Campaigner on climate who sees a justice crisis at its heart

Each weekday morning, every child in the south Asian community in Burnley would gather before making the journey to school.

- Damien Gayle Environment correspondent

It was the 1970s, the National Front was mobilising, and they were the children of south Asian workers who had been invited to Britain a decade earlier to fill labour shortages.

Among them was Asad Rehman, who had moved to the Lancashire town with his family from Pakistan aged four. “We would all walk together, because it was dangerous to walk alone,” he said. “We’d be attacked on the way.”

Things were no better at school. Pupils would perform Nazi salutes and hurl racial epithets at them; some exchanged Bulldog, the National Front newspaper, openly in the hall.

Rehman and the other children decided to defy the teachers who had failed to protect them by collectively refusing to attend school. It was his first taste of organising, and as he joined wider anti-racism movements that began organising across the country, it shaped his political outlook.

“We started to protect our community and I started to realise that abiding lesson that has stayed with me: we are much more powerful when we are a ‘we’ than when we're individual.”

This year, Rehman was appointed chief executive of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth. For decades, the poster child of climate breakdown was the polar bear drifting on an ice floe in a warming ocean. Now, to speak of the climate crisis without mentioning social, racial and economic injustice is all but unthinkable - and Rehman has been at the forefront of this transformation.