We must honour indigenous values to fight “the defining challenge of our time”

This blog was first published by Um So Planeta in Portuguese and can be found here.

I was born on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji, in 1992. This was the year of the Earth Summit in Rio, when 154 nations signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels were at 359.99 parts per million (ppm) – already above the ‘safe’ levels of 350ppm which were breached in 1986, six years before I was born. 

Twenty-nine years later, I’m a youth activist and participant in my own global summit process, as Youth Vice-Chair of Action Track 3 – Boosting nature positive production – for the United Nations Food Systems Summit. I’m writing this for the occasion of International Youth Day this year, where the theme – “Transforming Food Systems: Youth Innovation for Human and Planetary Health” – also reflects the importance of hearing and acting on youth priorities in this Food Systems Summit process.

It’s fair to say that global efforts to tackle climate change over my lifetime have been hugely inadequate. Emissions of greenhouse gasses continue to rise, with current CO2 levels over 415 ppm and counting. Thousands of scientists have declared a climate emergency and the world is feeling the pressure – from heat waves to fires to floods, to melting ice caps to drought, and in the first declared case in Madagascar, climate-change induced famine.  

In Fiji too, we are suffering some of the worst and disproportionate impacts, of this climate crisis, which we have done little to contribute to causing (the Pacific contributes 0.03% of greenhouse gas emissions), a mere drop in a bucket. My home is a beautiful, biodiverse collection of some 300 islands covering around 1.3 million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. For large oceans states like Fiji, made of maritime islands in the path of tropical cyclones, climate change is an existential threat. This is one reason I joined other young leaders to co-found the Alliance for Future Generations (Fiji), to help raise awareness of our plight, and to bring young people together to fight for and build a fairer, equitable and sustainable future for people and planet. 

The terrifying experiences of living through multiple climate-change induced disasters such as the recent Tropical Cyclones Winston, Harold and Yasa have fuelled my activism to build resilience amongst our young people.

Cyclone season in Fiji is half the year – November to April – and growing longer and more severe. Fiji as a small island nation holds virtually no responsibility for contributing to climate change, yet through these frequent and intense extreme weather events, people lose homes, ancestral lands, burial grounds, and see disruption to livelihoods, health services, agriculture, and tourism sectors and also to the extreme, the loss of lives. 

Back in the village the fisherfolks who would go fishing would share how the fish are growing scarcer and moving to deeper parts of the ocean. Community members would also share that native fruit trees are not bearing fruits like they used to in the past. Climate-induced disasters have also devastated local vegetables and crop production which has led to hikes in the costs of healthy foods at the local markets. Those with lower disposable income are unable to afford the exorbitant prices of these vegetables and crops, and the alternative is purchasing processed foods which are cheaper and often unhealthy. Fiji, as well as the Pacific region have one of the world’s highest statistics for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which has over the years also begun to put pressure on our public health systems. Approximately 80% of deaths in Fiji are attributed to NCDs, and this is almost consistent across the Pacific.

The climate hurts our food systems and our broken food systems hurts the climate – but it doesn’t have to be this way. These issues are not isolated events: they are systemic trends that show us that the climate emergency is already biting in more ways than one – and that we need to fight back.

Growing up in this context and experiencing multiple forms of inequalities and injustices, has led me through a journey to become an activist. My activism has been influenced by different parts of my personality: as a young person inheriting a global crisis, as an indigenous young man, and as a member of the LGBT community. Our struggles are interconnected – everyone deserves the basic human rights, equality, and a healthy, liveable planet.

The Pacific’s indigenous communities have a long history of living harmoniously with nature, fishing, and growing crops. In all this work, we have come to realise just how important it is to value our traditional and indigenous knowledge and value systems. Our forefathers and the many generations before us have cared for the land and sea, taken from it what was enough for them and protected and managed the resources so that we may also benefit from it.  They planted and were able to preserve food for long periods of time without the technologies we have today, using traditional and indigenous practices of processing and storing food, and we need to honour and revive these indigenous and traditional knowledge and systems.

Across the region, we have also been historically, communities that have drawn strength from diversity of our diverse gender identities and expression. 

With the introduction of colonial laws and systems and Christianity, many of the social norms, traditional practices, values, social ways of being and thinking have been lost. This means that certain minority members of our communities in our country face high levels of stigma and discrimination. Now climate change is further driving and deepening some of these social challenges, as well as the food availability challenges and the environmental challenges for these minority, vulnerable and often marginalized groups. This is an aspect of climate change that many people don’t often think about – like we don’t often think of how climate links to food systems, or racial justice, or migration, or indigenous justice, or social justice. I think it’s important to connect all these issues and also to connect these forms of activism.

I truly believe that climate change is the defining challenge of our time, especially for young people today and for our future generations. Here in Fiji, it devastates communities through natural disasters and extreme weather events, as well as slow onset events but it also drives a wedge between LGBT community and other community members, and this is an issue very close to my heart. 

Anti-LGBT discrimination stems from colonial systems and values, not indigenous ones, and has even led to members of the LGBT community here being blamed for climate-change-induced natural disasters. These harmful narratives have driven an increase in violence against LGBT community members over recent years, with people claiming the supposedly “sinful ways” of LGBT people have somehow “caused” disasters. We cannot accept this. 

We must raise our voices to tackle these harmful misconceptions, and I know that this comes at a personal risk. Communities need to become alert to the true causes of climate change – the large countries on the other side of the oceans who continue to emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases, who fail to live up to their promises, and are failing to transform their food and land use systems which contribute up to 30% of emissions today. People must know that these developed first world countries are threatening the whole world with their inability to act urgently and in proportion to the damages that they have caused that is literally a burning threat to our planet. 

As I continue to think and work to address these interconnected issues like many others, I am also striving to deepen my learning and understanding about our traditional and indigenous value and knowledge systems and practices. There is a lot that we can learn and take away from the past, and we can always find ways to bridge this useful indigenous knowledge and practices with modern science and knowledge to address the defining challenges of our time. 

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