Climate success stories: A pleasant surprise

When the Global Voices team first broached the idea of covering positive climate stories in May, I was apprehensive. I couldn’t imagine that there were enough positive environmental stories in the global majority for us to manage our target of 10 articles, let alone surpass it. Our Human Perspectives on AI spotlight in April exceeded all expectations, both in the number of pieces we got and the response to them, so I was even more worried. But then the pitches began to come in, and stories began to be written. Every day, I saw our tracking spreadsheet grow: communities fighting to save and restore rivers, people coming up with amazing solutions to counter specific effects, a focus on the importance of seeds and food production. Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Nepal, Mozambique, Tuvalu, Yemen, Brazil — people are fighting the good fight all over the world. Positive change is happening The story that really brought home the importance of this coverage for me was this one about the partial restoration of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. I was in my early thirties when I first found out about the ecological devastation of the Aral Sea, and I was in shock for a few months, often telling people, “But did you know it’s GONE? We used to draw it on maps, and it’s GONE!?” So reading that it is being successfully revived was truly a moment of wonder. In a year (no, decade) of seemingly endless bad news, it felt like a gift to read about this. And it happened in a region so ignored by the news in general, with action from the state and help from a favoured villain in mainstream English news: China. That right there is the core importance of telling these stories from the global majority, for the global majority — something we hold very dear at Global Voices. The modern world, while magically connecting us, manages to isolate us. It makes sense that we are so tied to the internet and social media, because it allows us to see and hear things we simply could not offline (like Global Voices stories). You could not read a print newspaper from Cameroon in Dhaka, but you can read it online. Yet the internet also somehow manages to isolate us in our bubbles by presenting us exclusively with what it thinks we want, and we so rarely see the communities fighting the same battles as we are in the global majority unless we actively seek them out. This is why Global Voices has committed to prioritising collaborative stories, and this one on successful conservation efforts around the world really reminded me of the many ways we are all still fighting (and winning) the fight. And it’s important to recognise that progress is being made. People are not in fact trapped on a road to inevitable doom, even — especially — in the chronically under-resourced and usually dismissed global majority. Because, as our Climate Justice Editor Sydney Allen put it in her May editorial, “It is important to share replicable, scalable examples of successful climate action because that’s the only way these strategies can be employed in other communities that need them.” It’s an obvious thing to say, but this spotlight really brought home how important it is to come together as communities to fight our battles and hope to win them. From the Indigenous women in Bolivia organising to fight wildfires and the Indigenous Torwali people of Pakistan trying to save the Swat River, to the Filipinos filing a landmark suit against an oil company and Kenyans reclaiming their land, when people come together, they create movements much more powerful than the sum of their parts. It’s not just the people — sometimes it’s the state Another aspect that this coverage brought to my attention was that governments are not, in fact, entirely ignoring the problems of the climate crisis. Governments all across Central Asia are responding to the annual air pollution crisis (we’re still waiting for this to happen in India, where every year turns the north into a smog-filled hellscape), covered in a story from our excellent partners over at Vlast.kz. That progress in Kazakhstan is driven by the government, as are many of the steps being taken in Barbados to reshape the fishing industry, including passing legislation, implementing recovery plans, and collecting data. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which is facing the very real possibility of losing all its land to rising ocean levels, has begun to build the framework to become a “digital nation” — some might call this a gimmick, but it is perhaps the only way to preserve a national identity in the face of the inadequate response to this global crisis. Women front and centre It also stood out to me how many women’s groups, communities, and collectives are involved in this restorative work. Broadly speaking, women suffer the most from the ill effects of climate change. Women also tend to be entrusted with caring for and fostering community, since it is a kind of emotional, interpersonal and domestic labour. It is no surprise that women end up fighting on the frontlines of this work. In fact, French feminist and ecologist Françoise d’Eaubonne “argued that the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature stemmed from a system deeply rooted in patriarchal values.” I’m quoting our Narrative Analysis Editor Samanta Azpurua, who dived into Ugandan ecofeminism, exploring the narrative that “Women are essential to Uganda’s climate action” for her piece this month. Using the Civic Media Observatory methodology, she pulls up some important context on the history of the feminist and conservation movements in Uganda. That piece is what I call a very GV story: it makes it impossible to ignore the immense intersectionality of life in the global majority. Climate, feminism, Indigenous knowledge, technology used to curtail rights, capitalism, and postcolonialism all have a role to play. We are always stronger in solidarity At the end of the day, it’s the people of the global majority who are and will be the hardest hit by the climate crisis. We are also the people who benefit the most from communication and alliances between global majority nations and civil society groups. We have experiences, inherited knowledge, and approaches that escape the comprehension of the global north, and the more we hear each other’s stories, the better chances we have of surviving the climate crisis.