Jennifer Uchendu

Jennifer Olachi Uchendu (born 10 August, 1992) is a Nigerian climate advocate, sustainability expert, and the creator of SustyVibes, a youth-driven initiative aimed at making sustainability understandable and achievable for Nigerian youth. Quotes “I came from a place of anger and frustration. I felt like I either do the hard work of exploring these emotions or I completely give up and do something else.”  “In Nigeria, even though we’ve come together because of climate change, it’s not out of place when someone talks about unemployment or the high prices of food, because we see that these are the broader impacts of the problem. Having something locally embedded and contextual means we can feel comfortable to express ourselves.”  “We need to have young people who feel well and can thrive under the circumstances that we have now. If young people feel completely powerless and crippled, it’s not just a public health crisis but a disaster for climate change. You have to have the energy to do something. That’s another valuable resource to protect." “When I went to COP, I came face to face with how leaders weren’t serious as opposed to what I thought it would be. There were a lot of debates on whether or not to take action and a lot of tokenism for young people who were trying to put their mouths in the conversation,” “For me, that was the peak because being there as a young climate activist, you aspire to be in those rooms and it felt to me that as people go up the ladder, the more detached they become from reality. That bothered me a lot.” "The need to uncover the impact of climate change on mental health is most important now because “we are in a middle of a climate crisis”. The continued climate denial is, however, perplexing. Supporters of this notion reject the idea that climate change is largely caused by human activity or constitutes a significant threat to human welfare and civilisation. “We’re sort of experiencing a climate crisis and all of those things they used to warn us about are here. You see a lot of impact and acute intensity in a lot of these disasters, so you just have to face it. Climate denial is kind of stale because you’re literally seeing the impacts every other day. I’m worried about it,” “Some people just don’t know, they’ve never had a conversation about the weather changing over a period of time, some people know what climate change is but they don’t call it climate change, they probably understand it in their own way. And there are people who have absolutely refused to believe in it no matter what happens and they stand by it. That is also an emotional response because climate change is very big and overwhelming and complex, it’s often referred to as a wicked problem." “It’s difficult to wrap your head around it because when you discover the enormity of the problem, you start to think of where to start from. And for some people, being numb or being in denial is their psychological response to problems. They feel like if they don’t know or talk about it, then maybe it’s not there. We know that’s not the reality but that’s their response." “For some other people we see they’re extremists, they call them climate terrorists who think there are many people in the world taking up too many resources, and so they think to have a mass shooting to save the world." “Climate denial is an emotional response and so when you see it in that light, you think education would help, and for some people you think the kind of work we do at SustyVibes which is making these kinds of conversations actionable and relatable, would work but it just won’t help and you just have to move on to who you can help and who is ready to receive it. It’s all about getting people to make the right decisions and building a climate-smart generation.” “In my third year, I started to learn about bio-fuels and I became fascinated. For me, it was like ‘you mean there are things in nature that can power machines, there’s solar? there’s renewable energy?’ So it is safe to say my journey into the sustainability sector started in the energy space,” External links Category:1992 births Category:Living people Category:Environmentalists Category:Women activists from Nigeria Category:Sustainability advocates Category:Climate change activists Category:Women born in the 1990s