When she was 17, Zainab Waheed found herself onstage in Buenos Aires facing an auditorium of officials from 20 major global cities. “Do you think urban destruction from climate change is preventable?” she asked. “Do you think we have the science or technology to move towards resilience?” The audience at the 2022 C40 World Mayors Summit answered with twin choruses of “Yes!”
“But do you think our leaders are doing enough to move the world toward resilience?”
“No!”
“Exactly! If our leaders do not understand the need for resilience right now, if we do not demand resilience right now, our leaders will continue to get away with inaction. The Global North will continue to greenwash our futures, and the world will continue to become uninhabitable.”
It’s one of many appearances the Karachi-born Waheed—now a Carleton first year—has made since launching a career as an activist in fifth grade, when she penned her first article on climate change. She’s written more than 30 pieces in both English and Urdu since, some linking climate change to Pakistani literary narratives, others sharing the experiences of climate victims to broader audiences.
Likewise, her speaking engagements have ranged from the hyperlocal to the global. In Islamabad, she’s visited madrassas to speak with girls about the effects they’re witnessing around them, from flooding to disease. She’s served as Pakistan’s representative to the UN’s Youth Force, and its delegate to the Pre-COP26 and Pre-COP27 Youth4Climate conferences. And in September she gave a keynote at the Ford Foundation’s Free Future conference in New York, discussing the intersection of gender-based violence and climate change.
“The UN reports that about 80 percent of the people impacted by climate change are women,” she told audiences there. “But those are just statistics, and statistics don’t tell us stories.” The 2022 flood in Pakistan killed more than 1,700 and cost billions in damages and economic loss. Humanizing its toll, she spoke of its impacts on women, from sexual violence caused by upheavals in the social order to ways disrupted supply chains left poor families without essentials, including feminine hygiene products.
Of all her high-profile activism, her role as UNICEF Youth Foresight Fellow is closest to her heart: “It opened up so many opportunities for me and gave me tools for thinking about the future.
“Foresight helps us ask: What is our ideal preferred future? How do we get there? What is the future we want to avoid? And it doesn’t have to be climate change. It could be about democracy, freedom of speech. What does the future of health look like? The future of education or AI?”
Such questions will be at the core of her next project. Aided by a UN microgrant, she’s founding a Foresight Club at Carleton. “It’s so important to think about the future because if we don’t, we’ll be pulled towards a future that we are not actively participating in shaping.”