The first panel addressed the Global South. Samira Siddique, CEE’s director of strategic initiatives as well as a researcher and advocate, noted the dangers faced by Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. It was a “scary situation,” she said, with camps in constant danger from mudslides and other consequences of climate change. She noted that the international community needed to expand their outlook and “think of loss and damage from cultural and spiritual perspectives” as well as economic ones.
Dr. Aliou Niang, associate professor of New Testament at UTS, noted how his Diola people of Senegal—and West Africa as a whole—had been reshaped by imperialism and colonialism. Condemning the “imperial, extractive perspective” and the colonial drive to extract “rice for empire” from Africa, he urged a change in mindset, which sees “land as subject, not as object” and a “return back to agrarian life.”
Earth advocate Oluwatosin Kolawole, a regional organizing coordinator for GreenFaith in New Jersey, helps GreenFaith organize in his native Africa. Noting the growing dangers from climate change, he emphasized the “call for justice” among Indigenous communities there.
Albarka Wakili, formerly media and communications officer at Pilgrim Wesleyan Church in Zambia, is now pursuing a master of divinity in social justice advocacy at Drew University. He reminded the audience that “the base cause [of ecological damage in Africa] is climate change and desertification.” He emphasized the need to “get proper education to the people.”
Noting that his Taíno people were the first to suffer from colonization, Kasike Roberto Múkaro Borrero, a strategic advisor at CEE, emphasized the dangers facing Indigenous peoples. “We’re not vulnerable people,” he said. “We’re people put in vulnerable situations.”