Pakistan's climate defender among Women of the Year 2023

She started her activism at the age of 16.

NEW YORK (Web Desk) - American magazine Time, on Friday, issued a list of women of the year that includes the name of Pakistani climate activist Aiysha Siddiqa.

Siddiqa became a climate and human rights defender, who comes from a tribal community Northern Pakistan, after being a personal victim of climate change. She realized at the age of 14 that the environment around her is not safe.

Siddiqa is considered a powerful voice in Climate change activism. Last year she also addressed the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh Egypt and shared her poem “So much for your durability, my people are dying.”

As a climate sustainability activist, she started her activism at the age of 16 and for 24 years she has been highlighting the impact of climate change issues occurring around the world, with a special emphasis on the lowest income countries that the bear the greatest damage from climate change.

In 2020, she founded an international climate youth coalition called “Polluters out” and started a climate education under the name “Fossil-free University”.

While speaking to the magazine, she noted: “I was brought up with the idea that the earth is a living being. It gives life to you and in return you have a responsibility. We have reached a point where we have the cry of mother collectively ignoring earth. This is how the climate crisis is connected to women and girls by the same structures that abuse, hurt and take without consent.”

“This is how we treat planet earth. This is how we treat the thing that gives us life”, she said.

Siddiqa highlighted that she had lost one family member after another over a period of 10 years, due to polluted water. She also said that one begins to analyze why people have to be killed for resources.

“I was absolutely shocked by the violations of human rights. Violence is linked to climate defenders and people who are just trying to clean air and water”, highlighted the climate defender.

The activist emphatically noted with reference to last year’s flood in Pakistan: “In South Asia, climate change disproportionately affects women. When people are displaced, women have to get water, raise the children, women have to find work. There were 60,000 women who were pregnant in August and we didn’t have enough hemoglobin, collectively, to save them.”

When they gave birth, many mothers lost their lives, she added. We are approaching the climate crisis with a very global northern lens, she said.

Siddiqa also said that if people live under an unstable government, they cannot eliminate climate pollution because unstable states do not function well and one cannot go and ask the government to do better.

“We need to think more dynamically about the solutions. The majority of the world that has to deal with the effects of climate change are actually citizens of unstable governments.

“This is something that we need to apply critically as part of the equation when we think about climate solutions when we think about legal solutions, economic and technical solutions,” Siddiqa said.

We have to do it quickly, she said.

The Pakistani climate activist said that when the countries with natural resources cannot supply raw materials to the industrialized countries, the global north will collapse.

“One thing that the climate crisis teaches us is that we are in this together. We have to think of this crisis as a collective global crisis. We can no longer be individualistic. It will not work, she said.