Climate Protest in the Age of Unrest

There are three remarkable shared characteristics about the wave of Generation Z (Gen Z) protests that have swept around the world in the last 18 months: the speed and scale with which they took off, their astonishing success and, lastly, the mix of motivations that lit the spark of protest and those that are missing from many of the protestors’ demands. Those missing motivations may hold clues about the future of effective climate activism.

Bangladesh’s Student-People’s Uprising, which ended with the toppling of Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year increasingly authoritarian premiership, was the first of this Gen Z Protests wave. What started as dissent against quota-based recruitment to government jobs quickly grew into a massive pro-democracy and anti-corruption movement, in which 1,400 protestors were killed, and the incumbent fled across the border to India and has since been sentenced to death.

In the last 18 months, similar Gen Z protests have emerged in more than 20 countries worldwide, from Mozambique to Mongolia, Paraguay to the Philippines. There are ongoing protests in 11 countries.

From local sparks to a global Gen Z uprising

The triggers for resistance are often incidental and varied in different contexts. In Serbia, the collapse of a rooftop in the Novi Sad railway station, where 16 people were killed, led to a spontaneous eruption of protests among the student community against government corruption and negligence. In Madagascar, a peaceful September protest against the persistent failures of state-owned companies’ provision of power and water in the capital evolved into widespread unrest spearheaded by a Gen Z online movement, and a military coup has since replaced the President.  

But there are common threads between these disparate protest movements: the erosion of democratic rights, rising authoritarianism, corruption and economic stagnation. Each protest has learned the lesson of the last, taking cultural cues from online culture and other protests to create independent movements, each with a recognizable Gen Z signature.

Gone are the “There is no Planet B” placards of 2020’s Fridays for the Future campaigns, which blossomed globally but were most prominent in the capital cities of Europe, Australia and North America. Now, protestors are taking inspiration from online meme culture. “Ok boomer, time’s up” became a rallying cry for the successful protests in Nepal this past September. A skull-and-crossbones flag from the Manga One Piece has become a symbol of protest across countries, and Pikachu is no longer a beloved Pokémon but a firebrand provocateur. 

The protests themselves are an expression of a generation that has grown up in a global social media age, who pride themselves on absurd humor and nihilism, and ironically, are willing to die for it. 

And while their methods and motivations might be unconventional, with Nepal’s election held via the app Discord providing the best case in point, Gen Z protestors have been remarkably successful. Governments have been overthrown in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar. Major policy changes have been achieved in Timor-Leste and Kenya. 

Not since the Arab Spring of 2011 and 2012, when pro-democracy protests deposed rulers in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen, has a protest movement caused so much political upheaval in such a short time.

Climate change and global protests

There were many contributing factors to the political instability that rocked the Arab Region over a decade ago. But the effects of climate change, especially when combined with bread and butter issues like affordability, corruption and authoritarian overreach, are an explosive cocktail. Indeed, widespread droughts wiped out around 85% of livestock across eastern Syria in 2011, while severe weather-induced breadbasket failures in 2010 saw price spikes on key foods cascade across the region.  

With protests ongoing around the world, it would be difficult to attribute all current Gen Z protests to a single climate event. In fact, climate change has been noticeably absent as a rallying call for the movements altogether.

At a cursory glance, that might be surprising. It was only six years ago that more than seven million protesters took to the streets around the world for the Global Climate Strike. The phrase “Gen Z Protest” has its origins in a 2019 article by the French Market Research firm Ipsos, which looked at climate action and intergenerational conflict. Since then, climate activism hasn’t gone away, but it has undergone a reckoning. The last major global climate strike took place in 2021 ahead of the 26th UN Climate Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.

For a while, the COP process provided a lightning rod for protest. But the hosting of three subsequent COPs in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Azerbaijan significantly curtailed the space for such campaigns. 

One noticeable outcome of COP30 being hosted in democratic Brazil has been a welcome return of newsworthy peaceful protests. This was best exemplified when 90 protestors from indigenous communities blocked the negotiators’ entrance to object to resource extractivism in the Amazon.

Why climate change is missing — and why that matters

A decade on from the landmark Paris Agreement, there has been little progress in annual greenhouse gas emissions. However, there have also been wins along the way. China continues to hurtle forward in its staggering rollout of renewable energy. Recently, the European Union announced that it was on track for its 2030 emissions reduction target.

However, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are still higher than they have ever been. Even the Secretary-General of the United Nations has warned that exceeding the 1.5 °C warming target, even temporarily, is inevitable.

During that period, activism and protest movements have had to adapt to a more turbulent and impoverished world, rocked by the economic and social shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, major military conflicts and the advent of artificial intelligence. The World Bank estimates that global growth in this decade will be the slowest since the 1960s.

Key figures in the climate movement, while not abandoning their roots, have since chosen to devote their energy to pressing humanitarian disasters. In September, Greta Thunberg and 170 other pro-Palestinian protestors were detained by Israeli forces as they sailed an aid flotilla to Gaza.

The flare-ups of protest led by Gen Z are a response to a fragmented and dangerous world order. It is not surprising, then, that the center of gravity of this new wave of protests lies in developing economies and fragile democracies, and that its chief protagonists are local activists focused on bread-and-butter issues.

Climate change will exacerbate the conditions for political instability. The World Economic Forum estimates that for every degree of warming, 12% of global GDP is lost. The world is currently on course for 2.7 °C warming by 2100.

The nature of that instability could derail climate action and see a slide towards authoritarianism. This is already happening in the United States, where a surge in climate migrants crossing the US-Mexican border has been used to justify the Trump administration’s homeland security policies. The Gen Z protests might demonstrate an antidote to this in the long run, ironically, precisely because they do not tackle climate change head-on. 

Accountability and the rule of law are prerequisites for international climate action. Corruption and inequality are blockers to addressing both rapid mitigation and adaptation, the latter being a significant challenge in the developing world. 

In this day and age, some of the most effective climate change activism might not be about environmental collapse, but rather about reinvigorating the democratic contract between governments and their people.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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