By Claire Patterson

While official proceedings are being carried out behind the gated security of the COP26 ‘Blue Zone’—a restricted space where diplomats pursue international negotiations and registered delegates hold events—demonstrations on the streets of Glasgow expose the issues less talked about.

On Friday (November 5), COP’s Youth and Next Generation Day, thousands of youth activists took to the streets alongside Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement to contrast leaders’ “blah, blah, blah” with the forceful energy that urgent climate justice requires. This sea of demonstrators from around the globe was expected to have numbered more than 25,000 people. 

With a single voice, the crowd chanted: “This is what democracy looks like.”

The young activists lining the streets used signs and banners to send strong messages to leaders around the globe: “no one is illegal on stolen land”; “phase out fossil fuels or phase out grandchildren.” This was a moment for their voices to be heard in front of the swaths of media that encircled Greta and other prominent activists in attendance, such as Elizabeth Wathuti and Vanessa Nakate. 

But if the eyes of the world are on COP26, then who are we looking away from?

Due to the difficulty of attaining a visa to enter the U.K. from a “red list country” in which the pandemic is still very much a reality, voices from the Global South are grossly underrepresented at this conference. These logistical barriers have left many youth activists from the areas of the world most brutally affected by both climate change and the pandemic unable to represent the interests and needs of their communities at the conference and in the city. At a COP so supposedly focused on raising funds to support climate resilience in the Global South, many of the most affected voices remain shut out. For all of these reasons, protest as expression is particularly important at this year’s COP.

The resulting amplification of Western voices continues to reflect the colonially based international systems of power, upon which this whole intergovernmental process is based. While some media outlets have tried to look beyond the more formal COP processes and shine a light on young and diverse activists, these voices have, for the most part, remained underrepresented and excluded. 

Even the youth activists who are able to make it inside of the Blue Zone “can feel incredibly tokenized”, explains Ana Gonzalez Guerrero, cofounder of the Canadian group Youth Climate Lab. She explains that the term ‘youth’ can be treated as monolithic, but in fact “every youth group is asking for something different”—expressing diverse and nuanced needs that reflect the myriad and uneven effects of climate change. We need to move past the assumption that simply allowing youth to be in the room is enough. Young people must have more than a seat at the table—they deserve a space to stand up on the chair and scream.