My hometown owes its story to a massive glacier that covered the entirety of northern Germany during the last ice age. When the glacier melted, the meltwater formed a river, the river Elbe. My river. Beside and on this water rose the city of Hamburg, powered by its harbour, by national and colonial trade, by the good fortune of being the last European mainland stop before the North Sea. Growing up, the riverside was my playground. The sandy beaches, the lighthouse, the laughter, the horns of the gigantic container ships passing just a few hundred metres away—all of that on repeat made up my childhood summer days.
But we never swam in the river. And we didn't ask why; it was just not allowed. Much later, I learned about the pollution, the bacteria and the toxins in the water, washed into the river from Hamburg’s overfertilized farmland after rainy days. I learned that the container ships operating in the river caused deadly currents, which increased with the growth of globalized container shipping. It was much later, too, when I learned how the uphill battle between my hometown’s ecology and its economy was manifested in my childhood playground. We, the children, didn't matter in this struggle.
There was another thing we noticed that was a bit odd. The vast majority of the kids at my school would cycle to school each morning, sweating on the last hilly part of the journey. There wasn't a bike path, though, so we would find ourselves trapped between a busy sidewalk on the one side, and honking school buses and rushing cars on the other. We would sigh with relief as we arrived at the school gates, our hearts racing. We adapted over time: sometimes we would walk our bikes for the most stressful parts of the journey, sometimes we would get to school early to avoid the worst of the traffic. Hundreds of those mornings passed before we considered that maybe it was the infrastructure, not us, that needed to adapt.
Looking back, I was experiencing an urban environment that had been built with neither children nor nature in mind. I was surrounded by the kind of infrastructure that suggested if something felt wrong to us, we were the problem, not the infrastructure itself. My childhood taught me what it looks like when urban spheres eat each other up, creating a subconscious yet omnipresent tension between the adults, the children, the natural environment and the built environment. None of this is unique; quite the opposite─it resembles dynamics we can see around the world, often in even more exploitative and exhausting forms. More than half the world’s population lives in urban environments, which are often the places experiencing some of the worst consequences of the accelerating global climate crisis.
As temperatures rise, all the existing shortcomings, tensions and unresolved crises will accelerate and fuel each other. That is the simple math of this century.
It isn't always easy to imagine what the climate crisis really means. Looking closely, however, can help. Wherever we go nowadays, whether it is Hamburg and its heatwaves, Tampa, Florida and its experiences with a recent record-breaking hurricane, Johannesburg and its water crisis, or New Delhi drowning in air pollution, in every corner of the urbanized world we find glimpses of a climate future that is yet to come. We are witnessing the extremes that could become baselines for a century of catastrophic records. We don't have to make up new worlds to understand what a climate disaster future could mean for us─all it takes is to not look away from what the world is telling us already.
And so the real challenge might be to imagine how things could go differently. What might it look like for us to take a different path that doesn’t lead to more and more radical disasters but, say, to more and more radical action?
Looking back to little Luisa playing on the polluted riverfront, it is quite easy to understand that urban infrastructure that is harmful for nature tends to be harmful for children too. It is also easy to see how young dreams of a better world are stifled by infrastructure that implies change is impossible. A world that teaches us it is humans who must evolve around the built environment will never inspire young people to think big and imagine different futures. It inherently disables agency and dries out opportunities to seek change.
What if cities didn’t silence their youngest inhabitants but instead listened to them? What if they inspired citizens to challenge the status quo and take their own needs seriously? What if cities were created around synergies between their different spheres, instead of reinforcing tensions and trade-offs?
It took time until we, as schoolchildren, realized that something was going wrong in our little world. But once the initial thought of potential change in our urban environment was planted, it was impossible to let it go. We had never interacted with municipal infrastructure planning authorities, had never thought about the cost of a bike lane, or the conflicts between neighbouring inhabitants who were asked to let go of a few square metres of their front yards. But by that time, we had decided that we would not return to traffic-jammed mornings, and the idea of leaving them behind had already become irresistible.
It took two years, endless discussions, town hall meetings, local consultations and political lobbying to push our local officials to invest in a bike path. But eventually it came, and it stayed. It was unconventional for youth to engage in local politics and in what would later be called “climate action”. That bike lane ended up being the first moment of over a decade of climate activism for me. And the more time I spend in climate spaces of all kinds, reaching from my neighbourhood all the way to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP), the more I am convinced that any urban area, town or city whose young people are excluded from finding answers to climate change is working against itself. It is not only that solutions for children tend to work out for climate and nature too, but also that the ability to think big tends to be a characteristic of younger generations, whose members have not yet been conditioned to routinely glorify the status quo. There is good news: the youth climate justice movement has officially declared that we do not intend to wait until someone invites us to make decisions affecting our own present and future. We are going to create space for ourselves at the table, whether that is welcomed or not. After all, we have a right to be heard, we have a right to climate justice and a right to be safe. We see leadership from young people who are not only taking to the streets but are remaining there to continue the struggle.
Years after I stopped playing at the beach, the river Elbe was cleaned up, bit by bit. Swimming, however, is still not advised. And today, I am angry about that, but in a good way. I didn't foresee it, but my childhood made me become an activist. And now it is up to all of us to decide whether we are going to watch as the times change us, or if we’re going to go out and change the times ourselves, to make every city safe, every river clean, and every evening’s sunset peaceful.
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The 缅北禁地Chronicle is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.
