A few years ago as Ineza Umuhoza Grace watched news footage of families in Rwanda evacuating their flooded homes, a memory surfaced: her mother waking her up at night and dragging her out of the house as torrential rains crashed through the ceiling and water rose from the floor. “I remembered the sense of being powerless,” she says. “And I could not believe that other children could be living that same fear.” (Rwanda is referred to as the “land of a thousand hills.”)
What Umuhoza had experienced as a child is the type of natural disaster that’s getting more frequent and severe in Rwanda. So she shelved her dream of becoming a pilot, and today the 27-year-old National Geographic Explorer leads two climate change education and advocacy organizations, working within Rwanda and internationally. In 2022 Umuhoza helped present a demand from dozens of youth activists to COP27, the United Nations global summit on climate change, for a fund to cover loss and damages. The effort paid off. World leaders agreed to make contributions to begin offsetting the effects on the most vulnerable nations. (As climate disasters grow more costly, who should pay the bill?)
“We’re all in one boat,” she says. “COVID-19 made it clear that whatever is going to happen in Belgium is going to happen in Rwanda. Just as COVID knew no boundaries, neither does climate change impact.”
This story appears in the April 2023 issue of National Geographic magazine.
