Deliver ‘real money’ for climate victims, Uganda’s Vanessa says
Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate shot to global fame in January 2020 for something she hopes will never happen again: she was cropped out of a news agency photo taken of her and four peers at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
After posting a tearful video on Twitter questioning why she — as the only black woman in the picture — had been cut out, the business graduate, now 25, garnered widespread online solidarity.
The Associated Press, which issued the photo featuring the activists including Greta Thunberg, apologised at the time for an “error of judgement” and published the original full image.
“No one deserves to be cropped out or removed from a conversation,” Nakate said on Thursday.
But the fallout ultimately elevated her activism, she said.
“It helped me reach a much bigger audience from that moment because when I spoke, I didn’t speak by myself,” Nakate said. “There were more people who were saying the same thing and asking the same question.”
The incident, which received global media coverage, “reframed my thoughts about race, gender, equity, and climate justice“, Nakate wrote in her 2021 book A Bigger Picture.
The book recounts Nakate’s journey — including her efforts to raise money for solar panels and clean cooking stoves in Ugandan schools — and tells the stories of other young activists working to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on Africa and its people, from Uganda to Kenya and Nigeria.
Loss and damage
At last year’s COP26 UN climate summit in Glascow, Nakate spoke tirelessly about the trail of “loss and damage” climate change is wreaking across Africa, and joined developing countries and aid groups in calling for funding to help vulnerable communities deal with the growing costs they face.
“Loss and damage” has risen up the political agenda as the toll of rising seas and climate changefuelled disasters — from floods to storms and droughts — soars globally, causing hunger, migration and, in some cases, even vanishing land and culture.
Nakate said she will raise the issue again at COP27 in Egypt next month, where she and other activists want agreement on setting up a finance “facility” to help pay for loss and damage from more extreme weather and higher seas.
“We have had enough words spoken, we have held enough meetings when it comes to loss and damage for decades — so what I want from COP27 is action,” Nakate said.
She called for the creation of a fund — which has met with resistance by rich governments over the years —“with real money in it to help people that are suffering right now.”
As a goodwill ambassador for the UN children’s agency Unicef, Nakate helped launch a Unicef report this week that said 559 million children are exposed to frequent heatwaves, with babies and young children especially at risk of heat-related death.
All of the world’s two billion children are expected to be exposed to heatwaves on a regular basis by 2050, threatening their health, it warned.
Fossil fuel ‘lie’
Nakate is scathing of the argument by some African nations, including Uganda, that they should be given more time to exploit their oil and gas reserves to help grow their economies and lift their citizens out of poverty.
People worldwide are struggling to afford energy as electricity and fuel prices rise, she noted, while about 600 million Africans — 43% of the continent’s population — still have no electric power.
“But I also want to be very clear about this: We will not solve energy poverty by funding new fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa,” Nakate said.
“Oil and gas companies have been promising to lift people out of energy poverty for decades, but it’s been a lie ... with the pipelines and the power lines from coal and oil and gas — they never reach those who live at the last mile.”
If projects such as the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline go ahead, the profits from the new infrastructure “will end up in the pockets of already rich people“, while the cost of building it “will suffocate African countries that are already drowning in existing debt“, she added. For the softly spoken activist, the only workable, climatefriendly solution to bring electricity and development opportunities to poor, remote communities is local renewables such as solar home systems and minigrids.
“It’s the cheapest and the fastest way,” Nakate said.