Climate Change Activists

"I believe education is a powerful weapon that we can use to conquer climate change."

"If international representatives don’t recognize the current dangers of climate change in African countries, there will be global repercussions."

"As youths, we are a powerful force and our actions can make a huge difference."

"Start locally, find ways to raise your profile, and utilise social media to amplify your efforts. Remember, the real impact of your work is what truly resonates"

"Keep striving, keep dreaming. We are all working together towards a more sustainable, equitable future. The future we envision is within reach, and each action, each voice, is important. That is my message"

"We’ve equipped over 10,000 women with the necessary resources – organic fertilisers, indigenous seedlings, and tools – to become game-changers, channelling their traditional knowledge towards environmental conservation"

"Women have a lot to give – we cannot solve the climate crisis without women"

"I know first-hand how it consumes our time, which is why I identify as an ecofeminist. The water crisis disproportionately impacts women, forcing them to trek for very long distances. This hinders our self-empowerment and steals opportunities"

"We succeeded in bringing more young people to the climate justice space. Now we have many young people who want to do something for their communities and countries as well"

"Science has forecasted, many more countries will join this list if we did not take the right measures now, and if we did not start adaptation specially in Africa."

"The strongest and most valuable asset is having other other options"

"The second valuable asset is knowledge."

"Human survival, in a situation of resources degradation, hunger, poverty and uncontrolled climate migration, will make conflict an inevitable result."

""I have zero doubts that the climate movement around the world will succeed and come to a very good result. What I’m actually worried about is you. You have to choose the right side of this battle”."

"“Our main mandate was to advise the Secretary General on his climate priority, his climate strategy and on engagements with various countries”"

"“The students held demonstrations against some of the dictatorship’s actions. The next day, some people from the regime came to our exam hall where we were taking our first semester exams. They tore up the exam papers and they threw two students from the window. One of them died. One of them was seriously injured. It was terrifying”."

""There are a lot of current situations where climate change is causing conflicts and threatening the security of populations. When I say security, I mean securities; energy security, food security, water security amongst others"."

"“If we continue discussing one problem without discussing other related problems, it's not going to be enough. Finding holistic, wicked solutions to a problem is the only way we can survive.”"

""Many countries boast about pledging carbon-neutrality by 2030 or 2050. But I don´t think these pledges are a proper expression of climate ambition or something to be proud of. For us living through the climate crisis with continuous impacts, this time frame seems too far in the future. We are now in 2020 and the impacts we are feeling are already very severe. Government pledges don’t mean much to us. We need concrete action now."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"If we avoid the worst and we're able to adapt in a way where we really kind of changed our approach to things like equity and how we deal with the environment. If we do that, and I want my son to know I was a part of it, even just a small part of it, but part of it, and if we don't and we fail, I want him to know that I tried."

"She’s a gem."

"I’m angry that the people of this country still choose not to acknowledge that social injustice happens on a daily basis in daily actions of everyone who lives here. But most of all, I’m angry that my family, my friends, my neighbors, after three weeks and two hurricanes, still have to wonder, when is this country going to look at us at human beings. The people of the Gulf Coast should no longer be referred to as those people. We are your people. We are citizens of this country. We need your support, and we need your help, and we deserve that. On behalf of those who have lost everything, the Pichon family in Slidell, Louisiana, would like to say to you and to the President of the United States, we need action today. I’m hopeful that today we will choose action instead of indifference. I implore you to care enough about inequality in this country, rather than turn your head away from the injustices not just in the Gulf Coast, but in Appalachia, in D.C. and southeast."

"My message to you, in the midst of all of this loss and in the shadow of fault and blame is that I’m angry. I’m angry that it took a storm of this magnitude to open the eyes of all those who would laugh and academically rebut the assertion of continued racial inequality. There are those who would suggest that people like being poor, that people wanted to stay in the path of the hurricane. We can look to the media and the hue of those who are accused of looting versus those who were accused of commandeering to see there are tangible injustices in this society today."

"We must reframe our understanding of the problem. Climate change is not the problem; climate change is the most horrible symptom of an economic system that has been built for a few to extract every precious value out of this planet and its people. To survive this next phase of our human existence, we will need to restructure our social and economic systems to develop our collective resilience. We must transform from a disposable, individual society into one that sees our collective long-term humanity, or else we will not make it. We must acknowledge that the only way you're going to survive is for us to figure out how to reach a shared liberation together."

"Climate gentrification that happens in anticipation of sea-level rise is what we're seeing in places like Miami, where communities that were kept from the waterfront are now being priced out of the high ground, where they were placed originally, as people move away from the Coasts. And climate migration is just one small part, but it's going to have ripple effects in both coastal cities and cities in the interior."

"we know that if the victims of the original sins of this country can get together and form a united front, we can actually change this country."

"We are not a people who are energized by hatred. I come from people who are energized by joy."

"the FEMA regulations aren't meant for the most vulnerable communities. The disaster process of this country are meant for the middle class...it sounds strange, right?...except the truth of it is that all of the laws in this country are meant for the middle class at best. There is a large swath of people who are never included."

"We’re dealing with multiple impacts… wet periods, dry periods, sea level rise, increased temperatues. That’s why there’s such a sense of urgency behind adaptation and mitigation, because the window for us to make decisions on how we’re going to prevent the worst is closing, and if we don’t take action now, then we’re going to be dealing with, in the words of the IPCC, “horrible” consequences."

"Migration is a huge issue, not just for the Americas, but also for other parts of the world. When we talk about the many impacts of climate change, what they mean, I think a major end result are climate refugees."

"Whether you like it or not, we’re going to have to deal with climate change, and we’re going to have to adapt. A lot of people say, just do what they do in the Netherlands, or New Orleans, build seawalls, but we can’t. We sit on a very porous limestone rock, so when the sea level goes up, it doesn’t just come up over the coast on the beaches, it comes in underground into the acquifer, and we get our drinking water from that acquifer. It raises the water table causing inland flooding and it also contaminates that potable water. Communities are spending millions of dollars moving well fields inland because of salt water intrusion."

"I also think that because we have more international perspective we’re not as susceptible to the campaign of disinformation that’s being pushed by the polluting companies. These arguments seem to be most upfront in American media. But when you look at international media, whether Telemundo or BBC, they’re presenting the information in a more practical way. They’re talking to scientists, they’re talking to experts, and when you do that, there is not a debate."

"The list of places that have the largest and/or the fastest growing Latino populations are also the places that are most vulnerable to sea level rise. And practically speaking there’s a large portion of the Latino population that works outdoors in the environment whether it's agriculture or construction, and so we are more sensitive to environmental changes."

"The sea level rise that we’re going to see in the next 15 years is going to transform Florida, it’s going to transform many parts of the world, it’s going to create major problems with flooding and drinking water. We’ve got a lot of science, we know that climate change is happening, we know that it’s human-caused, and we know that we’re starting to see the impacts now. But this information is not being sufficiently reflected in our policies at the state or the federal level."

"Reduce the amount of meat that you eat. Think about transportation, how you can reduce the amount of flying that you do. How can you not drive as much as you do? If you're going to buy a house, think about energy efficiency and think about what you really need in terms of house. Do you need a 5,000 square foot house or 15,000 or 1500 be okay?"

"How can we look at our kids and say we're fighting climate change and we're driving SUVs and eating steak every night and soaking up energy. It's hypocritical. We need to kind of walk the walk."

"So ocean acidification for folks that work in, for example, fishing industries, storms for anybody that lives along the coast, sea level rise for folks that live along the coast as well and heat, which is pretty much everybody. So I think to think that anyone is immune to the impacts of climate change is delusional."