A fight for the future

This article first appeared in our COP29 special issue of My Green Pod Magazine. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

Main image: Group picture at Extreme Hangout COP27, Egypt. Left to right: Dan Crockett, director at Blue Marine Foundation; Kevin Mtai, climate advocate and environmental defender; Vasser Seydel, grants and engagement director; Sam Taylor, conservationist and anti-poaching activist; Sierra Quitiquit, United States youth representative and Louis Cole, travel filmmaker and co-founder of the Social Good Club

In August 2018 Greta Thunberg began her campaign outside the Swedish Parliament, calling on her country to take action and align itself with the Paris climate agreement.

We know what happened next: young people around the world, who also increasingly recognised the urgency of the situation, crafted their banners and took to the streets in protest.

Here at home in London I proudly joined them and greatly admired the passion, the energy and yes, even the idealism: why shouldn’t they fight for their future?

As the months went by I became rather sad. Why had it taken young people skipping school to mobilise so many among the older generations?

They were succeeding in grabbing headlines but I saw so much anger, fear and sadness among these young people; it really bothered me, so I started to look for other ways to support them.

Two worlds collide

I had been working with Extreme International for a number of years and had got to know our cool, dynamic online community – who, incidentally, are mostly aged between 18 and 30.

These young people were also a passionate and driven bunch; they were scaling mountain peaks, cycling forest trails, surfing breaking waves and embracing the very life that so many were in fear of losing.

This community was a frequent frontline witness to the impact of climate change on our planet and on local communities in remote locations.

Many of them had become activists decades before; surfers have been vocal about sewage and plastic pollution for a long time, while mountaineers have been shouting to anyone who would listen that glaciers are retreating and that winter snow no longer falls in the glorious abundance of the past.

Two worlds were colliding in my mind. I felt deeply moved – indeed mobilised! Then the host city of COP26 was announced; Glasgow was not exactly my local city, but it certainly felt local enough.

Getting to COP

I had wanted to attend a COP for a long time but didn’t feel like I was qualified and wasn’t quite sure what I would do if I went.

Now I had the excuse that I needed. I wasn’t going for me, but to host an event for young people and with young people – for our Extreme community and disenfranchised youth from all around the world.

I felt very strongly that somebody needed to demonstrate not simply that we care about the environment, but also that we care about their human fears and, perhaps even more importantly, that we value their opinions and contributions.

I wanted to highlight the many wonderful people and organisations tackling this crisis head-on – teaching the solutions, building the businesses delivering the solutions and leading the NGOs delivering these solutions in the field. Many of them had been doing so for decades.

I wanted all these brilliant young people to know that there is hope – that there are people out there who are fighting for their future, from every corner of society; that there are places for them to go to actively participate in creating the future of their dreams, not their nightmares. That we may not be all-powerful, yet, but that we had their backs.

So naturally, the next step was to leap on a train to Glasgow and join a member of our team in a hunt for a venue.

Alistair, founder and CEO of Extreme – and, incidentally, also my husband– now famously recounts how he thought that I would not find one square inch of available space to host any kind of event, but also (most erroneously) that my ambitions were limited to perhaps hosting a lunch or drinks party. How wrong can one guy be!

I returned having secured a repurposed ferry moored on the River Clyde, right in the heart of the city – not for an evening, but for the full two-week duration of COP.

And so the work began, with the backing of my husband and the wider Extreme team, all having bought fully into my somewhat mad vision.

Sharing solutions

We called and emailed everyone I knew and people I didn’t, inviting them to come and participate in a fringe event where we promised there would always be a young person on our stage – participating in conversations with politicians, business leaders and scientists.

We wanted to help people express not just their fears but also their hopes – to share the stories of successful endeavours, of real-life solutions that were active today.

We wanted to cover everyday topics as well as the highbrow stuff; we wanted to get the world interested, so felt we should lean in to their existing passions – sport, yes, but also fashion, food, music, gaming, film and art.

The floodgates opened: we were joined by wonderful and visionary commercial partners and myriad leading local, national and international charities and communities who wanted to be part of the conversation.