Kids across the world expressed concerns about global warming by creating what organizers say is the world’s biggest postcard on a glacier in the Swiss Alps.
Bearing messages of hope and commitment, more than 125,000 colorful and hand-written postcards from kids around the world have emblazoned a glacier in Switzerland to create one giant one, half the size of a football field.
It is a cry of help — from New Orleans to Hong Kong, from sub-Saharan Africa to India — ahead of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Katowice, Poland, next month.
Photo: AFP
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and partners on Friday unfurled a “compound postcard” on top of the threatened Aletsch Glacier, the longest and deepest in the Alps, which is on track to melt to nonexistence by the end of this century if global warming trends continue.
Organizers say the postcards delivered to the glacier 3,400m above sea level near Switzerland’s famed Jungfraujoch aimed to set a Guinness World Record for the “postcard with the most contributions.”
Guinness said the attempt has not been registered. The current record is only 16,000.
Pinned down with clamps and nets, and laminated in long glued-together strips to protect them from the ice and snow, the postcards bore messages of efforts to fight climate change and help the environment, such as limiting water use, promises to use public transportation or recycling old goods before buying new ones.
“They are asking us and their leaders to take action to preserve the planet Earth for them to have a future on it,” Swiss Youth for Climate founder Oceane Dayer said.
Ever mindful of the impact, organizers are calculating the CO2 footprint caused by sending so many postcards — often through Swiss diplomatic posts — and preparing to double the offset.
Drones with cameras buzzed overhead as sunshine bounced off the white mountainside.
Overhead, cards spelled out “Stop global warming” and “#1.5C” — an allusion to the goal of keeping global warming below 1.5°C.
Organizers want to launch a “Global Climate Change Youth Movement” to compliment the UN meeting.
Organizers plan to use a snapshot of the giant compound postcard to make, well, a postcard.
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