Pre-schoolers at Clare Ellis Brown Pre-Primary in Durban, South Africa hosted a sustainability-themed concert for family and friends on Saturday 28 November. In the midst of the city, they boast a recycling project, a permaculture garden, a worm farm, and also house a chicken and two rabbits – helping to connect the children with nature and building a sense of appreciation and wonder at the natural world. At their performance, the children also handed out fliers for the city’s Climate March, one of thousands which took place around the world this weekend before the twenty-first annual session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) which opened in Paris on Monday 30 November. They sang Glenn Lehmann’s ‘I Am The Earth’, which ends:
We share the future
Stand side by side
One Earth, one people
We’ll turn the tide
And in the future
They’ll say with pride
One Earth, one people
We turned the tide
Side by side
These children are too young to remember it, but four years ago their city, Durban, hosted COP17 which, at the time, was the second-largest meeting of its kind. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) hailed it as ‘a breakthrough’ because the conference operationalised the Cancun Agreements reached the previous year: to reduce carbon emissions, help developing countries deal with climate change, and keep the average global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius. Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, President of COP17, said in her closing statement, “what we have achieved in Durban will play a central role in saving tomorrow, today.”
