Boniface Muthoni/Sipa via AP Images
A woman carries water from the Ngite water pan in the village of Vitengeni. Residents of Kilifi, Lamu, and Tana River are facing starvation due to the drought in coastal Kenya, October 7, 2021.
Some 100,000 young people marched to Glasgow’s COP26 venue last week to display their deep dissatisfaction with the glacial pace of the old-guard global leaders tasked with confronting the climate crisis. The Paris climate accord asked signatories to put forward their “best efforts” to reduce carbon emissions, but a September United Nations report found that the current emission reduction targets have missed the mark, and the planet is on a trajectory to warm by an unimaginable 2.7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2100. Now COP26 countries are squabbling over a path toward establishing new decarbonization targets—goals that are likely to come out of the conference—as well as the failure of the developed countries to assist the Global South and other developing regions.
With the failure of global power brokers to take decisive steps or fulfill Paris pledges to compensate the countries that have already sustained the most climate damage, young activists in the most threatened regions of the planet are moving to raise funds to identify and mitigate these serious threats.
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Some of the researchers involved in the first U.N. climate convention—the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—have sharply criticized wealthier nations at COP26 and their failure to follow through on climate justice initiatives, including promises to assist with climate financing, while the United States and other developed countries continue to invest in expensive, unproven technologies that will not get the planet where it needs to be by the end of the decade.
Activists from the Global South face a two-pronged fight: advocating for a sustainable future while also trying to make space for themselves in a movement that often privileges European and American voices.
The people most affected by climate change tend to be concentrated in the Global South. A study conducted by Germanwatch, a Bonn-based sustainable-development advocacy group, found that between 2000 and 2019, Puerto Rico, Myanmar, and Haiti ranked highest for long-term exposure and vulnerability to climate-related risks, collectively suffering 161 severe weather events, several thousand fatalities, and billions of dollars in losses.
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Compared to earlier movements, contemporary climate activists are demographically and geographically more diverse, according to Olaf Corry, professor of global security challenges at the University of Leeds. A survey of 10,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 25 found that “eco-anxiety” was more common in the Global South, where a higher percentage of respondents believed that their family security was threatened by climate change and that the “most valued things will be destroyed.”
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Water buffaloes sit in a dried-out water hole surrounded by animal remains in Lamu, Kenya, March 2017.
The prolonged dry seasons accompanying rising global temperatures pose serious problems for Kenyans living in rural communities where 70 percent of workers are employed in the agriculture industry. During a visit to Lamu, located on Kenya’s southern coast, Fazeela Mubarak, a 33-year-old Kenyan climate activist, saw dozens of rotting hippo and buffalo carcasses lining the shores of water holes near the village, their bodies scorched with sunburn. Droughts have killed scores of animals that get stuck in the muddy water holes created by the lack of rain, and slowly die due to dehydration.
When water holes dry up, elephants and other animals encroach on human settlements to find relief, often destroying local farms and crops as they forage and sometimes injuring or killing villagers. “Seeing a woman whose crops have been destroyed by an elephant overnight is so distressing and upsetting,” says Mubarak, who currently works as a volunteer for the Kenya branch of Fridays for Future, the global climate strike youth movement launched by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2018. “And these are the people who literally have a negative carbon footprint.”
With the help of friends and the Young Muslim Association, a Kenyan charity that funds long-term water solutions and other needs, Mubarak raised the money and resources to finance drilling a borehole to provide water for drinking, crops, and the wildlife. The village of about 200 people previously relied on water pans, circular containers that collect runoff water during rains. Now, when water levels are low, a community caretaker can switch on the solar-powered water pump to replenish the water hole. Still, local solutions like boreholes only do so much. Across Kenya, the ongoing drought has put over a million people at risk of starvation.
Fazeela Mubarak
Workers drill a borehole for water in Lamu, Kenya, January 2018.
Like Mubarak, 16-year-old Hyally Carvalho of Caicó, Brazil, worried about problems in her own city, including garbage accumulation, lack of sanitation, and river pollution. A member of the COP26 Coalition, one of the organizations leading protests in Glasgow, Carvalho hopes that countries will embrace stronger measures to fight the crisis at COP26, but she is ultimately skeptical of the conferences, pointing to the failure of the Paris convening to follow through on financial assistance.
Activists from the Global South face a two-pronged fight: advocating for a sustainable future while also trying to make space for themselves in a movement that often privileges European and American voices. Mubarak says that as a person of color, as a hijabi, and as an activist from an African country, she doesn’t quite fit in with the mainstream environmentalist movement. But the local efforts she worked on to secure the money for one project, a simple borehole in Lamu, transformed the lives of community members. “It was a beautiful sight to see,” she says.
