Climate crisis, Pandemic and Gender Inequality
An interview with Aliza Ayaz, international climate activist, United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.
Replenish Earth had the opportunity to interview Aliza Ayaz about her climate journey, the role of the youth in decision making processes and her nuanced and insightful understanding of systemic inequalities and the skewed effects of climate crises.
Aliza Ayaz is an international climate activist and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. She is known for setting up the Climate Action Society at UCL which helped inspire UK-wide youth action against climate change, leading to the climate emergency declaration at the UK Parliament. In October 2020 she was appointed as the United Nations youth ambassador for Sustainable Development Goals 13 (SDG13).
What inspired you to get into climate activism? Did you always want to pursue this career/karma trajectory?
My father Mohammad Ayaz and my mother Dr. Rana Najmi inspire me, being who they are as individuals. Their identities are not limited to a self centred live, eat, sleep, work, repeat cycle. Rather, what drives them as humans is compassion in every way and form for everyone — even the random person one passes on the street, the people that become family through relationships, domestic workers, traffic wardens, villagers, children, the elderly, housewives, bankers, actors etc. The world is more than just its material form.
This is the time to act, as we have an opportunity to press the “reset button” is the gist of my climate activism journey. We have that opportunity post-COVID to unlock green recovery and to take action now, as a more environmentally conscious framework for the future will create healthier and more resilient societies.
You have a bachelor’s degree in Population Health Sciences and a masters in the field of Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology, both from UCL. During this rather unprecedented Covid health crisis, how has your positionality on the impact of climate change on health emergencies and morbidities strengthened or changed?
Each region of the world experiences climate change and its impacts on health differently due to the variations in location-specific climate exposures and unique societal and demographic characteristics. My BSc helped me understand how we can support states, counties, cities, tribes, and territories to assess how climate change will affect their communities, identify vulnerable populations, and implement adaptation and preparedness strategies to reduce the health effects of climate change, be it via air pollution, natural disasters, temperature-related deaths. I know now that its only through informal community focus groups and surveys that we can capture community-level knowledge and perceptions of climate change and water safety.
You organised the first UK-wide “Sustainability Symposium” which won the Student’s Union “Event of the Year” award. In this new normal, given Covid restrictions, what are your suggested strategies for coalescing and bringing people together without losing momentum?
I have realised that since I was able to have such a great impact by myself, others could do the same! Climate Action Society was born from my experiences translating climate information. The way that CAS works is that we give students community service hours for translating climate information into different campaigns like recycling, vegan food, urban redevelopment.
My advice is to build experiences for people. Make climate action an experience that they cannot forget about. By doing this, we can reach new demographics of people, especially people of colour.
This is what we did at the world’s first Sustainability Symposium — welcoming 400 people in 2018, 600 in 2019 and growing more and more every year in our reach because we refuse to believe in exclusivity.
You talk about the deadly heatwave that grappled Pakistan in 2015 and the alarming implications it had for the indigenous population, in terms of access to healthcare and basic amenities like safe drinking water. In developing countries like Pakistan and India, declaring a climate emergency comes possibly last on its political agenda/rhetoric. It’s all about “development”. What can the youth do in times like this when you have little to no political or social backing?
Current decision-making processes have excluded young people, but with the UK hosting COP26 later this year, we need to take the lead in putting youngsters at the centre stage.
Post-COVID, important decisions will be taken on future investments in infrastructure and the economy — including the next generation of leaders. In this process, it is essential that they buy into, own and drive those solutions forward.
Work with companies, be it Nestle, Unilever, EFU or Foodpanda, pitch a sustainability job to them and tell them you are the asset that will make it happen.
The pandemic has exposed inequalities in society with significant negative impacts on Black and Asian communities in particular. We need to expand our understanding of why this is and develop policies to address these disparities. Such lessons are indeed relevant, and do translate to policy making in climate change. We must ensure a just and equitable transition to a green economy.
You also talk about the disproportionate effect climate crises have on women of colour and children. As South East Asian women, interacting with a global audience and exerting our privileges, how do we take up space? How can we be heard? What are the ways in which we can reclaim our power?
Depriving women of power and resources is not only unfair, it’s short-sighted. I rank the education of girls as one of the most powerful ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Educated women have more productive agricultural plots, steward their land better and have fewer children.
With respect to women smallholders, inequality in assets, inputs, and support means women produce less on the same amount of land. Closing the gender gap would improve the lives of women and children — and fight climate change.
Let me exemplify: let’s take a woman who hasn’t been lucky enough to go to school or university, but to be working in their agricultural land,and she has grown up thinking that her life is just harvesting crops. That’s reality in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and in many more low income countries. Increasing the yields of women farmers helps keep forests standing — since farmers don’t need to expand their crops into nearby forests when their existing land is productive — we can reduce emissions by 2.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050. That’s the emissions equivalent of taking 445 million passenger vehicles off the road per year. The fact is, the more power women have, the healthier their communities and our climate will be.
Secondly, be aware. As a woman, you deserve the same resources (such as training, financing, and property rights) as your male counterparts. When women earn their own wages, they typically reinvest 90 per cent of those earnings back into their families and communities.
In an interview of yours published on ‘The Story Exchange’ by Zoya Hassan, you talk about the misogyny experienced by young, women activists in your home country. This is a persistent trend experienced by not just activists but most people who are not cis-het men in the global South. What is your advice to people from marginalised gender identities coming from and working within rather traditional contexts?
Empowering women and girls and strengthening gender equality in fragile settings can help transform vicious circles into virtuous ones; supporting inclusive societies, sustaining peace and piloting development.
Where women actively participate in peacebuilding and statebuilding processes, the chances for peace and resilience improve. At the same time, these processes offer unique opportunities to increase women’s rights and empowerment. In recent years, the international community has increasingly recognised the importance of these connections. This is reflected in an increase in support for gender equality in fragile contexts over the past years. However, more can and must be done to ensure resources are used effectively to achieve meaningful progress in these settings.
Many of the recommendations call on us to break down silos of knowledge and action; to ‘join up’ disconnected policy frameworks on gender equality and fragility, to develop integrated analytical tools that highlight the wide range of connections between these issues, and to match global commitments with country- level capacity on gender relations in fragile contexts.
Interviewed and compiled by Geethika.
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