20 words to save the world.

In 1992 a 12-year-old Canadian girl stood up in front of a packed United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and berated the adults for letting greed and apathy destroy our planet. The men and women in the auditorium stared at little Severn Suzuki as though they were being told of the damage we were doing to our precious world for the first time.

“If you don’t know how to fix it, stop breaking it,” she said. She received a standing ovation. More than a few people wiped away tears. This little girl had no hidden agenda. Her honesty and urgency had caught them off guard. One of the biggest challenges facing the climate change debate is that adults have become jaded and cynical. We’ve heard the doomsday warnings so many times, and in such scientific detail, that we’ve started to accept the inevitability of the predictions.

And then there’s the fact that most of these predictions are likely to take place anywhere between 20 and 50 years from now. While it’s commendable that we have the vision and urgency to act now, most of the people involved in this global rescue plan won’t be around to see whether it works or not.

Their children will though. As will yours and mine. If anyone should have a say in what the world will look like in, say 50 years’ time, it should be them.

Enter Consider Us. Originally conceived to highlight Cape Town Green Week and the UNEP Finance Initiative Roundtable on sustainable finance, Consider Us was meant to give the children of Cape Town a voice in determining their own future. But very soon this campaign became a nationwide rally and it now promises to achieve global viral status.

The campaign, in a nutshell, involved asking children between the ages of six and eighteen to explain, in twenty words, why world leaders should consider them when signing their climate change treaties. What is precious about our world? Why is it worth saving? These messages then appear, in real time, on a dedicated website, serving as a voice of the generation with the most to lose.

And the results are sobering, to say the least. When 13-year-old Kiyan van Rensburg says, “We will make our ancestors proud. We will follow your example,” we suddenly find ourselves under immense pressure to set a suitable example.

Adding his voice is acclaimed local rock star, Arno Carstens, by offering a single off his soon-to-be-released album as the soundtrack to the campaign. Arno will perform the haunting “Emergency” along with a children’s choir at the opening of the UNEP FI Meeting. And when Arno and the children sing, “How long? Too long. Right now. This is an emergency,” it’s hard to imagine delegates in the auditorium, with children of their own, ignoring such a plea.

And this is the essence of Consider Us. It steers clear of the rhetoric; it doesn’t get bogged down in the science and the politics. It’s a simple and honest reminder to adults of exactly what it is they’re committing to.

A bound compilation of these messages will be taken to the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December and presented to heads of state, who will be asked to sign the book. The book will then travel back to Cape Town where it will be buried in a time capsule at a UN heritage site, to be opened twenty years from now. We can only pray that our actions today will stand up to scrutiny in 2029.

But Consider Us is not just about getting attention. It’s also about getting children to think and talk about earth issues. Given only twenty words to explain why the world is worth saving, you are forced to pause and choose your words carefully. Children start asking teachers questions. Teachers start thinking about answers. Classrooms become part of the debate and part of the solution.

There seems to be a genuine belief that Copenhagen can succeed where its predecessor, Kyoto, fell short. That world leaders are likely to walk away on 18 December with a signed plan in the back pocket that does more than tick a few token boxes. But maybe a special result in Copenhagen requires a special kind of wake-up call – a final straw to break this stubborn camel’s back. And this straw could just be the voice of a child.

For information on how you can get your children involved, visit www.considerus.org