The People’s Climate Walk, a 40-day journey during which a core group of 14 activists traversed more than 600 miles to raise awareness about climate justice, ended Saturday in
evacuees slept during the disaster—churches, schools, covered courts—and organized with members of local communities.
Naderev ‘Yeb’ Saño, a leader of the walk, said such grassroots energy would have a lasting impact.
“At the least, every person whom we have encountered we can safely say we have converted on climate change action and they will become local environmental heroes in their own communities,” he told Agence France-Presse. “Many of them promised to us they would continue the fight by organizing with their own communities to protect their natural resources.”
Next month, Saño will attend the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Lima, Peru. Last year, he gained attention for his emotional appeal to world leaders at the UN Climate Talks in Warsaw, Poland.
“To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare you to get off your ivory tower and away from the comfort of you armchair,” Saño said at the time.
reported. “They formed a human banner of the Philippine flag, symbolizing the growing national movement that is demanding climate justice, on behalf of the thousands who died in the disaster and the millions displaced by extreme weather events like [Haiyan].”
Tragically, such intense and destructive storms are likely to become more normal in the future as the climate crisis intensifies. Scientists have warned for decades that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has and will continue to cause the global average temperatures to rise and the result will be more and more extreme weather events.
As the world gets warmer, we should prepare for more intense typhoons and other harmful impacts of climate change. Communities like those affected by Haiyan are on the frontline of climate change and will be hit first and hardest.
The organisers of the People’s Climate Walk, including Greenpeace Southeast Asia-Philippines, are supporting communities along the route to hold the big polluters legally and morally accountable.
Also on Saturday, thousands in Tacloban participated in a memorial march and vigil at dawn, and hundreds in Manila protested what they see as lack of government urgency or progress on reconstruction in the wake of the devastating typhoon.