On June 11, 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 12-year-old Canadian youth organizer Severn Cullis-Suzuki addressed the United Nations regarding climate saviorism:

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet, because they have nowhere left to go. I am afraid to go out in the sun now, because of the holes in our ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air, because I don’t know what chemicals are in it… You teach us to not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then, why do you go out and…do the things you tell us not to do? Do not forget why you are attending these conferences—who you’re doing this for. We are your own children. You are deciding what kind of a world we are growing up in.1

Cullis-Suzuki became known as “the girl who silenced the world for five minutes.”2 She has gone on to inspire countless youth activists and organizers fighting for climate and environmental justice beyond climate saviorism—the issues raised in her speech 32 years ago being as critical now as they were back then, if not more so.3

Climate Saviorism Demonstrates a Failure of Leadership

The Rio Earth Summit had some limited successes despite its climate saviorism framework, namely, the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),4 whose decision-making body, the Conference of Parties (COP), meets annually to discuss and act on global climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015). The thirtieth session—COP 30—will convene in Belém do Pará, a city in northern Brazil at the base of the Amazon, in 2025.5 Many of the pledges that were made at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, based in climate saviorism, have still not been realized, such as the next steps from Agenda 21, a nonbinding treaty that initially aimed to achieve global sustainable development by the beginning of the 21st century. As of 2012, out of the 40 sectoral issues addressed in the treaty, 34 had made little to no progress on their goals.6 By 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was established at the Earth Summit, had failed to reach its goal of significantly reducing species extinction—with “30% of amphibians, 21% of birds and 25% of mammal species” at risk of annihilation.7 In 2023, those numbers had jumped significantly to 26 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians—but with the positive news of a decreased risk for birds, now at 12 percent.8

Read the full article about climate saviorism by Senowa Mize-Fox at Nonprofit Quarterly.