Vanessa Nakate

"I’ve always said that climate change is more than statistics, it’s more than weather, but in Turkana I really got to understand those words."

"Many people are calling it an African Cop but it won’t be an African Cop if the communities, the activists are not there."

"Having dominion over the Earth is about responsibility and service to the planet and its people, because God is not a God of waste and exploitation."

"It’s people and stories like this we really need to listen to."

"Across the continent many activists are doing incredible work, and there were many before us and the climate strikes in 2018. When the focus is just on one person it erases other experiences and stories. The solution is not to put faces on the climate movement, it has millions of people who are doing incredible work and organizing in their communities."

"It hasn’t rained for two years. To experience what that means in a community, to see how much people are suffering and how much help they need, I really got to see how the climate crisis is affecting so many lives and destroying so many livelihoods, and that it’s mostly women and children who are suffering the most."

"Africa is on the frontlines of the climate crisis but it’s not on the front pages of the world’s newspapers. Every activist who speaks out is telling a story about themselves and their community, but if they are ignored, the world will not know what’s really happening, what solutions are working. The erasure of our voices is literally the erasure of our histories and what people hold dear to their lives."

"There are people who are looking for answers to a question that needs to be answered through much needed reparations and responsibility from the global north."

"My advice would be that, even as we do activism, we prioritize ourselves, we prioritize our lives, we prioritize our mental health, because the very planet that we are fighting for will need us to exist as well."

"We can only better take care of the planet when we are also doing well. As we advocate and fight for climate justice, it’s really important that young people really prioritize their mental health and their own self care, to find out, what is self care to them?"

"We need to move beyond dialogues because with every dialogue there is a child dying, with every dialogue there is a family migrating looking for sources of water and looking for food, for every dialogue people continue to suffer."

""Your actions matter. No action or voice is too small to make a difference." https://laidlawscholars.network/posts/your-actions-matter"

"You cannot adapt to lost cultures. You cannot adapt to lost traditions. You cannot adapt to extinction."