## Climate activists — Uganda, Moldova, Fiji: messages to COP26

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**Canonical URL:** [Climate activists — Uganda, Moldova, Fiji: messages to COP26](https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/september/climate-activists-uganda-moldova-fiji-cop26-nakate.pdf)

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### Vanessa Nakate (Uganda) — urgency, fossil fuels, and scaled solutions
- Core message: COVID-19 showed "nature is in charge"; the climate crisis is speeding up with evidence in "massive floods this summer in Nigeria, Uganda, China, and Western Europe" and "raging wildfires and fierce heat waves in North America and Turkey."
- Equity concern: "The climate crisis is having the greatest impact on those places that have contributed the least to global emissions." Example: "Madagascar’s 28 million people produce less carbon than a Western city the size of Cincinnati, yet they face a historic drought and famine."
- Energy and development challenge: "Here in Africa, electricity demand is likely to double by 2030."
- Policy prescriptions and priorities:
  - Immediately stop digging and burning fossil fuels; "Most of the fossil fuels currently sitting in reserves need to remain unburned for us to have a chance of keeping below even 2°C."
  - "Subsidies, development finance and private finance must stop funding fossil fuel infrastructure now."
  - "Huge public and private investment must instead go into scaling renewable energy around the world."
  - Use a wide set of solutions, including non-technological ones: "Project Drawdown lists educating girls and family planning as the fifth most impactful global climate solution to keep temperatures under 1.5°C of warming."
- Framing: "We can either cling to our reliance on fossil fuels, or we can take this opportunity to save ourselves from an uninhabitable future. We cannot eat coal, drink oil, or breathe so-called 'natural' gas."

### Vladislav Kaim (Moldova) — climate finance, debt, and multilateral action
- Context: Moldova presented as "arguably Europe’s most vulnerable country to climate change."
- Central demand: COP26 must "deliver a comprehensive and sustainable solution when it comes to financing green transitions in places least equipped to do so."
- Historic target and critique: "Since 2009, the climate finance target of $100 billion a year stands as a reminder of the broken promises, lack of visionary leadership, and absence of political will."
- Interlinked priorities and timing: effective climate finance should "build on other important milestones" including "the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, as well as to the Group of Twenty (G20) finance ministers meeting in Rome right before the start of the COP26 Leaders’ Summit."
- Immediate fiscal issues:
  - COVID-19 has brought "immediate fiscal challenges"; "Many vulnerable countries risk defaulting on their Nationally Determined Contributions, current or enhanced."
  - New issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs): "The road to walking the talk on the Paris target on finance starts with making sure these countries are the primary beneficiaries of any new issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and that they secure a significant share of those proceeds for climate action."
- Debt and institutions:
  - Advocate "a comprehensive, all-hands-on-deck debt restructuring for the most affected countries" via "debt-for-nature and debt-for-climate swaps and more."
  - Critique of existing initiatives: "The G20's Debt Service Suspension Initiative, despite its extension, represents merely a duct tape solution to a monumental problem."
  - Call for multilateral development banks: "we need ironclad road maps from multilateral development banks to go fully green and 50 percent adaptation-focused by 2024."
- Closing risk: without action "another big-ticket item that previous generations were too lazy and careless to pay for will end up on the tab of my own."

### Ernest Gibson (Fiji) — communities, social movements, and systemic change
- Framing: The climate crisis is not only environmental but also "an ethical issue, a human rights issue, an economic issue. It is about peace and security."
- Pacific perspective: As "a Pacific Islander from a large ocean state," Gibson emphasizes lived impacts: "more severe weather events, rising and warming seas, and longer seasons."
- Value of communities:
  - Criticism of development approaches that "treat communities as problems to be solved and not as agents of change and contributors to the solution."
  - Recommendation: "Communities possess a wealth of experience in fostering and sustaining a healthy relationship with the environment, and it is on this richness that we should draw. We should take our cue from them."
  - Call for accountability: "adjust the way that we measure the success of our actions to ensure that we are accountable to grassroots communities and the people on the frontlines of the climate crisis."
- Role of social movements and youth protection:
  - Emphasize "the importance of social movements in speaking truth to power."
  - Need mechanisms "that protect young people so they can challenge the 'powers that be' without fear of retaliation."
- Systemic critique: "We need to move away from looking at the climate crisis as an environmental issue—it is ... about peace and security. Whether we like it or not, all these things are connected. And the solutions lie in our ability to take charge of this capitalist, greed-driven system and fundamentally change the world we inhabit."

*Source: Finance & Development, September 2021.*

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_Source: https://www.imf.org/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2021/september/climate-activists-uganda-moldova-fiji-cop26-nakate.pdf_