Aiysha Siddiqa started a climate education programme called “Fossil Free University” and co-founded a global climate youth coalition called “Polluters Out” in 2020.
Aiysha Siddiqa, a climate activist from Pakistan, is listed among the women of the year in a list published by the American magazine Time on Friday.
Time magazine also revealed the names of women who have distinguished themselves in a variety of fields, including politics, human rights, and the arts, from Mexico, Iran, Brazil, Ukraine, and Pakistan, among other nations in its 2023 list.
Siddiqa, who is from a tribal community in northern Pakistan, became a climate and human rights advocate after experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand. At the age of 14, she realised that her surroundings were unsafe.
Siddiqa is regarded as a powerful voice in the fight against climate change. Her poem, “So much about your sustainability, my people are dying,” was read aloud at the COP27 Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, which was held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the previous year.
She began working in the field of climate sustainability when she was 16 years old, and for the past 24 years, she has been raising awareness of the effects of climate change issues that are affecting people all over the world, with a focus on the least developed nations that are bearing the brunt of the problem.
She started a climate education programme called “Fossil Free University” and co-founded a global climate youth coalition called “Polluters Out” in 2020.
In her interview with the publication, she made the following observation: “I was brought up to believe that the earth is a living thing. She gives you life, and in exchange, you have a duty. The cries of Mother Earth are now being collectively disregarded by us. Because of the same structures that are mistreating, harming, and stealing from people without their consent, the climate crisis is connected to women and girls in this way.” “We handle the planet Earth in this manner. We treat the very thing that gives us life in this manner,” “she observed.
Siddiqa emphasised the fact that she had lost successive family members over the course of ten years as a result of contaminated water. She added that one should begin by analysing why people must be killed in order to obtain resources. “The human rights abuses shocked me to my very core.
The climate defender emphasised that violence is associated with those fighting for clean air, water, and climate change. In South Asia, climate change disproportionately affects women, the activist stated with reference to the flooding in Pakistan last year.
Women must go get water, care for the children, and find work when people are displaced. We did not have enough hemoglobin to save all 60,000 pregnant women during the month of August, she continued, adding that many mothers died while giving birth.
She claimed that we are approaching the climate crisis from a very global north perspective. Siddiqa added that because unstable states do not function properly and citizens cannot go to them and demand that they improve, people who live in them cannot stop climate pollution.
“We must consider the solutions with more dynamism. “This is what we critically apply as part of the equation when we think of climate solutions, legal solutions, economic solutions, and technical solutions,” Siddiqa said.
The majority of the world’s population that is currently experiencing the effects of climate change are actually citizens of insecure governments. She stated that we must act quickly.
The global north will collapse, according to the Pakistani climate activist, when the naturally resource-rich nations are unable to supply raw materials to the industrialized nations. “The climate crisis has taught us that we are all in this together. We must consider this crisis to be a global emergency. We can no longer be egocentric. She said, “It won’t work.