Finding a future that is sustainable for everyone on our planet
Over the past month, the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2021 has raised more than £830,000 for climate justice, partnering with four brilliant charities. As the appeal prepares to close, the charities talk about their missions – and the future of the planet.
Steve Trent, chief executive, Environmental Justice Foundation
“We’ve almost lost our winters, the rainy season does not start on time and, when it does rain, we have too much. We want to stay here, but it will be difficult,” says Abdul Zuffer. We’re in his home in southern Bangladesh, which he had to rebuild after cyclone Aila. As a rice farmer, he tells us of the struggles to cope with the erratic weather and changing climate.
Half the world away, in Sweden, reindeer herder and Indigenous Sami leader Lars-Ánte Kuhmunen tells us an eerily similar story. “We have short winters now, and it rains [rather than snows]. It’s hard to predict.” As we film him checking the herd, he stops abruptly in the snow and pulls out a calf, frozen stiff. “This one was starving to death. That’s climate change.”
EJF works across the world to amplify the voices of those losing their livelihoods, communities and homes to the climate crisis. Alongside their powerful testimony, we use groundbreaking reports and strategic advocacy to call on leaders for an urgent, society-wide transition to zero carbon and a robust international agreement protecting the rights of climate refugees.
We meet with heads of state and decision-makers across the globe, and our films and photography exhibitions have reached hundreds of thousands of people. We also advance the solutions: training and supporting grassroots activists, and working with policymakers. We need to lay out a clear roadmap to a just, sustainable future for people and planet.
Sarah Roberts, chief executive, Practical Action
A key lesson of tackling environmental catastrophe is that the people worst affected are already leading the way in adapting their lives to their new climate reality. They just need the right tools to enable them to thrive and not just survive. This is at the heart of Practical Action’s work.
Our support has helped farmers in Kenya develop resilient and innovative agricultural approaches in the face of erratic weather patterns and farmers in Bangladesh adapt to catastrophic cyclones and flooding.
Achieving a global economy that has nature, people and planet at its heart has always driven us and aligns with the ethos of our founder, the visionary economist EF Schumacher. Other examples include our work in Peru with coffee farmers, in Rwanda with Yogi Tea, and in Malawi with female farmers.
After the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, this year is more important than ever in terms of ensuring financial commitments are met and inequality challenged.
A better world is possible, but no individual or institution can do it alone. Only by working together can we make that happen.
Eva Rehse, executive director, Global Greengrants Fund UK
The people most affected by the climate crisis are also the least responsible for it. Smallholders, fishing communities and Indigenous peoples across the world rely on natural resources and ecosystems that are being disrupted and destroyed by global heating at a terrifying rate. They are disproportionately likely to live in the “sacrifice zones” of fossil-fuel extraction, and to be affected by extreme weather events such as wildfires, flooding, cyclones and drought.
But these same individuals and communities also have the power to resist extractivism, to become more resilient against the effects of the climate crisis, and to enact alternative economic and political approaches rooted in local knowledge and practice.
These locally-led “climate solutions” – communities mobilising against coal power, Indigenous activists defending their forest lands, farmers taking up regenerative agriculture – are what Global Greengrants Fund and our partners at the CLIMA Fund were set up to resource and strengthen. By channelling small-scale, flexible funding to grassroots initiatives, we shift resources and power to communities and movements who are often unable to access any other external support. By trusting people on the frontlines to take the lead, we help to nurture new, bold ideas that are valuable tools in the struggle against the climate crisis.
Madagascar is experiencing drastic change to its weather patterns. Photograph: Michele Burgess/Alamy
Hélène Ralimanana, manager, Madagascar Conservation Centre, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Climate change has thrown our beautiful Madagascar into crisis. Dramatic changes to our weather patterns have increased poverty and driven people to deforest precious habitats in order to survive.
We have seen a big shift in our seasons over recent years. We now experience much longer dry seasons with less rain, which has a devastating impact on agriculture and communities. When the rainy season does come, it can bring flash floods that destroy the rice fields, the main food staple for the majority of the country. This is one of the factors leading to a famine in the south, and increased degradation of the environment as people migrate to other areas.
The Guardian and Observer appeal will enable us to expand projects helping local people adopt sustainable techniques to cultivate yams – a vital crop for nutrition during drought – as well to improve soil quality and increase income through cash crops. We also hope to speed up seed banking across the island, collecting more endemic and precious species, and using these to skill up local communities to restore forests.
At the Madagascar Conservation Centre, we document and preserve the country’s biodiversity, so crucial to improving resilience in a changing climate. We believe our projects can transform lives while protecting Madagascar’s precious biodiversity.
The 2021 Guardian and Observer charity appeal is scheduled to close at midnight on 16 January