Three artworks of our Sponsor Children have been selected to represent Bangladesh in the BEYOND Spacesuit project executed by the Space for Art Foundation. This project is reflecting child and young people's voices on climate change issues for a Safe Earth.

A spacesuit has been made with these artworks imprinted depicting children’s vision for the Earth as they see it from space. Apart from Bangladesh, the artworks have been collected from children of 100 countries around the globe and printed onto the NASA spacesuit. These artworks will also be exhibited at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, UK in November 2021. The selected artworks were selected from the participation of 1033 children from our 15 working areas in the artwork competition in February and March 2021. During the competition at the local level, one of the participants, Tamalika shared, “In my drawing, I drew a picture of a flooded area. Natural disasters such as rising temperatures cause ice to melt, resulting in increased water levels and flooding. Houses are being submerged in the floods; people are facing many difficulties. There is a crisis of safe water and there are difficulties in living. People are being forced to live in different places at different times and are being affected by various diseases like diarrhea, cholera. To get rid of this, we should deal with natural disasters. Instead of cutting down trees, large quantities of trees should be planted to deal with natural disasters. Eco-friendly factories should be set up away from residential areas to protect people from factory pollution”.

Apart from this, one of our child’s voices on climate justice is reflected in The Daily Mirror, a national newspaper in the UK in 2021, this newspaper is running a feature about what children think about climate change and what they want to see happen to protect the planet. In this newspaper, our child has reflected her thinking to the world leaders that the leaders should do to address to ensure climate change. Furthermore, this year the issue of climate change has been getting priority to discuss with child rights issue because children are being exposed to climate and environmental hazards, and stresses. Discussion sessions and Child hearings were conducted with the community people where they all agreed to reduce the use of plastic, expand tree plantation program, and increase advocacy with government bodies to work combinedly for the community-level initiative. During the hearing, Aduri, a member of the child forum in LRP-52, Kurigram said, “Children are mostly affected by climate change but there is no mechanism to protect the children, we are proposing to the respective authority to take some programmatic interventions which are for child health, child protection especially for preventing child marriage”.

After the hearing in LRP-43, Biswambarpur, Shamima (13) a participant shared, “Me, along with other Child Forum members requested to the UP (Union Parishad) chairman to repair the 4 most important roads of our community as, during monsoon, it becomes muddy & broken. It creates problems for us to go to school. Even we can’t go to the hospital due to the condition of the road. We also requested him to take proper steps to prevent river erosion. The chairman of Union Parishad assured us to take the initiative through LGED (Local Government Engineering Department) in this regard. The chairman ensured that very soon the repair work of that road will be started”.