Image by Gabriela Mesones Rojo for Global Voices.

The Global South — from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Pacific Islands, from the Amazon Basin to Western Asia — is at the forefront of a crisis that was largely created by just a few wealthy nations. These regions are facing the most severe and immediate consequences of climate change: rising oceans, prolonged droughts, accelerating deforestation, disrupted food systems, and mass displacement. Yet these same communities are generating some of the world’s most innovative, locally rooted, and human-centered climate solutions.

While global attention on climate justice in the Global South has never been higher, coverage remains disproportionately centered on the perspectives of Western nations and large international institutions. Additionally, much of this coverage only focuses on the massive scale of the problem, overlooking those working tirelessly to combat it and the consistent progress that has been made. While this constant negative messaging might promote engagement and clicks, it can also promote apathy and trigger a phenomenon of climate anxiety, wherein people feel unable or unwilling to take meaningful climate action, as they feel the situation is hopeless. 

Global Voices Spotlight will shift that narrative. Rather than framing the Global South as a site of climate vulnerability and victimhood, our reporting will center the ingenuity, agency, and leadership of communities, activists, scientists, and entrepreneurs across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Western Asia and North Africa, and the Pacific. There are people making brilliant advancements in green research, launching impressive conservation plans, harnessing Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and achieving concrete victories in the fight to restore the planet’s ecosystems.

Rooted in Global Voices’ twenty-year track record of multilingual, community-driven journalism, this series, “Local solutions to a global crisis,” will amplify stories and voices that global media consistently overlooks. We will not just lay out the problems surfacing because of the climate crisis, but also explore the solutions: what is being built, grown, fought for, and imagined from the ground up.

We have so many stories to tell, and not enough budget for all of them. The global funding crisis — controlled by many of the same actors opposing climate action — has made it harder to report on these issues, even as that reporting is more and more vital. Donate now, and your contribution will go towards paying our editors and other staff so that we can offer you more of these urgent insights from around the world.

This Spotlight runs through the full month of May, so you’ll see more articles soon. In the meantime, check out April’s Spotlight, “Human perspectives on AI.”

You can support this coverage by donating here!