Alaa Abd el-Fattah has become a figurehead for people across the planet fighting for a future unencumbered by the entwined threats of climate breakdown and state violence
, she had just blanked an old friend in the corridor. This was becoming a reflex, she explained, as she pulled me into a breathless dash through the conference centre hosting the climate talks, sending papers, pastry crumbs and apologies tumbling in our wake. “A schoolmate I haven’t seen for many years waved across the room at me during breakfast,” she said, swerving to avoid what appeared to be the entire Malian national delegation heading the other way. “I just ignored it.
In this disorientating bubble in the Sinai desert, public conversations have been conducted in the past two weeks that had not been heard in Egypt for years – oil and gas production is one of the only consistently growing sectors of its debt-laden economy – and its human-rights abuses. In the run-up to the summit, debate raged among potential participants about whether the struggle for environmental justice and human rights can ever be separated. According to Hossam Bahgat, one of Egypt’s most prominent human-rights activists, the answer is straightforward: one is impossible without the other.
Some environmentalists privately expressed concern that controversy and press attention over Abd el-Fattah was distracting attention from greater priorities. “189m people per year in the global south are being battered by extreme weather and need loss-and-damage finance to survive,” one said to me. “That’s a human-rights issue, too.
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