Sabrina Elba: Climate Change Is Putting Livelihoods at Stake

For Sabrina Elba, the fight against climate change must begin in the Global South. The actress, model, and co-founder of the beauty brand ​​S’ABLE Labs has seen first-hand how climate change is impacting smallholder farmers in Africa—and just how ignorant most of the Western world is to it.

In the Global North, she says, the discussion is so often about “climate change happening like 10, 50, or 100 years from now. No, it’s not. It’s happening now.”  

Elba is a Goodwill ambassador for the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations that addresses poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. In 2020 she, along with her husband Idris Elba, launched a $40 million fund with IFAD to prevent the economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic from triggering a global hunger and food crisis.

She spoke with Time about the importance of prioritizing farmers in the Global South, why more people should know where their products come from, and the need for urgency in the climate fight. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TIME: What inspired you to get involved in the climate movement?

Elba: Growing up, in Vancouver, Canada, being the only Somali family, being the only Black girl in my high school, I didn’t really have that connection to identity. My mom at home would always be like, ‘We’re strong Africans’ and I was just like, ‘Okay, I believe you,” but then the trauma porn I was seeing on TV, the name teasing that came with being a minority, made me feel like people didn’t understand what it meant to be African.

What didn’t help was, at the time, there were a lot of droughts throughout Africa, and there were a lot of ads talking about food insecurity and hunger and portraying Africans in the light that made it look to some people that they were waiting for a handout. And actually what was happening was that people were in a circumstance where their carbon footprint had very little to do with what was causing this impact on them. It wasn’t being framed as a climate conversation, but it was the start of us seeing that, actually, [climate] impacts … were happening in Africa very early on.

I remember becoming very passionate about [how] Africans are hard working, people in the Global South are hard working. But if you don’t invest in people, or if you don’t consider people in the narratives around climate change, then of course, they’re going to be in a situation like the one that they were in. … So I got involved in the agencies that I am involved in, particularly IFAD, because I saw what IFAD was doing and how they were framing the conversation. I was like, bingo, this is the type of climate work that I want to do. 

A lot of your activism has focused on rural communities in the Global South. Why was it important for you to focus on the struggles of these communities?

My mom is a product of these pastoral communities. So I was flooded in my youth with stories about how farming is so important, and agricultural communities are the backbone of Africa. … The farmers of our world are the custodians of this planet. They’re protecting the biodiversity of the land. We owe them so much.

You have worked as a Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Can you speak about that work and why it’s an important part of the climate fight?

They’re a little known secret in the U.N. I had just been so impressed by the fact that, unlike the other food agencies, they weren’t focused on the aid cycle. Aid is obviously important, particularly when it comes to climate disasters—people need food in emergency situations. But when you’re trying to think long-term and future-proof these things, aid can feel like a short-term solution. So rather than giving farmers what they need in that moment, why not equip them so they have the tools to take care of themselves going forward? … It took me five minutes to hear that and go, “Oh my God. I didn’t even know something like this existed.” Why give a fish when you can give a fishing rod? It just makes sense.

Agriculture and climate change are so interlinked. Climate change is directly impacting farmers across the Global South today. So if they’re not set up to adapt to these changes then they’re in a pickle. It’s mostly the women [who are farming]. That means agriculture is a gender issue. … We are all connected through food and agriculture—it is a great way to actually humanize the climate conversation, because people forget there’s a face to climate change, and most times it’s an African woman.

You recently visited shea cooperatives in Ghana. What did you learn on that trip?

I came across the beauty report that World Vision had written. And this ties right into one of [S’ABLE Lab’s] ethos as a brand: We source all of our raw materials that come from Africa in a responsible and traceable way. We make sure we connect with the communities, business person to business person, help them set up the infrastructure they need to ship us the raw materials overseas, make sure that they’re getting paid the right wages, and that we can also guarantee that there are no harmful situations for those farmers when we source those materials. 

The supply chain in beauty is broken. An ingredient like shea is so overly abused because it’s in such demand. But people have totally forgotten again that there is a face and a name behind these ingredients, that things don’t just appear out of thin air. Shea has a long, rich history across West Africa, passed down from mother to daughter. These ingredients were sacred at one point. They were used for childbirth. And now it’s just everywhere, and keeping up with the demand for that, especially when it’s such a manually intensive ingredient to farm, is really hard for a lot of these communities. Speaking to the farmers directly is the best way to find out about any issue, because you’re hearing firsthand their struggles or what they think needs fixing in this supply chain process. …  

I don’t think [consumers] even realize, when you’re buying a beauty product off a counter, that you might be harming someone, that you might be supporting a product with child labor, because we talk about it in fashion, but we don’t talk about it in beauty. So we were like, if we can amplify this message with World Vision and Fairtrade … let’s do it.

You often speak of the importance of uplifting small scale farmers. What can the climate movement learn from their practices?

So much. We hear again and again Indigenous people’s knowledge is overwhelmingly stronger than some of the data and information that we’ve accumulated. People who understand directly how to protect the biodiversity of these areas, what’s needed to maintain some of these forests. Those are the people we should be listening to and valuing and learning from; their voices just mean so much in this conversation. But often Indigenous people aren’t given the platform. They are stakeholders in this and they’re stakeholders on this planet, and they should be given a seat at the table—more than just one. 

What are some of the most pressing issues you’re noticing in the climate space right now? What can be done to address these issues?

The lack of urgency. … We’ve gone backwards on some of the Paris Climate Agreement milestones, and it’s a very scary time to be talking about climate. We’ve seen some countries turn their backs completely to the climate conversation when it’s a time where we all need to be focusing and giving attention. 

I do think that people should find out how they can pressure their [elected] leaders and people running for office and ask themselves, “Who do we need elected at this time?” because everyone’s livelihood is at stake. Everyone’s future is at stake at this point. … The effects are impacting people today, you know, around the world, and it’s heartbreaking when someone has the luxury in the Global North of worrying about it in some distant future, but in the Global South, someone’s like, ‘Well, I’ve just lost my livelihood and my capital because of climate change.’