Beyond the UN, young feminists drive climate justice action
As young feminists, we understand that racism, sexism, poverty and inequality are structural issues exacerbated by the crisis that climate change poses. This is a decolonial and holistic vision of the type of climate justice that young feminists are working towards around the world.
During COP24, the most recent United Nations climate negotiations held in Katowice, Poland, teen activist Greta Thunberg told leaders and governments around the world that they lacked the maturity to take real climate action. Normally at the UN youth speeches are applauded before being ignored in favour of the corporate interests that dominate the talks. But Thunberg’s radical demands have ignited the movement with thousands of youth all over the world demanding real climate action. Members of the Young Feminists for Climate Justice global network were also present at COP24 working with other progressive climate justice coalitions and movements. Young feminists stand for climate justice by strengthening collective demands and by reminding governments, particularly from the Global North, that the causes and impacts of climate change are also rooted in a system that has led to centuries of colonization and capitalist extractivism.
The Young Feminists for Climate Justice network (YFCJ) is a space for those working towards climate and gender justice around the world. This group was initiated by young feminists at COP21 in 2015, and now includes hundreds of members. The local work of the network’s many members exemplifies how we are taking direct action to empower our communities towards healing justice and transformational liberation.
Realizing that our perspectives are usually marginal in the mainstream media, as a network we open and hold new spaces to share our stories and experiences on the ground. One example of this effort is the Young Feminists for Climate Justice Storytelling Project launched at the UN climate negotiations. The collaborative project spotlights stories of young feminist groups organising for ecological justice in the global south and how they incorporate self and collective care practices within their activism, and ultimately communicate that for us the current global situation is an emergency.
As a young queer feminist and member of YFCJ, I do not expect governments to do what they have failed to do in more than two decades. I participate in this space to stand alongside other young feminists and climate justice activists to build trustworthy relations, thread common strategies, and amplify the reality on the ground: people on the frontlines of climate change, particularly in the global south — communities of color, indigenous and rural communities, women, queers, and youth — are pushing back against corporate extractivism and government inaction, while providing a route to a just transition. As Aneesa Khan, member of the YFCJ network and co-coordinator of the SustainUs youth delegation at COP24 stated at a Women and Earth’s Climate Action Network (WECAN) event: ¨we live in a time of tipping points, as war, racism, poverty and a plethora of other issues drive society over the edge. Every single one of these problems is being exacerbated by the worst planetary crisis we have ever faced: climate change¨.
Phillip Brown, a twenty year-old Jamaican activist, is a YFCJ network member who is outspoken about the geopolitics of climate change and corporate extractivism. They consider themselves a queer liberator putting their own body on the frontlines to tell the story of how black and brown queer bodies have been systematically left out of the implementation of climate solutions.¨Developed countries like the US, and the European Union, are historically the largest polluters and contributors to the climate crisis. (…) Warming seas caused by climate change warns us The Big Storm will happen sooner than later, and when it does, it will be black queer bodies like mine on the frontlines¨, writes Brown, who also works with youth of color across the USA organising training programs to empower them with tools to conduct social and environmental activism, advocating towards transformational change.
Other members of the Young Feminist Climate Justice Network work hard to heal their communities from these oppressions by re-centering the ambitions of those historically at the margins, like Ruth Nyambura. A Kenyan eco-feminist and political ecologist, and also part of the Women and Gender Constituency at COP, Nyambura’s academic research on food politics in Africa elevates the experiences of those at the frontlines of coal power plants, pipelines, and extractive corporations, especially the Rural Women Assembly self-organized alliance in southern Africa, which is driving transnational mobilizations that challenge the foundations of industrialized agriculture. Mmabatho Motsamai, a queer feminist and developmentalist from Botswana is the founding editor of The Afrolutionist, an online platform that features radical young Africans working on economic, social, cultural and environmental justice through a human rights lense. ¨I am deeply passionate about reducing traumas [in my community] (…) I want a fairer, accessible life for all”, says Motsamai, who has also been part of different community-based feminist coalitions in Southern Africa.
For many of us who are part of the YFCJ network, and for those who have always seen the protection of nature as a profoundly feminist issue, the histories of disempowerment, displacement, and cycles of violence particularly towards black, brown, and indigenous women and queer bodies come in connection to the exploitation of our lands. This perspective of connection — which sees parallels between the violence borne by bodies and territories — also sees links in the solutions and alternatives we can propose from the grassroots. For Gabriela Gonzales, a Peruvian geographer and part of the activist collective TierrActiva Peru, Latin American ecofeminism proposes an alternative to development that is shaped by indigenous beliefs, where confronting the common subjugation of territories and the female body to colonization and patriarchy must be at the forefront of a just transition. Through research techniques like participatory cartography, Gonzales works with indigenous communities and organizations to deepen local knowledge on socio-environmental issues like extractivism and deforestation, to then support the implementation of autonomous and territorial governance.
From Aotearoa (Māori for New Zealand), indigenous feminist India Logan-Riley explains that youth Māori activism is grounded in honoring and strengthening their ancestral cultural connection to lands and waters. Part of the group Te Ara Whatu, they organize in solidarity with trans* indigenous people to reclaim non-binary identities, “a decolonising act because so often the white man would assume a right to speak on indigenous issues because he had studied them with the “superior” scientific approach (…) [these stories] alter how we perceive ourselves and the legacies we have to protect because it changes how we emerged as humans and came to be on our land”, states Logan-Riley. Her feminism directly challenges the engraved mindset of white male leadership in the international environmentalist movement.
The type of intersectional work that these young feminists are carrying out shows how structures of exploitation come hand in hand with other forms of oppression―racism, sexual, gender, and ableist discrimination―and how our work towards justice addresses them in a systemic, interconnected way. This is the kind of climate justice that we are fighting for, one where people’s intersecting demands drive international climate policy instead of the greenwashed environmental protection schemes, the “sustainable development” model, or fossil fuel corporate interests.
Such demands were articulated in the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, a manifesto that was presented at COP24 and supported by members of the YFCJ network. This set of demands is a collective and international statement assembled in 2018 centering Southern movements demands, with the input and collaboration of diverse climate justice organizations. These demands shape what climate justice means for us: to keep fossil fuels in the ground; to reject all false solutions to the climate crisis, like geoengineering techniques or carbon markets that commodify our forests; to advance rights based, feasible, and fair solutions that support decentralized, community-owned energy production; to honor the carbon emission fairshares and the historical debt that industrialized nations owe to developing countries; and to end the corporate capture of the climate negotiations.
Our demands contrast strongly with The Paris Agreement — the latest UN document outlining the type of climate action to be taken on by the international community. This agreement lacks political ambition from industrialized countries to reduce carbon emissions, has meant insufficient and inadequate climate finance pledges, and exemplifies an unwillingness to get rid of the fossil-fuel industry and corporate power that rule behind these negotiations. This intergovernmental agreement is simply incompatible with the need for a just and equitable transition towards a renewable energy matrix by 2030, as underlined by the climate science community in the latest IPCC report on 1.5 degrees.
The historical debt to those most impacted by climate change and who have done the least to cause it is continuously and systematically ignored by rich, industrialized countries and also, whether deliberately or not, by many northern NGOs, activists, and media. Meanwhile, most developing governments keep pushing for the fossil-fueled right to development. The UN climate negotiations is not the space to ultimately defeat capitalism, patriarchy, nor discrimination, but it serves as a leverage point for young feminist and climate justice activists to come together, build upon our own narratives of liberation and resistance that are lived and enacted in our local contexts, and strategize our political goals. In times when far right political militarization is on the rise in many parts of the world, and the systematic harassment and erasure of community leaders and land defenders increases — many of them youth and women — we are taking advantage of the few opportunities that we have to openly advocate for our demands. And we are making our non-negotiable climate and feminist politics clear.
- To further engage in young feminist activism on climate justice, click here to join the Young Feminists for Climate Justice Facebook group.
- Thank you to Ani Hao, Media Consultant at FRIDA |The Young Feminist Fund, for their editorial advice on this piece.
