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Greta Thunberg. Photo: Gallo Images / Getty Images
- Climate change activist Greta Thunberg withdrew from Desmond and Leah Tutu’s Legacy Foundation annual peace conference.
- In her place will be Christiana Figueres, who helped draft the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
- The conference is traditionally held on Tutu’s birthday.
Climate change activist Greta Thunberg withdrew from Desmond and Leah Tutu’s Legacy Foundation annual peace conference.
Thunberg’s spokesman, Daniel Donner, declined to comment on his reasons for withdrawing from the event.
In her place will be Christiana Figueres, who helped draft the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and an activist from Uganda and South Africa.
The conference will take place on October 7, when the Anglican Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize winner turns 89.
Figueres was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016.
The foundation said in a statement Friday that it had brought together national and subnational governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and NGOs to jointly comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The agreement aims to bring future global warming to below 2 ° C.
She is the co-founder of Global Optimism, co-host of the Outrage & Optimism podcast, and co-author of the recently published book, The future we choose: surviving the climate crisis.
She will be joined by Vanessa Nakate from Uganda, 23, and Ayakha Melithafa from South Africa, 17.
Its theme will be: Global climate justice, now and for the future, with an emphasis on intergenerational dialogue and cooperation.
The statement cited an excerpt from an article Tutu wrote for The Guardian six years ago.
Our desire to consume anything of perceptible value, to extract every gemstone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhino in the jungle, has no limits. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth. We are running out of time to turn things back.
