AFP UK

Pine trees emerge from the volcanic ash on a slope of the Tajogaite volcano

“Our plan now is… there are no plans,” said a tearful Leticia Sanchez Garcia, a year after her house was buried under lava from a volcano that erupted on the Spanish island of La Palma.

After living with friends for months, the 34-year-old was finally able to move in May, along with her partner and three young children, into a prefabricated wooden house provided by the government.

Yet for her and many others on the tiny isle, part of the Canary Islands chain off Africa’s northwest coast, life remains difficult.

On Monday, it will be a year to the day since the Tajogaite volcano — previously known as Cumbre Vieja for the ridge on which it sits — erupted.

A year on, Sanchez and others like her face an uncertain future.

Sanchez works as a geriatric nursing assistant, but her contract expires in December. 

Her partner lost his job when the banana plantation where he worked was destroyed by the volcano. Now he is employed by the local government as a street sweeper but his contract too ends in December.

The family can stay in the three-bedroom house for one year for free.

“I am still in denial,” she admitted, sitting on the patio of her new house in Los Llanos de Aridane, the economic centre of the island of around 83,000 people.

“I still think I will return one day.” 

From the patio, Garcia can see the volcano that upended her life and the mountain slope where her house once stood. But she avoids looking in that direction, she said.

She missed her “garden, her chickens, making plans with friends”.

– ‘Rather be dead’ –

The volcano rumbled for 85 days, ejecting ash and rivers of lava that swallowed up more than a 1,000 homes.

It also destroyed schools, churches and health centres, cut off highways and suffocated the lush banana plantations that drive the island’s economy.

So far, the government has provided more than 500 million euros ($500 million) towards temporary housing, road repairs, clearing ash and financial support to people who lost their jobs.

But many locals complain that the pace of reconstruction is too slow.

Applications for public aid are complex, they say: craftsmen are often booked out, building materials scarce and construction permits too slow in coming.

So far, only five of the 121 prefabricated houses bought by the government have been allotted to people left homeless by the volcano, says the regional government.

Around 250 people whose homes were destroyed are still living in hotels, according to the Platform of Victims of the Volcano, which lobbies for those who lost their property.

Another 150 are staying with friends and family. 

“No one died in the eruption,” said the group’s president, Juan Fernando Perez Martin, a 70-year-old former high school teacher who has polio.

“But some of us would rather be dead than suffer all these strong emotions, all these problems we are facing.” 

His house, which was adapted for his wheelchair, was buried under more than 20 metres (65 feet) of molten rock.

Frustrated by the delays in getting government aid, he took out a bank loan to buy a more modest house in the central town of El Paso and adapt it for his disability. He lives there with his Mexican wife.

– ‘In limbo’ –

One of the few items they were able to take when they fled their previous home was a portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which now features prominently in their kitchen.

Everything else is gone, including Martin’s prized collection of nearly 6,000 books.

“I can never recover that,” he told AFP in the patio of his new home where he likes to smoke cigars.

While the eruption was officially declared over on Christmas Day, the volcano will continue to release toxic gases for a long time.

That is why some 1,100 people are still unable to return to their homes in and around Puerto Naos, a resort town on the southwest coast of the island.

The gas levels in the area are considered too dangerous. Signs featuring skulls and crossbones at the entrance to the town warn of the “risk of asphyxiation”.

“We are in limbo,” said Eulalia Villalba Simon, 58, who owns a restaurant and flat in Puerto Naos to which she no longer has access.

She now rents an apartment on the other side of the island, surviving thanks to aid from the government and charities.

“We don’t know when we can go back or even if we will be able to return because we have been told it could last for months or years,” she said.

“We don’t know what will happen.”

Plastic waste floats on the Cerron Grande reservoir in Potonico, El Salvador

A blanket of multi-colored plastic waste flowing in from tributaries covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador.

It is a sorry scene that has also become an all too common sight on the Caribbean beaches of Honduras, where thousands of tons of rubbish arrive from neighboring Guatemala.

Fizzy drink bottles, medication packets, tattered flipflops: all sorts of plastic rubbish can be found floating on  13,500-hectare (52 square mile) Lake Suchitlan, which serves as a reservoir for a power plant and is considered by UNESCO to be a wetland of international importance.

Local fishermen say the pollution forces tilapia and cichlid fish deeper into the artificial lake — the largest body of freshwater in the country — where they cannot be reached with fishing nets.

“It has been more than two months since we’ve been able to fish,” angler Luis Penate, 25, told AFP.

To make ends meet he has started ferrying around tourists in a boat owned by another fisherman.

Ducks clear paths through the rubbish, little tortoises climb on top of floating bottles to sunbathe and skinny horses wade into the lake to drink the contaminated water.

This contamination is unprecedented,  says Jacinto Tobar, the mayor of Potonico, a small village 100 kilometers north of San Salvador in Chalatenango department.

“The fauna and flora are suffering a lot” and there are ever fewer tourists, he said.

The fishermen must also compete with 1.5 million black cormorants that inhabit the lake, according to Tobar, who says they have become a type of plague since arriving as migratory birds and then staying put.

With a population of 2,500, Potonico is the most affected of 15 riverside villages.

The state body that administers the reservoir employs dozens of workers to clean the lake by hand.

Some locals also help out with the task, which Tobar says will take three to four months to complete.

“What can we hope for in the future if we don’t look after our environment, if we soil our streets, rivers, lakes, forests and beaches,” said President Nayib Bukele earlier this week at the launch of a “Zero Rubbish” campaign.

Environment minister Fernando Lopez said the country generates 4,200 tons of waste a day, of which 1,200 tons end up in rivers, beaches and streets.

– ‘Unable to stop it’ –

One of the worst affected areas of the Central American Caribbean coast is the beaches of the Omoa region in Honduras.

It is a beautiful coastline with abundant vegetation and palm trees, some 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Tegucigalpa.

But in some places the sand is almost entirely covered with plastic waste of all sorts, including syringes.

“This rubbish comes from the Motagua river on the Guatemalan side, they weren’t able to stop it,” said Candido Flores, 76, a local resident.

“As the river rises, it returns again.”

It has created islands of floating waste that have been denounced by local authorities and activists, and has even caused tensions between the two countries.

Every year, some 20,000 tons of plastic waste comes through the Las Vacas river, a tributary of the Motagua, according to The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch NGO.

Most of that comes from a landfill in the Guatemalan capital. 

Environmental activists say the problem must be tackled at its source.

“We must attack where the main flow of rubbish comes from,” said Eduardo Arguera, 29, an architecture student at the University of El Salvador, who has launched several clean up campaigns.

To contain plastic waste and prevent it from reaching rivers and lakes, he suggests fencing it in at strategic points.

Ricardo Navarro, president of the Center of Appropriate Technology, says only 30 percent of the waste floats; the rest sinks to the bottom of the bodies of water.

Meaning what is visible, quite literally, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The United Nations Environment Programme says 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, and warns that number could triple in the next 20 years.

Plastic waste floats on the Cerron Grande reservoir in Potonico, El Salvador

A blanket of multi-colored plastic waste flowing in from tributaries covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador.

It is a sorry scene that has also become an all too common sight on the Caribbean beaches of Honduras, where thousands of tons of rubbish arrive from neighboring Guatemala.

Fizzy drink bottles, medication packets, tattered flipflops: all sorts of plastic rubbish can be found floating on  13,500-hectare (52 square mile) Lake Suchitlan, which serves as a reservoir for a power plant and is considered by UNESCO to be a wetland of international importance.

Local fishermen say the pollution forces tilapia and cichlid fish deeper into the artificial lake — the largest body of freshwater in the country — where they cannot be reached with fishing nets.

“It has been more than two months since we’ve been able to fish,” angler Luis Penate, 25, told AFP.

To make ends meet he has started ferrying around tourists in a boat owned by another fisherman.

Ducks clear paths through the rubbish, little tortoises climb on top of floating bottles to sunbathe and skinny horses wade into the lake to drink the contaminated water.

This contamination is unprecedented,  says Jacinto Tobar, the mayor of Potonico, a small village 100 kilometers north of San Salvador in Chalatenango department.

“The fauna and flora are suffering a lot” and there are ever fewer tourists, he said.

The fishermen must also compete with 1.5 million black cormorants that inhabit the lake, according to Tobar, who says they have become a type of plague since arriving as migratory birds and then staying put.

With a population of 2,500, Potonico is the most affected of 15 riverside villages.

The state body that administers the reservoir employs dozens of workers to clean the lake by hand.

Some locals also help out with the task, which Tobar says will take three to four months to complete.

“What can we hope for in the future if we don’t look after our environment, if we soil our streets, rivers, lakes, forests and beaches,” said President Nayib Bukele earlier this week at the launch of a “Zero Rubbish” campaign.

Environment minister Fernando Lopez said the country generates 4,200 tons of waste a day, of which 1,200 tons end up in rivers, beaches and streets.

– ‘Unable to stop it’ –

One of the worst affected areas of the Central American Caribbean coast is the beaches of the Omoa region in Honduras.

It is a beautiful coastline with abundant vegetation and palm trees, some 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Tegucigalpa.

But in some places the sand is almost entirely covered with plastic waste of all sorts, including syringes.

“This rubbish comes from the Motagua river on the Guatemalan side, they weren’t able to stop it,” said Candido Flores, 76, a local resident.

“As the river rises, it returns again.”

It has created islands of floating waste that have been denounced by local authorities and activists, and has even caused tensions between the two countries.

Every year, some 20,000 tons of plastic waste comes through the Las Vacas river, a tributary of the Motagua, according to The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch NGO.

Most of that comes from a landfill in the Guatemalan capital. 

Environmental activists say the problem must be tackled at its source.

“We must attack where the main flow of rubbish comes from,” said Eduardo Arguera, 29, an architecture student at the University of El Salvador, who has launched several clean up campaigns.

To contain plastic waste and prevent it from reaching rivers and lakes, he suggests fencing it in at strategic points.

Ricardo Navarro, president of the Center of Appropriate Technology, says only 30 percent of the waste floats; the rest sinks to the bottom of the bodies of water.

Meaning what is visible, quite literally, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The United Nations Environment Programme says 11 million metric tons of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year, and warns that number could triple in the next 20 years.

Displaced flood-affected people stand in a queue to receive food at a makeshift camp in flood-hit Sehwan, Pakistan

From record droughts to catastrophic floods, the world’s worst climate hotspots are seeing a surge in acute hunger, according to an Oxfam report that called on rich nations to drastically cut their emissions and compensate low-income countries.

The analysis, “Hunger in a heating world,” found that acute hunger had risen 123 percent over six years in the ten most-affected nations, defined by the most number of UN weather appeals.

“The effects of severe weather events are already being felt,” Lia Lindsey, Oxfam America’s senior humanitarian policy advisory told AFP, adding the report was timed to pressure world leaders at the UN General Assembly to act.

The countries — Somalia, Haiti, Djibouti, Kenya, Niger, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Madagascar, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe — have repeatedly been battered by extreme weather over the last two decades. 

An estimated 48 million people across those countries suffer acute hunger, defined as hunger resulting from a shock and causing risks to lives and livelihoods and based on reports compiled by the World Food Programme.

That figure is up from 21 million people in 2016; 18 million people are on the brink of starvation.

The report acknowledges the complexity surrounding the causes of global hunger, with conflict and economic disruption — including those from the Covid-19 pandemic — remaining key drivers. 

“However, these new and worsening weather extremes are increasingly peeling away the abilities of poor people particularly in low-income countries to stave off hunger and cope with the next shock,” it said.

Somalia, for example, is facing its worst drought on record, forcing one million people to flee their homes. 

Climate change is also causing more frequent and intense heat waves and other extreme weather including floods, which covered one-third of Pakistan, washing away crops and topsoil and destroying farming infrastructure.

In Guatemala, weather conditions have contributed to the loss of close to 80 percent of the maize harvest, as well as causing a “coffee crisis” in the region that has hit vulnerable communities hardest and forced many to migrate to the United States. 

– ‘Obligation, not charity’ –

Oxfam stressed that climate-fueled hunger is a “stark demonstration of global inequality,” with the countries least responsible for the crisis suffering most from its impact.

Polluting industrialized nations such as those of the G20 are responsible for more than three-quarters of the world’s carbon emissions, while the 10 climate hotspots are collectively responsible for just 0.13 percent.

“Leaders especially of rich polluting countries must live up to their promises to cut emissions,” said Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam International executive director, in a statement. 

“They must pay for adaptation measures and loss-and-damage in low-income countries, as well as immediately inject lifesaving funds to meet the UN appeal to respond to the most impacted countries.”

The UN humanitarian appeal for 2022 comes to $49 billion, which Oxfam noted was equivalent to less than 18 days of profit for fossil fuel companies, when looking at average daily profits over the last 50 years.

Canceling debt can also help governments free up resources, said Bucher, with rich countries holding a moral responsibility to compensate poorer, most-affected countries. 

“This is an ethical obligation, not charity,” she said.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun

Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.

But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.

A new study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science sets out to provide a convincing answer.

Between 100-200 million years ago, an icy moon they named Chrysalis broke up after getting a little too close to the gas giant, they conclude.

While most of it made impact with Saturn, its remaining fragments broke into small icy chunks that form the planet’s signature rings.

“It’s nice to find a plausible explanation,” Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, told AFP.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, was formed four and a half billion years ago, at the beginning of the solar system. 

But a few decades ago, scientists suggested that Saturn’s rings appeared much later: only about 100 million years ago.

The hypothesis was reinforced by observations made by the Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

“But because no one could think of a way to make the rings 100 million years ago, some people have been questioning the reasoning that led to that deduction,” said Wisdom.

By constructing complex mathematical models, Wisdom and colleagues found an explanation that both justified the timeline, and allowed them to better understand another characteristic of the planet, its tilt.

Saturn has a 26.7 degree tilt. Being a gas giant, it would have been expected that the process of accumulating matter that led to its formation would have prevented tilt.

– Gravitational interactions –

Scientists recently discovered that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 83 moons, is migrating away from the planet, at a rate of 11 centimeters a year.

This changes the rate at which Saturn’s axis of tilt loops around the vertical — the technical term is “precession.” Think of a spinning top drawing circles. 

Around a billion years ago, this wobble frequency came into sync with Neptune’s wobbly orbit, creating a powerful gravitational interaction called “resonance.” 

In order to maintain this lock, as Titan kept moving out, Saturn had to tilt, scientists argued.

But that explanation hinged on knowing how mass was distributed in the planet’s interior, since the tilt would have behaved differently if it were concentrated more at its surface or the core.

In the new study, Wisdom and colleagues modeled the planet’s interior using gravitational data gathered by Cassini during its close approach “Grand Finale,” its last act before plunging into Saturn’s depths.

The model they generated found Saturn is now slightly out of sync with Neptune, which necessitated a new explanation — an event powerful enough to cause the drastic disruption.

Working through the mathematics, they found a lost moon fit the bill.

“It’s pulled apart into a bunch of pieces and those pieces subsequently get pulled apart even more, and gradually rolls into the rings.”

The missing Moon was baptized Chrysalis by MIT’s Wisdom, likening the emergence of Saturn’s rings to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

The team thinks Chrysalis was a bit smaller than our own Moon, and about the size of another Saturn satellite, Iapetus, which is made entirely of water ice.

“So it’s plausible to hypothesize that Chrysalis is also made of water ice, and that’s what it needs to make the rings, because the rings are almost pure water.

Asked whether he felt the mystery of Saturn’s rings stood solved, Wisdom replied, soberly, “We’ve made a good contribution.” 

The Saturn satellite system still holds “a variety of mysteries,” he added.

Flooding in parts of Pakistan has affected over 33 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes and killed nearly 1,400 people

Human-caused climate change likely contributed to the deadly floods that submerged parts of Pakistan in recent weeks, according to a rapid analysis on Thursday looking at how much global heating was to blame.

An international team of climate scientists at the World Weather Attribution group said that rainfall in the worst-hit regions had increased as much as 75 percent in recent decades and concluded that manmade activity likely boosted record levels of August precipitation in Sindh and Balochistan provinces. 

The resulting flooding affected over 33 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes and killed nearly 1,400 people.

To determine what role global heating played in the downpours, the scientists analysed weather data and computer simulations of today’s climate to determine the likelihood of such an event occurring at the roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming that human activity has caused since the Industrial era.

They then compared that likelihood to data and simulations of conditions in the climate of the past — that is, 1.2C cooler than currently. 

They found that climate change likely increased the 5-day total rainfall for Sindh and Balochistan by up to 50 percent. 

The analysis showed that there was a roughly one percent chance of such an event occurring in any given year in our current climactic conditions.

“The same event would probably have been much less likely in a world without human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, meaning climate change likely made the extreme rainfall more probable,” the team said. 

The authors of the study however stressed that due to large variations in seasonal monsoon rainfall over Pakistan historically, it was not possible to conclude that manmade warming contributed significantly to 60-day total rainfall levels.

“What we saw in Pakistan is exactly what climate projections have been predicting for years,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. 

“It’s also in line with historical records showing that heavy rainfall has dramatically increased in the region since humans started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” 

– Finance needed –

Otto said while it was hard to put a precise figure on the extent to which manmade emissions drove the rainfall, “the fingerprints of global warming are evident”.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said that weather-related disasters such as Pakistan’s had increased five-fold over the last 50 years, killing 115 people each day on average. 

The warning came as nations are gearing up for the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, where at-risk countries are demanding that rich, historic polluters compensate them for the climate-drive loss and damage already battering their economies and infrastructure. 

Fahad Saeed, researcher at the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Islamabad, said the floods showed the need for richer nations to radically ramp up funding to help others adapt to climate change — another key ask at COP27.

“Pakistan must also ask developed countries to take responsibility and provide adaptation plus loss and damage support to the countries and populations bearing the brunt of climate change,” he said.

Flooding in parts of Pakistan has affected over 33 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes and killed nearly 1,400 people

Human-caused climate change likely contributed to the deadly floods that submerged parts of Pakistan in recent weeks, according to a rapid analysis on Thursday looking at how much global heating was to blame.

An international team of climate scientists at the World Weather Attribution group said that rainfall in the worst-hit regions had increased as much as 75 percent in recent decades and concluded that manmade activity likely boosted record levels of August precipitation in Sindh and Balochistan provinces. 

The resulting flooding affected over 33 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes and killed nearly 1,400 people.

To determine what role global heating played in the downpours, the scientists analysed weather data and computer simulations of today’s climate to determine the likelihood of such an event occurring at the roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius of warming that human activity has caused since the Industrial era.

They then compared that likelihood to data and simulations of conditions in the climate of the past — that is, 1.2C cooler than currently. 

They found that climate change likely increased the 5-day total rainfall for Sindh and Balochistan by up to 50 percent. 

The analysis showed that there was a roughly one percent chance of such an event occurring in any given year in our current climactic conditions.

“The same event would probably have been much less likely in a world without human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, meaning climate change likely made the extreme rainfall more probable,” the team said. 

The authors of the study however stressed that due to large variations in seasonal monsoon rainfall over Pakistan historically, it was not possible to conclude that manmade warming contributed significantly to 60-day total rainfall levels.

“What we saw in Pakistan is exactly what climate projections have been predicting for years,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. 

“It’s also in line with historical records showing that heavy rainfall has dramatically increased in the region since humans started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” 

– Finance needed –

Otto said while it was hard to put a precise figure on the extent to which manmade emissions drove the rainfall, “the fingerprints of global warming are evident”.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said that weather-related disasters such as Pakistan’s had increased five-fold over the last 50 years, killing 115 people each day on average. 

The warning came as nations are gearing up for the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, where at-risk countries are demanding that rich, historic polluters compensate them for the climate-drive loss and damage already battering their economies and infrastructure. 

Fahad Saeed, researcher at the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Islamabad, said the floods showed the need for richer nations to radically ramp up funding to help others adapt to climate change — another key ask at COP27.

“Pakistan must also ask developed countries to take responsibility and provide adaptation plus loss and damage support to the countries and populations bearing the brunt of climate change,” he said.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun

Discovered by Galileo 400 years ago, the rings of Saturn are about the most striking thing astronomers with small telescopes can spot in our solar system.

But even today, experts cannot agree on how or when they formed.

A new study published Thursday in the prestigious journal Science sets out to provide a convincing answer.

Between 100-200 million years ago, an icy moon they named Chrysalis broke up after getting a little too close to the gas giant, they conclude.

While most of it made impact with Saturn, its remaining fragments broke into small icy chunks that form the planet’s signature rings.

“It’s nice to find a plausible explanation,” Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, told AFP.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the Sun, was formed four and a half billion years ago, at the beginning of the solar system. 

But a few decades ago, scientists suggested that Saturn’s rings appeared much later: only about 100 million years ago.

The hypothesis was reinforced by observations made by the Cassini probe, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017.

“But because no one could think of a way to make the rings 100 million years ago, some people have been questioning the reasoning that led to that deduction,” said Wisdom.

By constructing complex mathematical models, Wisdom and colleagues found an explanation that both justified the timeline, and allowed them to better understand another characteristic of the planet, its tilt.

Saturn has a 26.7 degree tilt. Being a gas giant, it would have been expected that the process of accumulating matter that led to its formation would have prevented tilt.

– Gravitational interactions –

Scientists recently discovered that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 83 moons, is migrating away from the planet, at a rate of 11 centimeters a year.

This changes the rate at which Saturn’s axis of tilt loops around the vertical — the technical term is “precession.” Think of a spinning top drawing circles. 

Around a billion years ago, this wobble frequency came into sync with Neptune’s wobbly orbit, creating a powerful gravitational interaction called “resonance.” 

In order to maintain this lock, as Titan kept moving out, Saturn had to tilt, scientists argued.

But that explanation hinged on knowing how mass was distributed in the planet’s interior, since the tilt would have behaved differently if it were concentrated more at its surface or the core.

In the new study, Wisdom and colleagues modeled the planet’s interior using gravitational data gathered by Cassini during its close approach “Grand Finale,” its last act before plunging into Saturn’s depths.

The model they generated found Saturn is now slightly out of sync with Neptune, which necessitated a new explanation — an event powerful enough to cause the drastic disruption.

Working through the mathematics, they found a lost moon fit the bill.

“It’s pulled apart into a bunch of pieces and those pieces subsequently get pulled apart even more, and gradually rolls into the rings.”

The missing Moon was baptized Chrysalis by MIT’s Wisdom, likening the emergence of Saturn’s rings to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

The team thinks Chrysalis was a bit smaller than our own Moon, and about the size of another Saturn satellite, Iapetus, which is made entirely of water ice.

“So it’s plausible to hypothesize that Chrysalis is also made of water ice, and that’s what it needs to make the rings, because the rings are almost pure water.

Asked whether he felt the mystery of Saturn’s rings stood solved, Wisdom replied, soberly, “We’ve made a good contribution.” 

The Saturn satellite system still holds “a variety of mysteries,” he added.

Ugndan climate activist Vanessa Nakate has been named UNICEF's new Goodwill Ambassador

Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate recently traveled to the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa to hear from children suffering from starvation. The next day she learned that one of the boys she met had died.

It is for such children, whose lives have been shattered by the global climate crisis, that Nakate, UNICEF’s newest Goodwill Ambassador, has set out to make their voices heard.

“I’m hoping to continue doing the same thing to amplify, and really platform, the stories of the children … that are suffering, because of the climate crisis,” Nakate, who is 25, told AFP in an interview.

Inspired by Sweden’s climate crusader Greta Thunberg, several years ago Nakate founded the Rise Up Climate Movement in her native Uganda and has spoken at prestigious international climate events.

On Thursday, she was appointed the newest Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, joining recent high-profile supporters such as actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, singer Katy Perry and Syrian refugee and education activist Muzoon Almellehan.

“In my journey of activism, I’ve always told myself, and I’ve always believed that every activist has a story to tell,” Nakate said. “And every story has a solution to give and every solution has a life to change.”

The activist says children and women suffer the most from global warming and her mission is make their voices heard — but not to speak on their behalf.

“I cannot say that I can give a voice to anyone, because I believe everyone has their own distinct voice,” she added.

“But the question is, who is listening to what we are saying? Who is paying attention?”

– ‘Roof for all of us’ –

Last week, Nakate visited UNICEF-run hospitals and nutrition centers in Turkana, a Kenyan region in the Horn of Africa hit by devastating drought.

There she witnessed the tragedy firsthand.

“I got to meet many children suffering from severe, acute malnutrition, because of this drought,” Nakate said of the trip. “One of the children that I got to meet that day, I got to learn the following morning that he had passed.”

UNICEF says about half of the world’s children — roughly 1 billion — live in one of 33 countries classified as “extremely high risk” due to climate change impacts.

Scientists say that droughts, floods, storms and heat waves will only get stronger and more frequent due to global warming, and Nakate is frustrated that governments around the world, busy with the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic, are not doing enough to save the planet.

“It can be discouraging to see that the world is not paying the attention that it should to climate issues, it can be very frustrating,” said the activist.

“Leaders especially need to understand that Earth is a home for all of us, is like that roof for all of us. And we have to ensure that the entire roof is well and no part is leaking,” Nakate said. “Because any leak in a part of a roof will eventually affect everyone in that house.”

White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy

The Biden administration announced plans on Thursday to expand the use of wind energy by building floating offshore wind platforms.

The Interior Department said the objective is to deploy 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind capacity by 2035, enough to power more than five million homes.

It seeks to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind energy by more than 70 percent by 2035.

“We’re launching efforts to seize a new opportunity — floating offshore wind,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said at a briefing for reporters.

McCarthy said the technology “will let us build in deepwater areas where turbines can’t be secured directly to the seafloor, but where there are strong winds that we can now harness.”

The Biden administration has previously announced a goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030.

Two-thirds of America’s offshore wind energy potential is in deep-water areas such as off the coast of California and Oregon that require floating platforms, officials said.

To kick off the program, the administration announced nearly $50 million in funding for research and development.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said her department will coordinate with the Interior Department “to ensure that floating offshore wind can coexist with wildlife and with fishing.”