Penelope Lagera
Growing up in the southern Philippines, environmental realities were never distant. They shaped our daily lives, our safety, our survival, and how our communities understood the land around us. That perspective stayed with me through my academic work, including fieldwork in Brazil with farmers and Indigenous communities whose lives are directly tied to land and climate change. Carrying those experiences into UNEA-7 shaped how I listened, what I noticed, and how I participated, reinforcing the responsibility that comes with entering global spaces while holding local and lived knowledge.
What shaped my UNEA-7 experience most was the constant awareness of who I was in the room. In every side event, every informal exchange, and even while sitting inside plenary sessions, I felt the weight and clarity of my positionality as an immigrant, as someone from the Global South, and as a young woman navigating institutions that have historically excluded voices like mine. Immigration reshaped my sense of self long before I entered global policy spaces. But standing at UNEA-7, I realized that each stage of my journey taught me something different about how institutions work, who they listen to, and what it means to show up fully in spaces that were not built with people like me in mind. UNEA-7 felt like the moment where all of that converged, where I understood that my identity was not something to soften, but something to stand on.
And so, every day at UNEA7, I wore my Filipiñanas. When I was asked why I did not wear Canadian cultural attire instead, my answer came easily. As one of the largest diasporas in this country, and as a firstgeneration FilipinoCanadian, my Filipiñanas are Canadian cultural wear too. They reflect a Canada shaped by migration, plurality, and layered identities, and they remind me that who I am and where I come from are inseparable from how I show up in these spaces.
For many people in global policy spaces, climate change is something learned through reports, projections, and technical briefings. For me, and for so many communities in the Global South, it has never been theoretical. It has shaped childhoods, migrations, economies, and our sense of safety. Being in these rooms reaffirmed that while climate change is a global reality, its impacts are uneven, and the voices of those who live its consequences most directly must remain central to global conversations and decision-making.
We need more immigrants present in these spaces, not as symbols, but as participants whose struggles are heard with care, whose work is reflected with honesty, and whose communities are seen not as statistics, but as people whose lives matter beyond charts and reports. The way I carried my Filipiñanas into these rooms with pride is how I will continue to show up in global spaces. And as more of us walk through these doors, I hope we help build institutions where Global South perspectives shape Global North decisions, and global governance never speaks about us without us.
