Possibilities for an emergent South Asian leadership in Australian climate activism
‘Western Sydney means migrants, religious diversity, ethnic diversity, if you think multicultural Australia it exists in Western Sydney. The so-called ‘others’ are there! And the truth of being from Bangladesh is that those places are going to drown. So, climate change and social justice are fundamentally related’ – Samia (name changed) in the report titled Why North-South Intersectionality Matters in Climate Activism; Perspectives of South Asian Australian Youth Activists, pg.15.[1]
I joined the Australian environment movement in 2008, after having been an environmental activist in India. At that time, looking around, I rarely found ‘others like me’, meaning to say, other people of colour, and especially other South Asians, in the movement. The climate movement in Australia also began growing rapidly around this time. Once again, as a South Asian, I experienced an absence of ‘others like me’ within movement organisations and at public protests and marches for climate action. To my mind, this lack of racial and cultural diversity in the climate movement posed a contradiction to Australia’s multiethnic reality, where, especially migrations from the Asian region are rapidly changing the racial demography of Australia’s largest cities.[2]
Mainstream climate organisations and their networks in the global North, including Australia; have been noted as often lacking racial diversity, even when diversity is enshrined as a value.[3] Critical environmental scholars argue that their de-historicised and technocratic framing of campaign goals for climate and environmental action, that fail to acknowledge intersectional injustices, can often tend not to resonate with ethnic minority and migrant community members.[4],[5]
Mainstream climate activism’s technocratic campaign structures also do not allow the space for ‘everyday sustainability’ practices of migrant communities to be represented.[6] These factors contribute largely to an absence of ethnic minority and racialised migrant community members in mainstream climate groups and networks.
Questions for an emergent South Asian climate leadership
In Australia, the climate movement has become larger over the last 10 years that have witnessed a paralysis of climate action under successive Liberal Coalition governments. But Australian climate activisms’ focus on climate risks to Australia alone can often fail to resonate with migrant POC communities because the narrative turns on risks to a largely white, affluent way of life. The climate activism narrative aims to preserve and does not question affluent lifestyles anchored in overconsumption that is at the root of the multiple planetary crises (of which the climate crisis is a part) that we are facing today. It aims to replace coal with renewables in our energy systems while not acknowledging that the economic systems that built a fossil-fuel-powered global society have been based on colonialism and capitalism, which has and continues to disrupt and dislocate Indigenous and land-based communities.
Low levels of racial diversity within the Australian climate movement fail to match the multicultural reality of Australian society today. Climate impacts are already pronounced in South Asia[7], a region that is home to one-third of humanity, and from where Australia is currently experiencing the highest annual migrations.[8] Climate leadership by migrant communities of colour like South Asians has the potential to bring the global reality of the climate crisis into perspective within Australian climate activism. Since we are all in this climate crisis together but not equally, in my mind, this situation raises the question as to how are Asians and South Asians in Australia, interpreting the climate problem, that mainstream activism cannot capture? And, how can their interpretations and narratives be made relevant in the climate conversation in Australia?
It is crucial to investigate a fundamental point while asking these questions about climate leadership in Australia by migrants from the global South: whether and how such leaders are articulating a different politics that takes cognisance of the past, present and future malaise of colonial capitalism that is at the root of the climate crises. Since their effects, equally through impacts of climate-induced weather events, and the violence of industrial development, continue to be seen most prominently in the populous global South or the Majority World, home to the largest numbers of vulnerable, land-dependent, subsistence-based, Indigenous Peoples and Communities.
The simultaneous emergence of youth climate movements over the last decade has created fresh possibilities for re-framing the dominant campaign structures of mainstream organisations from an erstwhile technocratism towards an emphasis on justice. The next generation’s activism is seen as distinctly different from mainstream climate activism in that youth movements frame the issue of climate change and meaningful climate action not only in terms of the science but also the social world, in which race, class and gender intersect to form a system of inter-locking oppressions.[9] Youth movements in the global North are more likely to be racially diverse than mainstream climate movements, and possibly even led by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) activists.
These factors are combining to create possibilities for the emergence of climate activist leadership from the next generation of people of colour migrants. In Australia, in the last decade, prominent youth activism by Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC), First Nations Seed Mob network (Seed), Diaspora Pacific Islander Pacific Climate Warriors (PCW) and more recently School Strikes for Climate Change (SS4C) have more explicitly foregrounded climate justice, drawing attention to the need for both inter-generational (the next generation will inherit the worst impacts of climate change) and intra-generational (we are being differentially impacted by climate change, with first nations, small island communities, and global South communities being affected more than others). As a South Asian, I have particularly noted the emergence of South Asian youth climate activists in Australian climate activism and the possibility this holds for South Asian climate leadership.
Next, I outline my own perspective on what constitutes climate justice from a global perspective, shaped by my experience in environmental campaigning in India and Australia. I argue why I think North-South intersectionality is crucial for global climate justice, and what it means to me. I then talk about the emergent South Asian leadership and its possibilities to re-define an earlier, racially un-diverse climate movement, through a discussion of a research report I authored in 2022, titled Why North-South Intersectionality Matters in Climate Activism; Perspectives of South Asian Australian Youth Activists. Essentially, I delve into the idea of justice that they bring to Australian climate activism.
Finally, I talk about the scope of building this emergent leadership to make North-South intersectionality possible in climate activism. Through the work of a newly founded project where I am a co-founder: Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity, an intergenerational South Asian climate justice collective in the Australian climate movement.[10] And I outline risks from a lack of an intersectional approach from this leadership, for global climate justice.
As an industrialised country, I have referred to Australia as belonging to the global North. As a developing region, I have referred to South Asia as the global South. Under the United Nations’ framework for climate change negotiations (UNFCCC), the terms signify how countries politicise their climate responsibilities, with developing countries like India holding developed countries historically responsible. I have also referred to South Asia as the Majority World, which I find a more accurate term for talking about this populous region, which is home to a quarter of global humanity. This term was popularised by noted Bangladeshi photographer and activist Shahidul Alam. It signifies all developing countries, essentially the global South, whose populations form the demographic majority of this planet.[11]
My outlook: climate justice needs to be imagined from the Majority World
The term intersectionality was coined and first used in critical race theorisation by Kimberele’ Williams Crenshaw. This article uses intersectionality as conceptualised in climate justice praxis. Because ‘we are all in this together’, the climate era can create an inclusive ecological justice and an intersectional politics across various environmentalisms that is less like exclusionary (Northern) environmentalism and more like human rights, since ‘what we are fighting for is each other’.12 The task for climate activists is to overcome the various disconnections and connect the various movements. For this, eco-centric Northern environmentalism will have to decolonise and establish solidarity with the vision of movements that are fighting to redress historic injustices.13
However, these possibilities for intersectionality and the notion of climate justice as a common frame have emerged from the global North. Therefore, this article also extends the significance of intersectionality to be cognisant and inclusive of global North-South contextual differences while supporting global Indigenous climate justice outcomes. I elaborate on my understanding and politics of North-South intersectionality in climate justice in this section.
Most of my working life has been spent in international environmental organisations – Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. But having worked within these organisations in both the global North and South, I have become critically aware of differences in environmental and climate justice in the two contexts. In my formative years as an environmentalist in Greenpeace India, I was confronted by a fundamental tension within this global organisation: of international campaign narratives being forged in the North (where international ENGOS are invariably headquartered) and applied to the global South, singularising a diversity of ways in which environmental justice can be asserted by communities from the ‘ground up’. Essentially, although Greenpeace’s narratives were science-based, they spoke to a relatively homogenous, English speaking, middleclass, urban audience.
Reading Marxist historian Ramachandra Guha’s essay ‘Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique’[12] helped to clarify the conflict I faced. Guha had just completed a dissertation on the Chipko (tree-hugging) Resistance that began in the 1970s in the Himalayan foothills, titled The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya.[13] In it he contended that peasant communities involved in this long struggle against deforestation in the Tehri region of the Himalayas, like many other struggles around India, were essentially fighting to have a say in and to democratise the management of natural resource – land, water, forest – wrested away during colonisation when the British administration enclosed peoples’ commons.
Travelling to the United States, Guha learnt about the vision of Radical Deep Ecologists George Sessions and Bill Devall, who strove to preserve wildernesses disappearing under the destruction of American capitalist industrialisation based on a scientific understanding of ecology.[14] In the essay Guha critiqued that although compelling, this vision did not challenge the root cause of global environmental destruction, which was endless capitalist growth; in fact, it ran parallel to capitalism in American society. The essay critiqued radical ecologists’ one-size-fits-all approach to environmental destruction globally through largescale wilderness preservation, pointing out that this vision excluded the ecological burden that the world’s poor carried. The essay reminded that the creation of national parks in India had exacerbated environmental injustice through evicting Indigenous communities from their forests and lands.
Wilderness-centric environmentalism has been practised in the United States and other similar cultural geographies including Australia. Guha and various others have classified these environmentalisms as Northern Environmentalism. They have been variously critiqued by other modes of environmental activism where nature is not separated from human presence. The environmental justice movement emerged in the United States in the 1980s and ran parallel to the dominantly white mainstream environmental movement. It fought for safe and clean environments for poor, and racialised communities, in places where they live, work and play’.[15]
Scholars of the environmental justice movement have pointed out that even while taking on big scientific challenges, American environmentalism in the 1970s ignored urban and industrial concerns, consequently ignoring everyday places and realities, and with them, certain kinds of people. These exclusions assumed racial overtones against the backdrop of historic settler colonialism and structural social inequalities.[16] From the perspective of Indigenous environmental justice, by deeming places from where Indigenous presence has been removed by violent settler colonialism as pristine, wilderness-centric environmentalism not only disregarded but was also complicit in perpetuating historical justice.
In 1994 joint paper with ecologist Madhav Gadgil on the Environmental Movement in India, Guha deepens the conceptual differences between Northern Environmentalism, practised by an urban, affluent or middle class, of scientific nature conservation, and Environmentalism of the Global South as seen in India, of subsistence-livelihood-bound communities, peasants, fishing communities. They classify the former as a ‘full stomach phenomenon’, the environmentalism of the rich. Environmental activism of global South communities remain preoccupied with what they call shallow ecologies, such as pollution control, agro-ecology, and aimed at securing a fair share of the commons.[17],[18] Ecological economist Juan Martinez-Alier’s 2002 book The Environmentalism of The Poor; A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation qualifies environmentalisms of the poor as dominated by disproportionate ecological burdens from industrialisation and in accessing natural resources for the poor.[19]
Martinez-Alier’s 1995 paper[20] (amongst various other critiques) questions a central assumption of Northern environmentalism that environmental activism is a by-product of social affluence, something other societies can aspire towards as their material improves through economic growth.[21],[22] Finally, Guha and Martinez-Alier’s Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) highlights various ecological activisms of communities across societies and historical periods in South America and South Asia, to construct an ‘alternative and sometimes oppositional framework from the conventional wisdom of Northern social sciences’ about what environmentalism is (p. 14).[23] Reading all these streams of critique of Northern Environmentalism, my question while at Greenpeace was how could middle-class environmentalism forge meaningful alignment with community struggles and what narratives would that yield?
This quest across practice and theory continued through the arc of my environmentalist journey across India and Australia. The legacy of American environmentalism has cultural and historical bearings on Australian environmentalism, which shared its dominant wilderness ethic. In Australia I saw Northern environmentalism from the inside out. The world’s first Green Party, the United Tasmania Group (UTG), was formed in 1972 to put wilderness protection on the Australian political agenda. This grew to become the Australian Green Party in 1992, constituted of a confederation of state units. Its founding narrative critiqued ‘the global ecological crisis unleashed by capitalism’,[24] but its early approach, dominated by eco-centrism, similar to American scientific conservation movements, did not tackle the patterns of capitalist production that were the root of the problem. From the 1970s to the 1990s, eco-centrism found strong support from the memberships of Australian environmental organisations (ENGOS) who were largely tertiary educated, politically left of centre, secular, and predominantly urban.
From the 1990s, environmental organisations worldwide have had to increasingly grapple with climate change. Particularly in Australia, with the institutionalisation of various land rights regimes and particularly the Native Title Act 1993 and the beginning of land being returned to Indigenous communities, collaborations between environmentalists and First Nations struggles against mining have increased, making narratives of environmental conservation to necessarily take a turn towards land-based justice and human rights. Scholars note that this has forced a reconsideration of the simple binary of nature in Northern environmentalism, as pristine or transformed.[25] Since the effects of climate change can be felt both globally and locally, it has made it imperative for Northern environmentalism that works with the big picture science, to find alignment with the activisms for ecological justice for communities.[26] Acknowledging the role of colonialism, capitalism and environmental degradation in creating today’s climate crisis has made it essential to have new conversations about time, place and meaningful political action.[27],[28]
It is with this question, of how a top down, science-based climate activism of the global North (and one also driven by the environmental campaigns of international ENGOS), focussed on action to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, is finding alignment with land-based justice struggles of communities, that I wrote my doctoral thesis, comparing Australia and India.[29] In Cutting Carbon from the Ground Up: A Comparative Ethnography of anti-coal activism in Australia and India, I compared the activism in alliance between the Stop Adani movement and the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners campaign against the Adani
Corporation owned Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland, with that of an Indigenous community’s fight to stop a coalmine in their forest home in Mahan, central India, in alliance with Greenpeace. In both cases the Indigenous resistances put land justice, rights and self-determination at the heart of their story, and found solidarity from their mainstream environmentalist allies. While Stop Adani in Australia and Greenpeace in India talked about climate change as the imperative for activism, their narratives of solidarity with rights of Indigenous people, and acknowledgement of the inter-twined nature of the struggle for climate justice and against (ongoing) colonisation, formed a centrepiece of their political strategy and marked the turn that scholars have written about in the ‘big-picture environmentalism’ of the global North.
A critically outstanding issue remains around the need for Australian climate activism to acknowledge the need for a systemic change, to challenge capitalism, rather than merely take action to stop coal, reduce carbon, and usher in renewable energy within the same systems that have caused historic injustices to communities. The issue compounds when global North climate activists, such as in Australia, working to replace fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) with renewable energy, essentially working on a technological solution to the climate crises, appropriate the term ‘climate justice’ for their movement. Further, the Australian climate movement does not question net zero targets that have been driven by the world’s wealthiest nations, even while a global climate justice movement dominantly from the global South and Indigenous communities flags critical concerns around net zero’s over-reliance on technological fixes instead of real and significant reductions to emissions. Through Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity, we highlight that addressing the energy source, essentially, taking technical climate action, is just part of the story of addressing climate justice.
Most of the struggles of communities in the global South continue to challenge capitalist extraction. The number of such struggles is intensifying each day. India currently has the world’s highest number of ongoing environmental conflicts.[30] With large-scale renewable energy projects already beginning to dispossess Indigenous communities of their lands, like large dams and coalmines did during India’s post-independence development from the 1950s, the question emerges as to what constitutes climate and energy justice for vulnerable communities, to redress their historic wrongs and secure their futures? And this question continues to expose the looming gap in top-down, scientific environmentalism’s approach: in not challenging capitalist growth structures that underpin ecological destruction, and not demanding that clean energy be built through new systems that do not perpetuate the injustices of the past.
My climate justice outlook has been shaped over time, and with these ongoing challenges of struggles against capitalism in India in mind. When I look at the increasing diversity in the Australian climate movement, and passionate young Australians of South Asian heritage speaking about climate justice, I wish to be able to guide this emerging leadership towards a critical understanding of global North-South differences in climate justice, and for them to be able to articulate a politics that gives solidarity to community struggles in South Asia, where their families come from.
Climate justice perspectives of young South Asian climate activists in Australia
In 2012, at the peak of climate movement mobilisations for a carbon tax in Australia, I spoke to 12 young South Asian Australians about whether they would join climate activism. The research was driven by my own impulse to understand what fellow South Asians thought of mainstream Australian climate activism, a space I professionally occupied but where I rarely met another South Asian. I was particularly curious to understand what and whether their social and racial identities played a role in shaping these perceptions.
I could not identify any young South Asians in climate activism and therefore recruited 12 university-level South Asian Australians who identified as concerned about climate change. I found that despite being aware of climate change, they did not prioritise climate change for action, compared to social justice issues including working for refugee rights, largely, on the basis, of a sense of non-identification with how the climate problem was framed and dominated by white activists. I found that interconnected perceptions and influences including family values exposures to South Asia, feeling unrepresented in the Australian mainstream, and a pervasive lack of understanding in Australian society of the global South acted as underlying factors in their reluctance to participate in climate activism.[31]
The incommensurability of worldviews and consequently how environmental and climate campaign framings in the global North versus South, had been my own defining experience as an environmental activist across India and then Australia. The disjuncture the respondents felt between pressing social justice and human rights issues that not only persisted in places their families came from across South Asia but were also present to an extent in Australia, and climate action as framed by Australian climate activism, strongly resonated with me.
The Sapna climate justice network first started in 2020 as a support group for South Asians in the Australian climate movement, who met every fortnight on zoom during prolonged Covid lockdowns. During that initial phase, I interacted with and learnt about the experiences of several young South Asian climate activists. Several South Asians had joined School Strikes and AYCC through these networks’ school recruitment channels. They articulated a ’climate angst’, having experienced more widespread climate impacts in the last decade including Australia’s devastating bushfires in 2019. While these young South Asians brought values of social and racial justice to their climate activism similar to the 2012 respondents, unlike the latter who spoke about climate activism from the outside, the current respondents spoke of the highlights as well as challenges of speaking from the point of view of their idea of justice inside climate activism in Australia. Hearing their accounts inspired the second set of 12 interviews with South Asian youth activists in 2022, and the findings from the interviews form the primary basis of the above-mentioned report.
I categorised their experiences under three themes, first why they joined climate activism and what notions of justice they brought to it, second, their experience within a white climate movement, especially focussing on a crucial theme: of opportunities and challenges they encountered in telling climate impact stories they wanted to tell that wove Australia and South Asia together. The final theme contained their experiences of negotiating the expectations of their families, particularly their migrant parents’ aspirations for them, vis-à-vis being climate activists. All names were changed in the report to protect respondents’ privacy and this article follows the same standard. Themes 1 and 2 paint a composite picture of what kind of justice-driven leadership they want to bring to climate activism, what motivates their approach, and what challenges stand in their way.
All names are pseudonymised to protect interviewees’ privacy.
Take the case of Hope, who was born in Botswana, grew up in Western Sydney, and is of South Indian heritage. She joined AYCC as a volunteer coordinator and is now a national campaigner there. She has grown the AYCC network in Western Sydney and trained activists of colour in the School Strikes movement to tell their stories. She brings a ‘glocal’ (global + local) experience to climate justice story-telling by connecting her second-generation migrant experience in Western Sydney to rural Botswana:
I was born in Botswana, in a rural mining town near a coalmine. There would be days of toxic pollution and we could not go fishing. And you know, living in Western Sydney, that there is a socio-economic divide from the rest of Australia. My experience makes me community focussed. (pg. 15)
She shared that her motivation to join climate activism was shaped by a determination to exercise agency, to tell stories from the global South where her family has lived experience, rather than hear about climate impacts there from white activist peers who do not:
I went to a climate science workshop within the AYCC training after my HSC. They were talking about climate refugees and migration. It struck a nerve and I wanted to talk about my community and my people. My grandmother died with mining dust in her lungs in Botswana. This is not abstract for me. But I also got very upset. They talked so casually about something that is so real for me! White people run the workshops but have no lived experience! I went back and enrolled as volunteer coordinator. (pg. 16).
Hope’s profile shows that she has defined a certain leadership within youth climate activism, emphasising nurturing younger activists of colour and building activism locally in Western Sydney, while connecting places on the global map through climate story-telling. While it is understood that arguments of intergenerational and intra-generational and global climate justice are foregrounded in youth movements, it is one half of the equation. The other half is about who actually tells these justice centric stories, for whose benefit, and who is being mobilised as a result. As seen through Grace, South Asian youth leadership is asserting an agency that is in return both helping to draw the South Asian community into climate conversations as well as building a network of young climate leaders from the community.
My respondents are actively pursuing place-based identity making through their climate-impacts stories. While grounded in the science of climate change, the racial, social and cultural specificity of their stories, drawing on how they, where their families come from, and where they live are ‘seen’ by mainstream society and the media at large in Australia, is defining a climate leadership from the South Asian migrant community in Australia that embodies both intergenerational and intra-generational justice. Take the case of Nazia who joined School Strikes in 2018. She passionately links the experience of growing up in Western Sydney with that of her father’s experience of growing up in Munshiganj village on the banks of the Padma River in Bangladesh, one of the worst impacted low-lying regions in the world:
In one generation, the house has been destroyed three times! My father does not know this is climate change. He thinks the water goes up and down. I told him it would only keep going up! Many families in the (gram) village lose their homes and jobs each year during the monsoons. And then Penrith in Western Sydney, where so many Bangladeshi’s live, is the hottest place, hotter than Sahara. This is the story of so many Bangladeshis now living in Western Sydney, and yet we do not talk about climate change to them. I wanted to do that. (pg. 15).
Nazia’s aspirations for climate leadership assume that a climate hotspot like Western Sydney will be prioritised within climate activism and its stories told by activists from there, whose racial, cultural and religious diversity make them the ‘so called others’ in the Australian mainstream. Her aspiration turns on the possibility that climate change can bring attention to Western Sydney’s migrant minority communities, linking to where they come from, their cultures and their identities, stories largely ignored in the Australian mainstream. But she narrates experiences of encounters even within youth activism that reflect a mainstream bias that erases experiences of racial minorities:
My teammate said in a large meeting that Western Sydney should not be a priority. Are only White people worth it? Northern beaches? Inner suburbs? Greater portions of people in Western Sydney come from countries ravaged by climate change. They might not know the connection between fossil fuels and climate change. But they have lived experience, much more than a white man from Cronulla. (pg. 22).
The kind of place-based climate leadership that South Asian youth activists such as Nazia are aspiring towards is challenging the invisibilisation of the ‘so called others’ in Australian society, by underscoring their climate impacts and appealing for racial justice. Another dimension to the challenge South Asian youth leadership in climate is facing in building a ‘glocal’ climate justice narrative and asserting racial justice through place-based identities stems from a nationalistic framing of the climate crisis in Australian climate activism. Samia, a Bangladeshi-Australian from Western Sydney, narrates the challenge of telling stories of South Asian-Australian climate impacts that are likely to resonate with the South Asian diaspora, even from the platform of youth activism, given the national framing of the climate crisis narrative and the selective (albeit strategic) show of solidarity for frontline communities that such a climate movement narrative brings:
Amongst the speaking points for media interviews, the room made was for specifically Indigenous Australian people as it should be 100% and for Pacific Islanders. The sort of narrative was that these groups are at the forefront of climate injustice in and around Australia. It was not said, but it was made obvious, that your box is not applicable to us. I felt guilty to take up the space because my story did not have legitimacy. (pg. 19)
Samia’s aspirations for leadership in climate activism points towards a need for forming solidarities and stories of climate justice that can connect experiences of First Nations, Pacific and global South frontline communities impacted by climate change. Joy, an Indian-Australian from Melbourne verbalises this need to move beyond an Australian society centred climate movement story by pointing to the need for building empathy through activism to prepare for a hotter planet:
We need to move away from centering our middle class lives and focus on the vulnerable such as South Asian communities…when things get worse in the future and there are climate migrations there will be a lot of ugliness like xenophobia…we have to build kindness in the movement…also link with the refugee movement…to prepare for the future. (pg. 28).
As opposed to a nationalistic climate narrative framed by a predominantly white climate movement, stories such as what Samia and Joy want to tell can sensitise Australian society towards necessary interconnections of climate activism with human rights issues, based on an acknowledgement that frontline communities from South Asia where their families come from will be faced with a humanitarian crises as climate change worsens.
The eight other respondents articulated similar and overlapping aspirations for climate activism leadership. Most notably, they politicise ‘everyday’ experiences of climate change that their families bring, which, as they assert, their white activist peers mostly lack. As Jahin, a Bangladeshi Australian from Brisbane put it:
For us Bangladeshi POCs, our people are drowning now and that is what we are fighting for! Climate activism is so vital for us. I find it more meaningful to be a POC activist on climate. In fact, I am grateful to be a South Asian climate activist. (pg. 18).
Through this logic, they assert a deeper legitimacy for themselves as climate activists, in a space dominated by whites. While the 2012 respondents had spoken about not participating in a climate movement where the issue was framed by whites, the 2022 respondents, speaking a decade later from within climate activism, and at a time when climate impacts have worsened, assert the need to ‘reframe’ the issue as experienced by their communities, and define a climate leadership in which their social and cultural identities, and consequently their idea of justice, play central roles. These findings, about their outlook on climate justice and how it is shaped, provide valuable insights about how this emergent South Asian Australian youth climate leadership can be nurtured, so that some of the critical gaps in climate activism of the global North, from the perspective of global climate justice can be addressed.
Building a South Asian youth leadership on climate justice in Australia
In the global North, youth climate activism is seen as bringing awareness about the colonial and racist underpinnings of the current climate crisis amongst young people,[32] and being human focused in their justice. In Australia, youth networks have provided the opportunity for the emergence of leadership from people of colour migrant youth such as from South Asia. As seen in the case of youth respondents in the 2022 report, such leadership has the potential to take the cause of working towards global climate justice several steps further. South Asian youth activist in Australia are bringing everyday experiences of climate change into storytelling. It is an emergent youth leadership that emphasises the linkage between solving the climate crisis and social justice, connects the global North and South through climate impact stories, and brings messages of why intersectionality is essential to understanding and fighting the climate crisis.
This emergent leadership faces challenges negotiating the mainstream climate movement. In fact, the idea for the 2022 report emerged out of a series of listening sessions, where some of us mentors listened to the tensions these young POC activists faced in their movement, and reflected on our own experiences within white movement spaces. The requirements of this leadership need to be understood and addressed to strengthen climate advocacy that holds social and racial justice at the heart of a global climate crisis whose roots are historic and entangled in a colonial and capitalist exploitation of the world that is still ongoing. In the concluding part of the report I set out three areas of recommendations that the Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity network, other climate justice networks of colour, and movement allies, can consider, to strengthen and support their emerging leadership.
The first of these include establishing actual linkages with frontline and climate impacted communities and movements in South Asia to represent these stories in Australian activism (pg. 29). Looking at the organising model of the Pacific Climate Warriors youth climate activist network, where diaspora Pacific Islander youth climate advocates have established linkages with community networks and youth action groups across the Pacific Islands offer inspiration for developing a model of interconnected activist communities for South Asians across Australia and South Asia. Establishing such linkages will help South Asian climate activists in Australia to learn directly from their counterparts in South Asia, to deepen solidarity, and break away from a dominantly nationalistic framing of climate justice in Australia. As a next step from telling stories about their counterparts in South Asia, Australian-South Asians can learn and design ways to create platforms and directly make room for climate activists and community storytellers in South Asia to tell climate stories in the global North.
Directly hearing about South Asian community struggles in the global North, such as Australia, will also bring the reality of the global South – that of communities challenging capitalist structures – to the forefront of the debate on climate justice. Diversity is necessary in itself in a dominantly White climate movement in Australia. But it would be a lost opportunity for global climate justice, if a new South Asian climate leadership in Australia did not go beyond the symbolism of diversity, and do the necessary work of joining the dots between environmentalisms of the global North and South. Particularly in the absence of a significant climate justice movement of racially and socioeconomically marginalized communities (not including Indigenous climate justice campaigns) in Australia, unlike in the United States, for the climate justice leadership of migrant youth from the global South to be intersectional, will mean needing to establish global North-South solidarities.
The second of these recommendations is to meaningfully connect everyday acts of environmental care of South Asian migrant communities in Australia with their own high level climate activist actions, such as organising climate strikes, in order to make climate activism and advocacy relevant for South Asian diaspora community members (pg. 29). Especially first-generation migrants of colour are largely absent from the staff and membership of climate and environmental organisations in Australia. They might also not speak the same language of global sustainability as the second generation.[33] And the third of these recommendations is to advocate for global climate justice and hold the Australian government accountable for the world and the global South. (pg. 29). The singular focus of the dominant climate movement in Australia on stopping coal extraction, combustion and exports, and starting renewable energy production, will not resolve the myriad injustices arising from a global capitalist economic system that is driving the climate crises. A youth climate leadership of colour can advocate and prepare Australian society for the empathy and acceptance of climate refugees and migrants that will be necessary to adjust to mass-climate induced social and economic impacts.
Today’s fast-paced and digitally organized activism and advocacy can pose a real risk to the slow and deep learning that is necessary to bridge the North-South divide. An emergent youth leadership of South Asian origin in Australia holds promises for global climate justice, and global North-South equity, if the leadership can be nourished on robust principles and real-life-experience-based mentorship across Australia and South Asia. My intention behind establishing Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity was to be able to provide this mentorship and learning experience for emerging South Asian climate leaders in Australia, by critically exposing them to justice and activism in South Asia. The challenge for South Asian climate youth activists in Australia, and for us at Sapna, will be to do the hard work that is necessary and overcome the risk of tokenistic solidarity making with the climate justice struggles of the global South.
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Endnotes
[1] Talukdar, R., 2022, ‘Why North South Intersectionality Matters for Climate Justice: Perspectives of South Asian Australian Youth Climate Activists, report published by Sapna South Asian Climate Solidarity, Sydney.
[2] Census data indicates that Asian migrations to Australia doubled between 2001 and 2011, transforming the face of Australia’s largest cities. Chinese-born migrants more than doubled and Indian-born trebled. Census data for the next decade, between 2011 and 2021, indicates that Indian-born migrants overtook Chinese-born to become Australia’s largest Asian migrants. Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021, https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/AUS, accessed on 20 August 2022.
[3] Taylor, D.E., 2014, The State of Diversity in Environmental Organisations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, and Government Agencies. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, School of Conservation and Environment.
[4] Curnow, J., and Helferty, A., 2018, Contradictions of Solidarity, Environmental Sociology, Vol. 9, Issue 1, pp. 145-63.
[5] Pulido, L., 2017, Environmental Racism.
[6] Klocker, N. and Lesley, H., 2013, ‘Diversifying Ethnicity in Australia’s Population and Environment Debates’, Australian Geographer, 44:1, pp. 41-62.
[7] Almost 700 million South Asians or half the region’s population has been affected by atleast one climate disaster in the last decade: https://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/south-asia-needs-act-onefight-climate-change.
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/28/india-now-third-most-common-place-ofbirth-of-australian-residents-census-results-show.
[9] Bowman, B., 2020, ‘They don’t quite understand the importance of what we’re doing today’: The Young People’s Climate Strikes as Subaltern Activism, Sustain Earth, Vol 3, Issue 16.
[10] https://www.sapnasolidarity.org
[11] Alam, S., 2008. Majority World: Challenging the West’s Rhetoric of Democracy. Amerasia Journal, Vol, 34, Issue 1, pp. 88-98.
12 Stephenson, W. 2015, What We’re Fighting for Now is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice. Boston, MA, p. xv)
13 Klein, N. 2016, Let them drown: The violence of othering in a warming world, 2 June, London Review of Books, vol. 38, no. 11.
[12] Guha, R., 1989a Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation’, Environmental ethics, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 71-83.
[13] Guha, R. 1989b, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
[14] Devall, B., & Sessions, G. 1985, ‘Deep ecology’, Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, pp. 157-61.
[15] Gottlieb, R. 2005, Forcing the spring: The transformation of the American environmental movement, Island Press, p. 34
[16] Purdy, J. B. 2015, ‘Environmentalism’s racist history’, The New Yorker, 13 August, viewed 20 September 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history.
[17] Gadgil, M. & Guha, R. 1993, This fissured land: an ecological history of India, Univ. of California Press.
[18] Gadgil, M., & Guha, R. 2000, ‘Ecological conflicts and environmental movements in India’, Development: Challenges for Development, vol. 6, p. 254.
[19] Martinez-Alier, J. 2002, The environmentalism of the poor. A study of ecological conflicts and valuation, Edward Elgar, Cheltemhan.
[20] Martinez-Alier, J. 1995, ‘The environment as a luxury good or ‘too poor to be green?’, Ecological Economics, vol. 13, pp. 1–10.
[21] Nash, R. 1982, Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.
[22] Inglehart, R., 1997, Modernization and post-modernization: Cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[23] Guha, R., Martinez-Alier, J. M., 1997, Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South, Routledge.
[24] Brown, B., Singer, P., 1996, The Greens, Melbourne, p. 20
[25] Christoff, P. 2016, ‘Renegotiating nature in the Anthropocene: Australia’s environment movement in a time of crisis’, Environmental Politics, vol. 25, 2016, issue 6, pp. 1034-1057.
[26] Purdy, J. B. 2015, ‘Environmentalism’s racist history’, The New Yorker, 13 August, viewed 20 September 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history.
[27] Birch. T. 2016, ‘Climate Change, Mining, and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge in Australia’, Multidisciplinary Studies in Social Inclusion, vol. 4, no. 1.
[28] Bird Rose, D. 2013, Slowly–Writing into the Anthropocene, TEXT, vol. 20, pp. 1-14.
[29] Talukdar, R., 2021, Cutting Carbon from the Ground Up: Comparative Ethnography of anti-coal activism in Australia and India, unpublished Doctoral thesis, https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/150974/2/02whole.pdf
[30] Environmental Justice Atlas 2016 https://ejatlas.org
[31] Talukdar, R., 2012. Talking About Climate Change in Multicultural Australia. Unpublished Masters Research Report. Melbourne University, School of Land and Environment.
[32] Hilder, C. and Collin, P., 2022, The role of youth-led activist organisations for contemporary climate activism: the case of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Journal of Youth Studies.
[33] Walker, C., 2021. Generation Z and Second Generation: an agenda for learning from cross-cultural negotiations of the climate crisis in the lives of second-generation immigrants. Children’s Geographies, 2021, Volume 19, No. 3, pp. 267-274.