“Free territories; protected children”: the rallying cry of Amazonian children took over the entire final plenary of the People’s Summit this Sunday, the 16th, in Belém. The demonstration opened the children’s participation in the program, which also included the reading and delivery of the Children’s Charter to some of the main authorities of COP30: Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, COP President; Ana Toni, CEO of the Conference; Marina Silva, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change; Sônia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples; Guilherme Boulos, Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency; among other authorities.
Before the formal delivery of the document, the commission of children and adolescents read the charter to the authorities and to the entire plenary, moving everyone and drawing applause from all present. Minister Marina Silva was among those visibly moved. “As these children were speaking, the image came to me of someone who started working very early, at five years old. I was very thin. At ten we began cutting rubber. All of this makes me reflect that only in a democracy can the rubber tapper and Indigenous peoples reach where we have reached,” she said, calling on all of society to mobilize for the climate. “The fight against climate change needs the mobilization of all of society. Your enthusiasm and engagement are fundamental for us to continue this struggle.”
The adolescents who took the stage alongside the main COP30 authorities represented 600 children who, after a week of intense activities and debates, approved the Children’s Charter yesterday. The document expresses the perceptions, pain, expectations, and demands of around 600 children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 who took part in the movement. Over five days, children and adolescents from different territories— islands, urban peripheries, quilombos, Indigenous lands, riverside communities, and urban centers of the Amazon and other regions of Brazil—shared experiences of how climate change directly affects their lives.
In the charter, children and adolescents ask, “Take care of our planet now. We want to stay alive,” while reporting, in their own words, the real impact of extreme heat, smoke from fires, the lack of trees in schools, polluted rivers, and illness caused by the climate crisis.
Present at this Sunday’s plenary were adolescents and children from the Adolescent Participation Committees of the State and National Councils for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, as well as riverside children from Cáritas projects in Abaetetuba and from the Tela Firme Collective, an urban resistance group in Belém, among others. More than 120 organizations working on children’s rights participated directly and indirectly in the Summit.