From Expert Negotiations to Fridays for Future: How the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Shaped Youth-Led Climate Activism

This study traces the development of a series of United Nations (UN) conferences beginning in 1972 that provided a continuous forum for over 50 years for policymakers and citizens to engage in furthering the scientific understanding of what is today called climate change and negotiating intergovernmental cooperation in promoting sustainable development. The study shows that beginning in the 1960s and 1970s information about first, the greenhouse effect and later climate change, mostly came from academic and scientific experts in the form of written reports and testimonies conducted for governmental and intergovernmental entities, such as the United States Senate and UN conferences. The most recognized of these UN conferences remains the historic Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the early 1990s where governments adopted pathbreaking new approaches to sustainable development. Galvanized by a perceived lack of progress over twenty-five years after the Rio conference, youth climate activists such as the global youth movement Fridays for Future organized a worldwide youth strike with hundreds of thousands of students protesting on the streets. The study describes how youth-led climate activists appropriated the act of going on strike as a political tool to expand the forum the UN conferences provide these involved citizens. As such, the students’ strike garnered global media attention reporting on the dangers of climate change for humans, animals, and plant life alike and the need to further sustainable development.