WEF 2020: Put refugees ahead of climate change discussions, says youth leader

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Pretoria – The plight of refugees across the world is often swept under the carpet as global focus is diverted to other international challenges, particularly climate change.

This is according to the winner of the 2017 International Children’s Peace Prize, 19-year-old Mohamad Al Jounde, who was speaking at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. 

“Of course we have been discussing a lot about climate change, it is such a crucial issue nowadays especially in the World Economic Forum. [The WEF] has a lot of emphasis on it. As a refugee, there is a really important issue when we work with climate change, which is that I cannot demand refugees to care about climate change – they have to get education first,” said the former Syrian refugee, who also won MTV’s Generation Change Award in 2018. 

“It is concerning that all the emphasis is on climate change – from business to government – people are forgetting refugees in the sense that they are forgetting the struggles that refugees face like finding education, like finding work. You cannot solve climate change if you can’t solve those problems first because refugees make a huge part of the population around the world and we could lift them up to a certain socio-economic level …”