A youth climate campaigner from Surrey has joined the crucial climate negotiations at COP26 that are taking place in Glasgow at the moment.

Rishitha Sali, a year 12 student who goes to school in Woking, was able to join in the climate summit thanks to her school's participation in the Surrey Eco Action Schools team.

The group was one of many school-based climate campaigns who worked with the UK Schools Sustainability Network to send school students to Glasgow so they could take part directly in the negotiations, which have been billed as "literally the last chance saloon" for humanity to avert catastrophic global heating amid the climate crisis.

While at the summit Rishitha will work with the student charity PPL PWR (People Power) on a stand in the Green Zone (main exhibition area), promoting hydrogen fuel cells, and also join discussions on climate anxiety with the public which pschologists have highlighted as a growing affect of the climate crisis on young people.

"Going to Glasgow is a chance to give young people a collective voice in the climate emergency and collaborate in taking action against climate change. It's also a once in a lifetime opportunity to attend and participate in panel discussions with several other young people from across the world and with academics, politicians and leading activists," she told the Surrey Comet.

"COP26 will be a historic moment in environmentalism and we'd like to spread awareness on the effects of climate change, to promote a systemic change," the Surrey student added, saying that she and her colleagues hope to see the UK government do more to promote climate awareness throughout the education system.

Reflecting on the what she believes is a need for improved education on the seriousness of the climate crisis, she said: "Even in 2021, huge amounts of people remain oblivious to the devastating potential consequences of climate change, focusing instead on how efforts to halt it inconvenience them now, rather than how it threatens to destroy so much of the planet..."

Those consequences not only include the increasingly common extreme weather events seen across the globe this year including wildfires, floods and droughts.

Direct threats to human food supply expected from increasing crop failures and the parallel biodiversity collapse now underway have also been highlighted as serious consequences of climate and ecological breakdown. 

Rishitha joined other voices in hoping that the pandemic could act as a "portal" through which our paradigms could be changed. 

"The coronavirus pandemic has robbed us of so much. Lives have been lost (and) countless opportunities have been missed... While it is only right that humanity attempts to tackle a virus that threatens so many lives, as we go forward, overcome the coronavirus, and resume our usual lives, climate change must once again become our top priority, influencing every decision we make," she said. 

The Surrey student is one of millions of young people who are taking direct action to put as much pressure as possible on states and corporation to decarbonise the world's economy as fast as possible.

Yet while some like Rishitha will participate with actions inside COP26 itself, others journeying to Glasgow over the next two weeks are taking action outside the conference itself.

For example Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate and Sweden's Greta Thunberg have criticised the climate summit entire approach to solving the crisis as little more than a performative show.

Addressing activists at a parallel rally outside the conference centre yesterday, Thunberg said: "Inside COP there are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously, pretending to take the present seriously of the people already today who are being affected by the climate crisis. Change is not going to come from in there. That is not leadership, this is leadership," she said, indicating the climate activists outside. "This is what leadership looks like."