Tunisia’s ancient Olives are struggling to keep up with climate change
Welcome to Climate Weekly!
This week, meet Eman Nighaoui, a passionate young writer from Tunisia, who has just joined our team at Climate Tracker.
Asslema,
Greetings from Tunisia!
My name is Eman Nighaoui, and 2020 has been tough for us all hasn’t it?
This year Tunisia’s weather has become more eratic than ever. For me, it’s a relatively small issue. My pomegranate tree died this year because of the weather, and it really broke my heart. But for our fisherman, where the hot weather brings storm surges and higher winds, the number of fishing days each year has shifted from 6 months to 60 days.
For our farmers and their famous olive trees, I fear they might soon see the same fate of my pomegranate. Just as the Lebanese cherish their “Cedars of God,” olives are the pride of the Tunisian people. We are the world’s biggest exporters of Olive oil, and almost all of our farms are organic and non-irrigated, leaving us especially vulnerable vulnerable to changes in rainfall and heat. In February, the drought in some of our poorer regions was so bad, that our minister of religious affairs asked all Imams to “pray for rain”.
My own little olive tree
Unfortunately their prayers were unanswered, and our Olive oil production is down by 64% this year.
What gives me some hope is that in a year of drought, emerging group Youth for Climate has had a fruitful year. Recently they created an online series called “Climate Rebillioun” to spur on discussion on climate change, and have recently organised their own online Climate Strike; with youth across Tunisia sharing their photos.
I just joined Climate Tracker this month, and hope next year I can connect with many more young Arabic journalists across the MENA region. Lina Yassin and I have a dream to create our own Arabic Climate Tracker site next year. We want to create the most vibrant Arabic language climate journalism community in the world.
If you’d like to help us build it, please reach out!
Thought of the Week
It’s funny when we think about the speed of change. When we want something so bad, that we harbour both the sense of impossibility and impatience at the same time.
Five years ago, I would have been writing this newsletter from a media desk in Paris. Though by this date in December, I wasn’t anywhere near a laptop. I was already drunk on the hope that the world had suddenly changed, and probably bragging to some random dude in a bar; like I was Frodo returning from Mt. Doom.
I never really ever imagined the coal and gas industry would just pack up and leave, but I also don’t think I believed they would manage the last 5 years as easily as they have.
Four years ago, I remember feeling that hope ripped out, one early morning in Marrakech.
This week however, I had one of those moments where you catch yourself suddenly surprised by the pace of change.
The first moment, was when I read how Philippine bank RCBC has pledged to stop funding new fossil fuel projects. The second, was this morning, when I read that Australia's newest coal-fired power plant has been written off as worthless by its Japanese owners.
While neither of these events signal that Asia’s insatiable coal expansion is entirely over, they do highlight that the end is nigh. That even in the world’s biggest coal market, the bucks just don’t add up anymore.
And that gave me a little bit of hope.
Because while the Paris Agreement may have stopped us from falling off a 4 degree cliff, it will be Asia that will decide if we can drag our collective future back to anywhere near 2 degrees of warming.
This is a weekly newsletter created by Climate Tracker.
If you have any questions, comments or want to get involved, email me at chris@climatetracker.org.