By their very nature, UN climate negotiations are filled with scientific and diplomatic jargon.
So when 10-year-old Nakeeyat Dramani Sam spoke during a plenary session with hundreds of delegates, her soft voice and direct message cut through the dryness, a reminder to negotiators and everybody listening that decisions made at climate talks can have a direct impact on people.
Talking about suffering in Ghana due to flooding, she held up a sign that said: “Payment Overdue”.
“I put a simple question on the table,” she said. “When can you pay us back? Because payment is overdue.”
The 10-year-old was talking about a thorny issue that has taken centre stage over the last two weeks of negotiations at the Cop27 summit, hosted in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.
Many developing nations are insisting that rich countries, which have contributed most to climate change because of high greenhouse emissions, compensate them for the damage.
In climate negotiations, the issue is called “loss and damage”.
It is a topic that produces a wide range of opinions and nuanced battle lines.
Developed nations such as the United States have resisted such calls for compensation, not wanting to be on the hook for what could be open-ended liability.
China, also a high-carbon emitting country, supports the idea of rich nations contributing to such payments but does not want to pay.
On Thursday, the European Union put forward a proposal to create a fund for loss and damage.
While the proposal gave negotiators something specific to chew on, it was also likely to have deepened divisions.
Nakeeyat’s speech did not bother with the machinations of negotiations, but rather had the kind of frankness and freshness that comes naturally to children.
She told the attendees that she had met with US climate envoy John Kerry earlier this week.
Mr Kerry had been nice, she said, and the meeting got her thinking about the future.
Her next sentence had humour in it, though she certainly did not mean for that.
“By the time I’m his age, God willing, it will be the end of this century,” she said, implicitly saying, as children often do about adults, that Mr Kerry was old. He is 78.
Shortly after that came a powerful and direct message.
Talking about how scientists say the world has less than a decade left to continue polluting at today’s rates before the effects of global warming get much worse, Nakeeyat said: “Have a heart and do the maths. It’s an emergency.”
When Nakeeyat finished speaking, she received a standing ovation.
In an interview afterwards, Nakeeyat said that her environmentalism began a few years ago with a love for trees.
She wrote a children’s book about trees in Ghana and to date has planted more than 100 trees.
“I also call for action that every child must plant a tree,” she said, standing with her mother and aunt.
Nakeeyat said that she was a poet, and when prompted recited from memory a poem about climate change that ended with exhortations for rich countries to assume responsibility for historical climate damage and pay up.
Children were the best people to deliver such messages, she said, because they would be around to suffer the consequences of a warming planet.
“We are the future leaders, so when we talk people listen,” she said.
“I don’t know about the adults because I’m not at their age.”
