Why I am active: Ferko Öry

Along the coastline of Bangladesh stand enormous towers, apocalyptic: apartment buildings by the surf? No, they are storm shelters where villagers seek refuge from yet another cyclone. For twenty years, I worked in Africa and Asia to strengthen rural healthcare in collaboration with colleagues from those countries. There, in Pakistan, Mozambique, Indonesia and Sudan, climate change is having the most severe impact. Flooding, as in Bangladesh, or drought in Sudan.

I lived with my family in a small fishing village in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and know the fishermen who knotted their nets in the evening light. The teacher, the imam. Soon, that village may be wiped out by rising sea levels. And there are no towers to flee to. I also worked in Darfur, Sudan, where famine is waiting around the corner. There, too, I remember the faces and hands of the midwives, beautifully dressed in white, the men conferring under a sparse tree.

And that is why I am a climate activist, because I know where the worst blows will fall.

Ferko Öry. Paediatrician (non-practising). Work experience — in addition to academic paediatrics — 20 years of rural healthcare in Africa and Asia, PhD in research into improving working conditions in tanneries in India (environmental project).