A young activist on his fight for climate change policies to be at the top of the European political agenda
Giorgio Brizio is never at rest. As a 22-year-old Italian student activist, he is always running from meetings to protests to book presentations. During our Zoom interview, he jogs through Milan central station, trying to catch a train to Padova after two hours of sleep.
Today he is attending two presentations for his book: For many years from tomorrow: 27 European activists on climate, peace and people’s rights. The collection of 27 essays, each written by an activist from a different member state of the European Union, was published in Italian and English in May, deliberately timed for just before the European elections.
The book was born out of Brizio’s worry that the increasing presence of defence on the European political agenda would overshadow the global issues that “threaten our whole existence”.
He sees this year’s EU elections as a “watershed moment” because of the 2030 climate target plan. He is not optimistic: “The climate crisis takes the first place on the agenda of young people, but not of political parties, so I’m not expecting these elections to go very well.” In fact, polls suggest far-right parties that want to roll back on climate change measures will be successful.
Brizio did not want to write a manifesto, he says, but rather gather a diverse set of voices, passionate and knowledgeable about the climate crisis, peace, and human rights, to share a collective idea for the future of Europe.
It’s a future in which fossil fuels are replaced with renewable energy sources, socially conservative policies with values of equality, freedom, and human dignity, and hostility towards migrants with solidarity. The latter, Brizio says, is especially close to his heart.
He remembers visiting Marina di Modica, his grandfather’s hometown in the south of Sicily and one of the places in Europe worst affected by the migrant crisis. “Even if you’re not interested in human rights [or] in migration,” he says, simply being in a boat in the south of Italy makes you “scared of finding bodies and clothes instead of jellyfish”.
This fear, anger and anxiety acted as the initial catalyst for his activism. He started following migration campaigns, moved to Berlin at 17 to study, and returned to Italy “insatiably curious, even about simple things”.
Brizio began attending exhibitions and events without any expectations. One of them was a climate protest on the main square of Turin that he stumbled upon on Instagram in February 2019. He chuckles when he tells me he brought a dozen friends with him only to realise there were very few people involved. “We were standing under the rain,” he recalls. “I felt guilty and responsible, so I hoped that we had mistaken the day, the hour, the square — but that wasn’t the case.”
In reality, they were there at the inception of a new wave of the youth climate movement. “A few people there were singing ‘con Greta per il pianeta’, which means ‘with Greta for the planet’, and I was asking myself ‘Who is this Greta?’” Brizio then discovered Thunberg’s speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit (COP24) in Poland and for the first time understood the gravity of the threat that the climate crisis presents to human beings.
Photo Credit: Giorgio Brizio.
“It hit me that climate change is a mother crisis of all the others,” he says. “It’s the primary issue we need to fix. Because if we don’t, we won’t be able to fix anything.”
With that mindset, Brizio became one of the leaders of the climate movement Fridays for Future in Turin and published his first book about climate migrations, We’re not all on the same boat, in May 2021. He graduated in International development and cooperation sciences in Turin and is currently deciding which master’s program to apply to. “I’d just like to do something related to climate and social issues,” he smiles.
Five years after beginning his journey as an activist, Brizio says he sometimes still asks himself why he does it. “It’s because I genuinely enjoy it. And because I think the most powerful and meaningful thing in life is to do things for other people.”
Feature Image: Giorgio Brizio. Photo credit: Giorgio Brizio