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War, Peace and the Green Economy

  • Text
  • Green economy
  • Peace
  • War
  • Ukraine
  • China
  • Africa
  • Europe
This magazine is about the world’s collective and potentially transformational journey towards a green economy. It is also about taking you, the reader, on what we hope is an equally fascinating ”green voyage” across some key parts of Europe as well as to Africa and China.

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS -

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS - HILDA FLAVIA NAKABUYE WAR, PEACE AND THE GREEN ECONOMY PROFILE ‘The government is hearing us, but not listening to us’ Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, founder of Uganda’s Fridays for Future movement Ugandan activist warns Hilda Flavia Nakabuye, one of Africa’s leading climate activists and lead of Uganda’s Fridays for Future movement, describes young Africa’s green hopes. By ELENA SÁNCHEZ NICOLÁS When Hilda Flavia Nakabuye was a little girl, her family and other farming communities earned their living through agriculture in Masaka, southern Uganda. Eventually, the rainy seasons became unpredictable, and heatwaves became more extreme and frequent, destroying crop fields and drying up streams and other water resources. The poor harvests at her family’s farmland made it very difficult for her parents to earn enough money to pay her tuition fees. After climate change forced her to miss school entirely for several months, her family decided to sell the farm and move to the capital, Kampala, where Nakabuye founded Uganda’s Fridays for Future movement early in 2019. Role of history and colonialism in the climate crisis are at the heart of the debate. She was motivated by images of Greta Thunberg, protesting outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, into organising her own solo Uganda school strikes to raise awareness over climate change. But the 24-year old activist says her demands were only met with inaction. “The government is hearing us, but it is not listening to us,” she told EUobserver in an interview. She was referring to how school strikes attracted attention — and repression by the police — but fell short of driving meaningful changes. In 2019, Uganda’s Fridays for Future, which now has over 53,000 young members, submitted a list of demands to the government, calling on leaders to act fast to seek unprecedented global action towards the climate breakdown. “Nothing is being done,” she said, referring to how her organisation’s demands and criticisms have just been ignored so far. 41

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