” he told AlertNet.
His youth organisation’s main activities are in awareness raising and advocacy, working mainly with schoolchildren and youths, “because it’s easier to change the view of small children and youth than the behaviour of a 40- or 50-year-old man,” he said.
LOCAL SPENDING KEY
The group is also urging the Nepalese government to implement its National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) and the international community to contribute to an estimated $350 million needed in Nepal for nine priority climate change projects, Chapagain said.
He is especially keen for Nepal’s government to spend 80 percent of funding for climate activities at the local level, as it has promised.
“This is important because organising a conference at national level, like in Kathmandu, or at international level, like in Bangkok or Bonn, is not as important as having water and irrigation systems in the community, conserving forest in a village (and) supporting the livelihoods of poor people,” he said.
“Youth are (not) demanding things that cannot be achieved,” he said. “We’re basing our arguments on studies and what the scientific community suggests we should do to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”
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