When I was a kid, I use to think that climate change was an issue that was only affecting polar bears in the north pole. It was frightening – for one hot minute – and then my family and I would throw our food waste and batteries together in the same bin.



I grew up in a cité, the French equivalent of a council estate, in Argenteuil, in the Parisian suburbs. The majority of its residents were of African and Maghrebi descent. We barely had functioning elevators, so the council couldn’t be bothered to force us to recycle.

My friends who lived in middle-class neighbourhoods already knew how to recycle and plant seeds in a garden – and they had the space for it.

As I grew older, I realised that my friends who had the opportunity to leave the cité for more secure and bigger accommodation, such as gated communities in the suburbs, were almost all white.

The few times I raised the environment issue at home, I was told that “recycling was for white people”. But environmental issues, and especially climate change, have a funny way of affecting our everyday lives. And they don’t really care about our origins.

The first natural disaster which affected me was the French heatwave of 2003, when I was 12. It was quite a big deal in the country back then, because about 15,000 old people died from heat stroke and poor living conditions.

Suddenly, global warming was upon us. I thought that it just meant that we would have higher temperatures during the summer. I was wrong. Climate change means that we experience more extreme temperatures every year, both hot and cold. And it affected the black and Maghrebi people in my neighbourhood even more: the buildings we are living in have very poor insulation, and no district heating.

Having vegetation around a home has been proven to be effective to protect populations against heat waves. We had some green spaces where I lived, incredibly small and always crowded. But they have since disappeared, replaced by concrete. One of our biggest green spaces locally turned to a wasteland, where rats appeared and then spread to the surrounding cités.

We were completely forgotten, despite what the council promised. We had nothing to protect us from extreme temperatures, more frequent because of climate change. And that is the tricky thing with environmental racism: we have poor living conditions, and fewer opportunities to move to better accommodation. It has been shown that landlords tend to prefer white tenants when it comes to renting, or buying a home. And gentrification means that even if we choose to stay, we’ll be forced to leave sooner or later.

Environmental issues are serious and urgent, and affect everyone – especially people like me. Having access to a decent environment is a natural right. And I urge more young black people to care about that, because we pay the price every day. It is time for us to start at a grassroot level, to build healthier local communities and produce locally. Because no one else will do it for us.