Introducing Emtithal Mahmoud (Emi), a Sudanese-born former refugee who is representing the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) at COP27.
The annual climate conference kicked off on 6 November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where global leaders will coordinate vital climate actions and policy for the year ahead. Today (14 November) is ‘Gender Day’: a day in which the conference highlights how women bear a “disproportionate brunt” of the adverse impacts of climate change – as well as celebrating incredible women who are at the forefront of climate activism.
Emi, who happens to be a world-champion slam poet, entrepreneur, and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, is one of these women. Emi's family have been directly impacted by the climate crises in Sudan (Sudan is the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to the impacts of climate change, according to Global Adaptation Index), which has motivated her to speak up about the dire consequences of climate inaction for communities on the frontline of the crisis.
As well as speaking at COP27 as a panellist and keynote speaker, Emi will also be sharing her poem ‘Di Baladna’, which is inspired by conversations with refugees from Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and Rohingya.
Here, she speaks to GLAMOUR about her…
GLAMOUR: It's an honour to speak to you today, Emi. Can you start by sharing a little bit about your personal journey into climate activism?
Emi: I was about 10 or 11 years old when I first learned about climate change – back then it was referred to as “desertification” in reference to the contributing factors of the Darfur conflict. When I was 12 years old, I did my first science fair project about rising temperatures and changing extremes of temperature. It sounds nerdy, but it was very fun for me back then.
I grew up in the USA, but my visits back home to Sudan made me aware of climate change. I saw my neighbour's house crumble before my eyes when the floods came. And I remember going in to try to help. We used to play in her house a lot: one day we were running through the house playing, and then the next day, we're wading through huge amounts of water.
I always remember how my great-aunt said, "Don't walk in the water barefoot." As a child, when I saw the flooding in Sudan, I thought, ‘Oh, giant rain puddles!’ My instinct was to go and walk in the water for fun. Of course, the older generation told us, “You will literally die, get back inside.” I didn't realise there was a risk of being washed away. That was the first time I started to physically experience the effects of climate change.
One of your many climate initiatives is the One Girl Walk, can you tell us about what this involved?
In 2018, I created a walk called the One Girl Walk, where I walked 1,000 kilometres in 30 days from Darfur to Khartoum to create a collective responsibility for peace in Sudan.
In the beginning, everyone was saying, "Why are you walking from Darfur to Khartoum? You should walk from Khartoum to Darfur because the problems are in Darfur." People in Sudan were saying this. But by the time we finished the walk, everyone understood that our problems were all connected and that we're all united in this.
Most of the people who walked with me were young, recognizing and understanding that this is all of us together. We don't want anyone's wars, I guess we don't want to keep inheriting the same problems that our ancestors had to face before, and that we're growing up to address the problems we faced as children.
Climate action seems to be dominated by young people, I guess for obvious reasons. It's their future that is at risk. Is that reflected in the work you do?
Absolutely. A lot of people who are vulnerable are excluded from the decision-making tables. The people who are making the decisions seldom have to live with the consequences. And so I looked around, and I said, "Well, where are our voices?" It translates across everything that I do, even my advocacy for UNHCR, it's the idea that if we want to create solutions that actually represent the people, then we need to be represented and included from the outset, not just in the outcome phases.
Generally speaking, people in power are scared to engage with risk. They're afraid to engage with risk because there's a lot to lose, supposedly. There's a lot to lose in that there's power to be lost.
"When I think of who is the most vulnerable person in the world, I think of a young refugee girl who has few options to leave, has few options to be safe, and is erased both in practice and then again in language."
I'm not surprised that young people are the first to engage with risk, not because we don't have a lot to lose, we do have, we have everything to lose. We have our lives to lose, and that's all we have, and we still do it. But because we're also usually the first line of defence, we're the first ones to perish, we're the first ones to receive the pain of all of this. When I think of who is the most vulnerable person in the world, I think of a young refugee girl who has few options to leave, has few options to be safe, and is erased both in practice and then again in language, in the protocol, in all these different things.
In the UK, at least, there seems to be a misogynistic backlash against women who are participating in climate actions. Have you ever felt pushback as a woman in the climate movement?
Oh, absolutely. I've had a degree of privilege lately to have an ongoing rapport and a platform that I can use, but it took so much blood, sweat, and toil to get to that level […] That was originally how I felt starting out as an activist. But the deeper you go into activism, the more people you become responsible for. I'm accountable to the people on the ground that supported me, that are still there in the middle of the turmoil, and if I mess up, they might face the backlash.
So for me, over time, I started to learn this new level of responsibility and this new level of worry. With the One Girl Walk, I was able to take the responsibility onto myself, but even that, as it got bigger and grew, and all of that, it became more dangerous not only for me but for those around me. And so again, we don't have a choice because this is exactly what we need. We don't have an alternative. We have to succeed.
Because if we don't succeed, what does it mean? It means the erasure of our generation following generations. It means that there isn't much left for all of us. But what I'm trying to say is yes, I face backlash every day. And I also face the pain of every day of knowing that even if I do get to speak truth to power now, there is a buffer zone between when you speak truth to power and power actually acts where you lose people.
Can you tell me more about the importance of poetry and art in your activism?
Yeah. Poetry actually allows me to reach people where they least expect to be reached, and it even gives me a bit of a buffer in some spaces […] We have this art that allows us to break down the barriers between us and any other person. And I think that's something that I like to do with my poetry.
“If you speak to them with hate, as we've seen all over the world, they will respond with hate. But if you speak with your humanity, they have to respond with their humanity.”
I studied anthropology and molecular cellular developmental biology at college, and I'm going into medicine, but I continue to choose poetry because I really do believe that if you speak to somebody politically, they'll respond politically. If you speak to them academically, they'll respond academically. If you speak to them with hate, as we've seen all over the world, they will respond with hate. But if you speak with your humanity, they have to respond with their humanity.
So I see poetry as a tool, it's an art of protest, but it's an artful protest in that it allows you to really truly connect with the other person, and it makes the person see you. And I think that's what's important about spoken word poetry specifically, it's written to be heard, and it's written in a way where you can't separate the art from the artist. So for me, the role of art in these spaces is to access empathy in places where it's not always immediately clear where empathy belongs.
Finally, how have you found COP27 so far? Has it inspired you to think about your own goals as an activist?
My goal continues to be ensuring that we're recognized and represented. And when I say we, I mean refugees and vulnerable people, stateless people, displaced people. I want to make sure that we're represented not only in person at these things or in dialogue but also represented and recognized in the legislation that exists. I'm from Sudan, from Darfur specifically, and I can tell you that even though Africa's the hardest hit by climate change, only 4% of global climate change funding financing goes to Africa. Only 4%.
It's unbelievable that someone who lost everything from the floods or famine is not considered a refugee or is not considered someone who can be protected under legislation. It's also insane to me that even though 60% of internally displaced people last year were displaced by disasters, migration as a result of climate change is not a main topic at COP27, so I'm hoping that we can get that into the dialogue, even if it's for the future COP, and I'm hoping that we can just make it possible for there to be mechanisms and just ways for people to access support.
I can talk until my face is blue about the emotional value but if I really want us to scale the change on the ground, we need to start talking finance, we need to start holding some of these grown men accountable, telling them to put their money literally where their mouth is.
The climate crisis impacts everyone, but women and girls are bearing the brunt of it.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
