Doha Debates Ambassador Program

In the month of October during 2021, I earned the privilege of being selected as one of Doha Debates’ first batch of student ambassadors. We were given training and we fit into groups that had mutual interest in topics regarding the UN sustainable development goals. Our topic was Climate change and how we can showcase the interconnectedness of various stakeholders that may share responsibility and accountability of climate justice. I realized that although climate change is a very obvious environmental issue, it is a political issue as well. On a global scale, climate change can manifest itself and show true inequalities between countries. When victims of severe results of climate change become refugees and flee their homes, many Western countries tend to institute xenophobic immigration restrictions. Powerful Western nations have more political control in dictating how climate management policies are to be created. A quote that resonated with me in our research as a group was by Matt Huber, a writer at the Jacobin and a professor at Syracuse University, who wrote that “Climate change is a class struggle because it centers on the material conditions that working-class people face in their daily lives.” We were also trained to be able to create a systems map regarding not only the technicalities of climate change, but also the multiple systems that contribute to either the worsening of it or the improvement of it. Although transnational corporations, Local, regional and national governments, international world governments are on the map, individual citizens and grassroot initiatives are also mentioned on the map. This took me back to when I learned about the grassroot type of media from my alternative media in the Middle East class. Grassroots are often the source of the people, the citizens that produce that primary voice and specific, genuine message or even multiple messages. Additionally, I remember my own section of the presentation discussing Qatar’s initiatives towards reducing carbon emissions and improving the state of climate change during the FIFA World Cup of 2022. The way the grassroot media, and the first person perspectives of people from the East and West of the world shared their experience in Qatar just emphasized how much the country had reduced carbon emissions as a national development strategy. Qatar would have profited millions if they had kept the pricing for the metro the same during the World Cup, but due to the honest initiatives, the metro was completely free during the entire span of the world cup. Not only did that save on taxi rides, but the reduction of usage of some roads as well reduced people’s desire to use their cars on a daily basis. The many paid and shared media posts on Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter truly allowed people to be encouraged to change their biases about the country. This allowed for many communities to change their political opinions towards Qatar as an Arab Muslim country.