Written by Her Highness Sheikha Shamma Bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al-Nahyan, UICCA President & CEO
September 06, 2023
This summer, ignoring climate change has become impossible. Emotional, scary scenes of the climate crisis in action are all around us. July was the planet’s hottest month in recorded history, with more than 170 million Americans under heat alerts. Heat deaths, illnesses and burns are rising dramatically. Devastating wildfires burned out of control across Canada, Greece, Hawaii and many other nations in the Northern Hemisphere.
In response, we are rightfully seeing renewed calls for world leaders to put urgent climate action at the top of their agendas.
But looking at the constant daily headlines, I have to ask: Why didn’t we see the same outrage, fear and calls to action last year, when 7 million people were affected by floods in Bangladesh, or one person died every 36 seconds as a result of unrelenting droughts in the Horn of Africa, or when over 90 percent of Iraq’s rivers were contaminated, leaving millions unable to access clean water?
Why are tourists canceling their summer holidays more worthy of our attention than tens of millions of climate refugees who will be displaced from soon-to-be-uninhabitable regions in the coming decades?
For years, the Global South has been facing climate and ecological crises and extreme heat and weather events without the same level of attention as has been paid to this summer’s heat in Europe and North America.
The world’s poorest regions will be devastated if the climate crisis is allowed to escalate; in fact, many areas already are. Yet these communities, which will be the most urgently affected by climate change, are the least enfranchised in global decision-making. For example, only 14 percent of climate financing flows toward the 47 least developed countries. But citizens of the Global South have been innovating adaptation strategies for years, despite working generally with fewer resources and less support.
Climate change has no borders, and neither do solutions. Leaders from the least developed countries that have already begun adapting to extreme conditions; indigenous communities with centuries of knowledge about caring for their land; and nations that have developed and survived in some of the world’s harshest climates — all must have a greater voice in the conversation.
Creating change will require collaboration between all of us, working together to find and implement a multitude of macro- and micro-solutions. This summer’s extreme heat has opened the world’s eyes to the fact that we are already in a state of climate emergency. Can we afford to leave any stone unturned in the search for effective solutions?
In my work at UICCA, I meet so many inspiring entrepreneurs, innovators and change-makers from the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. I am deeply optimistic about the ambitious, creative and practical solutions that they are creating and implementing.
For example, agriculture and farming innovation is powering local food production, reducing supply chain emissions and cutting food waste in the MENA region’s “food deserts.” Pure Harvest operates 220,000 sq. m of energy-efficient farmland in the middle of the UAE’s desert, providing the first locally grown produce year-round, while Egypt’s FreshSource was launched after its founders discovered that a third of Egyptian-grown crops were wasted due to poor post-harvesting, storage and transportation. Today, they have digitized the supply chain, connecting producers and buyers to ensure more of the proceeds go directly to farmers and less of the crops are lost to wastage.
In construction, architects and designers are coming up with brilliant ideas to reduce the impact of one of the world’s highest-emitting industries. In 2021, the UAE’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, “Wetland,” was awarded the Golden Lion prize for presenting a new, sustainable, salt-based concrete created from the leftover saltwater produced by desalination. In Iraq, Kesk offers green building services and products that provide consistent, sustainable power to communities suffering from electricity cuts amid extreme heat.
What constantly impresses me is that so many of these initiatives are led by fearless young people, such as the Green Generation Initiative, a Kenyan nonprofit that has planted more than 30,000 trees, founded by 27-year-old Elizabeth Wathuti, and the UAE’s Peec Mobility, which ingeniously retrofits petrol cars like taxis to turn them into electric vehicles, founded by Zach Faizal, who is just 23 years old.
In Bangladesh, Bushra Afreen has been appointed Asia’s first chief heat officer, while Sierra Leone’s Eugenia Kargbo is the first in Africa. These two women are ground-breakers, working to protect their communities from extreme heat in an increasingly vital position that we will see being implemented in many more municipalities around the world in the years to come — hopefully including Abu Dhabi.
These examples are proof that when people are on the front lines of climate change, they step up to lead. How can I not be optimistic when so many of these ideas have the potential to become world-changing, practical solutions that can create a real impact in the journey to a more sustainable future?
However, to make that happen, we need governments, intergovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations and corporations to intentionally and collectively empower these change-makers, providing the support they need to realize their ideas at pace.
The world’s poorest regions will be devastated if the climate crisis is allowed to escalate; in fact, many areas already are.
It is a long and expensive journey to take an innovative concept and make it a reality, particularly at the scale and speed that the urgency of this crisis requires. For many founders, accessing funding can be an insurmountable challenge — particularly in the Global South, where there is less access to venture capital, green financing infrastructure or support for innovation startups.
Countries and entrepreneurs across this vast region do not only need aid, like the loss and damage fund agreed at COP27, but also impactful and strategic investment and increased access to green capital that enables ideas to create an impact.
Global South is not a passive victim in the climate emergency, but an active participant in the fight. The world must listen to the Global South, learn from us, invest in us and make sure no voice and no solution is left behind.
