Your say / climate crisis
‘Climate justice is about community building’
In November, Indigenous Amazonians arrived at global climate change conference COP30 in Belem, Brazil. “We want to reach a consensus where Indigenous territories are no longer sacrificed,” said Lucia Ixchiu, from the Kʼiche tribe in Guatemala.
A report by Earth Insight states that Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPs and LCs) look after over one billion hectares of tropical forest. The same report says that in the Amazon 31 million hectares, making up 12 per cent of Indigenous land, have gas and oil blocks and 9.8 million hectares have mining initiatives that risk groups such as the Waorani to pollution and displacement.
Over 5,000 miles away from Brazil, in Bristol, similar organisations, activists and scholars are advocating for climate justice that shares the ethos of these Indigenous groups. This shared struggle for a just and equitable world drives me as a youth climate reporter at Bristol24/7.
Through my work I have aimed to highlight voices and issues that are too often left out of climate advocacy. From covering personal journeys to institutional and organisational strides in the field, my experience has revealed that climate journalism is needed now more than ever.
Tackling misinformation, dispelling myths and contributing to public literature on climate justice is key – especially for young people to rely on amid growing fear and pain about the state of the world and the planet.
I’ve had the privilege of celebrating the brilliant work of people and environmental organisations in Bristol who care about the planet and its people. As my favourite quote by American civil rights figure James Baldwin goes: “The world is held together…by the love and passion of very few people.”
But celebrating isn’t enough anymore.
Speaking to climate activists like Gnisha Bevan of Nature Rising or Ruth Nortey who works with refugees and disabled people in the environment sector, or reporting on Gaie Delap talking about her arrest with Just Stop Oil and the dangerous precedent that set for peaceful protest in this country – all posed questions of enormous grief and unparalleled hope.
While all these stories originated from grief and anxiety owing to the continued destruction of our planet, they all preach hope and action for the present and future, standing on lessons from the past.
Young people, global majority activists, charities and events in Bristol and the region are addressing the climate emergency in ways the mainstream sector doesn’t, because climate change affects various sections of society differently depending on race, socio-economic background, location and age.
The destruction of millions of hectares of Indigenous land points to a cruel irony, one that is shared by Global Majority populations and the larger Global South: these groups and countries contribute the least to the harmful effects of climate change but are negatively affected the most.
News science magazine EOS reported that the United States of America alone has contributed to 40 per cent of the climate breakdown, followed by the European Union at 29 per cent. So where is the accountability for the Global North? And why are Global Majority voices silenced in the larger climate breakdown discourse?
The pattern repeats at a micro-level, and young brown and black people in Bristol have already identified this gap and are working towards bridging it.
When I reported on young organisers at Babbasa tackling gentrification and climate justice, they pointed out the interconnectedness of these issues. Gentrification causes existing communities to be displaced for profit. Climate and housing breakdown are operating as one, rooted in race and class.
Marginalised communities who rely on public transport, who consume less, are the ones being displaced. What the mainstream climate discourse still grapples to understand is that no community is expendable when development decisions are made.
This is why I’m passionate about continuing to report on climate issues—to make these realities visible, to uphold the voices and experiences of those bearing the greater cost.
My work is deeply personal because I carry the terror of inheriting a system that is fundamentally flawed.
For young people, especially those on the sidelines, this anxiety compounds with everything else we carry: watching our ancestral homelands become uninhabitable, seeing family members in the Global South face floods, droughts, displacement—the worst impacts of a crisis they didn’t create.
The grief, and the fight for a liveable future, is multilayered and often insurmountable.
Growing up in an Indian household, I understood how sustainability has always been ingrained in non-Western cultures and households, long before it became “cool”. Rotational farming, forest stewardship, water conservation—all of these have always been regular practice in South Asian cultures, rooted in strong ties with land and resources.
This is why I’m passionate about diversifying climate reporting: because it’s important to recognise that environmentalism is rooted in the lived and personal experiences of communities from across the world.
This is also why I’m drawn to stories centred on lived experiences—because the personal is always political. Working on Laughter’s profile, I understood the structural barriers that exclude people from access to nature.
Gaie’s panel discussion revealed the state’s response to the climate emergency. The young people at Babbasa demonstrate that climate justice is about community building. These stories and others are vessels that document how systems affect ordinary people on a daily basis.
Until we centre people who are bearing the greatest costs of a highly volatile world in our storytelling and funding decisions, we can’t implement any kind of justice and equity, especially in climate action.
Through my work as a climate reporter, I’ve found great hope that young people’s worries are being treated as evidence to bridge the gap in climate action, and that members of other marginalised communities are seen and respected as experts, not victims.
The future is indeed weeping, but it’s also organising and reimagining a better and fairer world. It’s important we tell those stories too.
Main photo: Medha Ghosh
Medha took part in Bristol24/7’s Youth Climate Reporter scheme, funded by Bristol City Council and our members, which aimed to amplify underrepresented voices and broaden the range of perspectives and stories we tell on environment issues. Read all of her articles here.
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