As poorer nations pay the price for wealthy countries’ pollution, fighting climate injustice is a moral obligation
“I remember thinking: if we make it out alive, how and where are we going to start all over again?” said Vanessa Nieuwenhuizen, who dragged her children to safety through rapidly rising flood waters in Samoa. Others in the Guardian’s interviews with people with personal experience of the climate emergency also talked vividly of the bewilderment and grief caused by wildfires, flooding and drought, of livelihoods lost and lives turned upside down.
“Every tree, every bush, every flower was burned and the whole ecosystem was wiped out,” recalled Antonis Vakos, a beekeeper from the island of Evia in Greece. For some the impact of extreme weather was sudden and catastrophic. For others it meant slow environmental degradation: entire ways of life gradually disappearing amid climate volatility, rising seas, and melting snow and ice. As Daharu Isah, a Nigerian farmer, expressed it: “The weather keeps playing tricks on me.”
