Did you know there are approximately 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 to 24 in the world today? This is the largest generation of young people in history according to the UN – and it’s a generation that are increasingly aware of the consequences of climate change and are mobilizing en masse to protect their future and the planet. Out of all these young people, the majority of them will be found in the Global South – 87% of people under 30 are found in the Global South. So how do we support these youth activists in the Global South? And what can we learn from one of the most successful youth climate movements, Fridays For Future?
Helping us answer these questions is Xiye Bastida, a Mexican-Chilean climate activist and member of the indigenous Mexican Otomi-Toltec nation. She is an organizer with Fridays For Future and the co-founder and Executive Director of the Re-Earth Initiative, an international youth-led organization that supports frontline youth across 27 countries. We spoke to Xiye on Climate Curious recently to discover more about her role in Fridays For Future, why supporting youth activism in the Global South and Indigenous communities is so important and how we might go about doing this.
Fridays For Future
Many of you will be familiar with Greta Thunberg. She is one of the leaders of the youth climate activist movement, specifically starting Fridays for Future, which saw mass strikes by school children across the globe to demand action on the climate emergency. However, the Fridays for Future movement was made up of many brilliant youth activists, including our recent guest, Xiye. In her Climate Curious episode, The story behind climate’s most powerful movement to date, Xiye explained what the Fridays For Future movement was:
“Fridays for Future was a climate strike movement, where students would skip school every Friday to protest at their local government that a climate emergency needed to be declared, that we need to follow the Paris Agreement, that we had to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming and that we needed to start phasing out fossil fuels.”
When the movement began, Xiye was based in New York and was part of her high school’s Environment Club. She and a handful of other students were inspired by the work of Greta and other activists and felt this was the right next move for her and her peers.
“When I heard the calling of the first ever global climate strike on March 15th, 2019, I told my environmental club, this is the next thing to do. We started to self-organize the school. I would put posters up everywhere: come to the strike, come to the strike… and when the day arrived 600 of my classmates walked out. […]
And from that moment on, I heard my calling. We got together all the high school leaders from the whole city and that’s when we started Fridays For Future, New York City. Fridays For Future, New York City was the biggest in the whole country.”
Why we need diverse voices in climate activism
Very quickly after the successes of Fridays For Future in New York City, Xiye noticed she was often being called the “Greta Thunberg of the US” in media headlines. Yet, Xiye felt these headlines were ignoring her own identity and the reality that many youth climate activists faced. She explained:
“I started to feel very confused that my identity didn’t matter. It was what got clicks that mattered. So I wrote an op-ed called, My Name is Not Greta Thunberg: Why Diverse Voices Matter.”
The piece aimed to highlight the huge diversity in the climate movement and to push journalists and the media to not reduce climate activism to be for one type of individual or action. This is especially important for young people throughout the Global South who tackled climate change in different ways to ensure their safety. As Xiye explains:
“For example, my friends from Malaysia cannot strike because it’s illegal. My friends from India got arrested and spent a couple weeks in jail for being part of Fridays for future. […] So you realize that the Fridays for Future Movement worked for the Global North and everybody from the global south, maybe not everybody, but the vast majority felt like the climate movement didn’t represent them. Because it’s things that we cannot do in our countries, or maybe we can do, but we risk arrest, violence, murder, disappearance.”
Supporting youth climate activists in the Global South
Xiye’s work now aims to empower youth-driven individuals and communities across the Global South in their climate work. She is strongly inspired and empowered by her Indigenous heritage which is weaved into her work more widely. She co-founded the Re-Earth Initiative to support this youth-driven climate work:
“I started my non-profit, Re-Earth Initiative, as a way to bring the youth global movement together from the Global South and make sure that the movement was inclusive, accessible, and really representative of who we are.”
Part of their focus is bringing funding to the Global South and to help individuals and communities focus on solutions and activities that empower them:
“So we actually fund the Global South. You cannot call on the same type of activism. So even if people call themselves activists, advocates or changemakers, it might pose a threat to them. So we are focused on solutions – we’re focused on people in their communities, on the front lines, implementing solutions that can be funded. We fund empowerment – anything that you think will empower your community or yourself and anything that has to do with the restoration of nature and the protection of nature.”
Part of Xiye’s mission is to believe in people the same way that people believed in her earlier on in her career. A really important part of doing this work though, Xiye explains, is giving people the resources they need to do the work.
“My job is to believe in the next person and to not just believe in them symbolically, but to give them the resources that they need to be able to be part of the global movement.
The environmental movement gets 2% of global funding/philanthropy. Out of that 2%, the youth get 0.76% and [majority of] that is going to Global North. […] If we’re not funding the leaders of tomorrow, or at least building the community, then what is the future of the global south in the climate crisis?”
As mentioned in the introduction, 87% of under 30s live in the Global South. Xiye’s call to fund communities and empower them to act on climate solutions is all the more important within this context.
What’s next?
If Fridays For Future was successful in raising awareness about the climate crisis then what comes next for the youth movement in general?
“So I think the future of the movement is in how we actually get the emissions down and how we get the adaptation up. That is the biggest challenge because the loss and damage fund, for example, is underfunded. The problem is money now – that governments are not putting money where their mouth is.”
Part of this shifting of financial flows, Xiye explains, is about shifting how we think about success. If we can move beyond growing the GDP of a country and shift out of a growth mindset, she believes this will help. Her Indigenous wisdom and heritage helps in this regard:
“This is from Indigenous Wisdom – we don’t operate in a growth mindset. What we ask is, what is good? What is balance? What do you need in your life to feel satisfied? Because in the current world that we live in, it’s always unsatisfactory. You always want or need something more. You’re told you need something more.”
Our thanks go to Xiye for sharing this wisdom with us and for all the other youth activists from the Global South that have brought climate to the top of the cultural conversation. If we want a strong climate movement, it is paramount that we support young people working in climate solutions in the Global South.
If you are inspired by what Xiye has told you today then you can check out other youth climate activists from the Global South we’ve had on the podcast. Here’s a few to get you started:
– How the Uru Uru team is cleaning up a sacred lake in Bolivia with Gustavo Blanco
– Meet the Latinas championing climate justice in Chile with Catalina Santelicas
– I can be your hero baby, how we smash the climate activist stereotype with Mauricio Porras
Climate Curious is committed to bringing diverse voices from across the Globe onto the podcasts – especially those who are under 30 and from the Global South. Keep listening to the podcast to learn the latest from these incredible individuals, organisations and communities working on climate solutions and justice.
