Northern climate change activists attend COP27

Northern Ontario was well represented at the 27th annual Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Egypt as a well-known Sudbury family of climate change activists was in attendance.

There were more than 33,000 people in Egypt for COP27. The attendees hope to examine strategies to protect the planet.

15-year-old Sophia Mathur of Sudbury was among the attendees. Mathur said she and her parents felt it was important to bring their unique perspectives to the event.

“I think it’s really important that we have these different perspectives, coming into these meetings and we attend the same pavilions and the same panels and we get to talk to people about what we’re concerned about,” said Mathur.

Mathur was well-known at the conference after being featured in a film during COP26 last year.15-year-old Sophia Mathur has been fighting against climate change for years already. (Supplied)Mathur told CTV News in an interview Friday that they were actually disappointed with some of the other speakers invited to attend the conference.

“600 polluters were able to attend this meeting. I actually heard something Greta Tunberg herself said, ‘If you were having a conference about malaria, you wouldn’t invite the mosquitoes,’” she said.

“You don’t invite the polluters, you don’t invite the people that are causing this problem to talk and make excuses on the issue.”

Murthur’s father, Dr. Sanjiv Mathur, is an anesthesiologist at Health Sciences North and an assistant professor at NOSM University. Dr. Mathur cited grim statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO) that suggest 90% of the world’s population experiences poor air quality leading to 7 million preventable deaths every year.

Dr. Marthur added Sudbury once saw the highest cases of lung cancer in North America, but that has since changed.

“It wasn’t until the government put a price on pollution and we started to charge them for putting sulphur dioxide, they started to reduce their output,” he said.

“We’re now starting to see a dramatic drop in lung cancer in northern Ontario. So the World Health Organization’s focus on air, food and water was a take-home point for me.”

Dr. Mathur attended to participate in WHO events and push his research with other activists.

“Ontario should be used as an example (for WHO’s clean air focus). Back in 2000, environmental activists, such as myself, went after the Ontario government for fossil fuels and coal. In 2014, we shut them down,” he said.

“Air quality so dramatically improved it was able to be measured in terms of hospital admissions, asthma-reactive airway disease and now cancer is going down.”

Mathur’s mother, Cathy Orlando, another climate activist, said she feels inspired every time she attends the conference..

“I get the education of a lifetime here. I’m a scientist and an educator by training and I have learned so much.”

Mathur was able to speak with three Canadian senators during COP27, one of whom invited her to speak at the senate in Ottawa sometime after she and her family return from the conference.

Negotiations at COP27 continue with official hoping everything will be wrapped up Monday.