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Day after day, students from the south Asian community in Burnley would gather prior to going to school. It was the seventies, a period when the National Front were actively organizing, and these youngsters were the offspring of immigrant laborers who had moved to Britain ten years before to fill labour shortages.

Included in this group was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the community with his family from Pakistan when he was four. “We walked in groups,” he explains, “as there were risks to walk alone. The little ones in the middle, teenagers around the edge, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

The situation was equally bad at school. Students would perform Nazi salutes and hurl racial epithets at them. They shared Bulldog without concealment at school. The black and brown pupils “every day, as soon as the dinner bell would go, we secured ourselves into a classroom, due to the risk of assault.”

“I initiated conversations to everybody,” he notes. As a group, they chose to challenge the teachers who had not kept them safe by collectively refusing to attend. “and we will say it was due to the schools aren’t safe for us.” It was Rehman’s first taste of mobilizing. When he became part of broader anti-racist campaigns developing across the country, it shaped his activist perspective.

“We took steps to safeguard our community and I started to realise that abiding lesson remaining with me: we are much more powerful acting together compared to acting alone. Groups are necessary to coordinate efforts and you need a vision that binds you.”

Recently, Rehman was appointed CEO of the conservation group this major campaigning network. Over many years, the symbolic image of climate breakdown was the polar bear in a thawing landscape. Today, addressing global heating and not including social, racial and economic injustice has become all but unthinkable. He has stood as a leader of this shift.

“This role appealed to me because of the scale of the crisis out there,” he shared with reporters on the sidelines an environmental protest in central London last month. “These issues are linked of climate, economic disparity, of financial structures which are biased the wealthy. Essentially a crisis of justice.

“A single organization that has always centred fairness – environmental justice and global climate fairness – namely this charity.”

Boasting over numerous backers and community teams, The organization (operates separately in Scotland) is the most extensive environmental campaigning network. Recently, it spent over ten million pounds on advocacy from legal actions against state decisions grassroots efforts against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

But it has – perhaps unfairly – been perceived as relatively moderate compared with its peers. More bake sales and petitions instead of confrontational tactics.

The hiring of someone focused on inequality like Rehman could be an effort to redefine itself.

It's not the beginning he's been involved with the charity.

After graduating, Rehman continued fighting discrimination, engaged with a community organization during a period when the far right remained active locally.

“There were initiatives, supporting victims, based in neighborhoods,” he says. “This taught me local mobilization.”

However, unsatisfied with simply reactively countering racism on the streets and from the state he, along with many others, sought to place equality work as a fundamental right. That brought him to the human rights organization, during ten years he collaborated alongside global south activists to demand a new approach of the definition of human rights. “Previously, Amnesty didn’t campaign on economic and social rights. their work was limited to on civil and political rights,” he states.

Towards the close of that decade, Rehman’s work at the organization connected him with multiple global equity groups. At that time they came together in opposition to neoliberalism challenging free-market policies. What he was to learn from these connections would affect his ongoing activism.

“I traveled and working with these people, and each person discussed the climate crisis, how farming was becoming impossible, forcing migrations,” he says. “I thought! Every gain and secured could be undone by this thing. This issue occurring, known as global warming – however few addressed it with urgency.”

This led Rehman to his first job with Friends of the Earth during the mid-2000s. Then, many activists framed climate change as a problem for the future.

“This network was the only mainstream green group that separated from the rest of the environment movement. pioneering creating the climate justice movement,” he states.

His efforts centered to amplify concerns from global south nations into discussions. It did not always make him popular. Once, he recalls, post-negotiations with officials and green groups, an official phoned the leadership insisting he stop his “climate Taliban”. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“There was a sense: ‘Why does he operate differently?’ Consider, ecology matters, there's common ground. [But] I viewed it as combating discrimination, defending rights … fundamentally political.”

Equity frameworks gained traction among activists. However, the opposite occurred. rights-based campaigns engaging with sustainability concerns.

This led to the charity labor-aligned {