The singer was born in Barbados, this island state in the Caribbean particularly affected by the consequences of climate change. On Twitter, she calls on the participants at the Paris Summit to reform the international financing system and the debt.
It is not to give news of her next album that Rihanna takes the floor, but to address the leaders gathered at the Paris Summit, on June 22 and 23. The purpose of this meeting is to rethink relations between the countries of the North and those of the South.
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The singer urges them to stop promising and finally act. On Twitter, she notably challenges Janet Yellen, the United States Treasury Secretary, and Ajay Banga, the President of the World Bank, to tell them: “SSupport the efforts of Mia Motley, President of Barbados. Mobilize for those who contribute the least to global warming and yet are the most affected. We need you to make courageous commitments to reform the international financing system and on the debt of the most vulnerable.“
She adds a link to the site of the NGO Global Citizen that she supports. The organization has developed ways to implement real climate justice: stop financing fossil fuels, tax polluters, reinject investments into the development of renewables. The NGO also recommends directing World Bank and IMF funding towards sustainable projects in low-income countries, or even eliminating the debt of countries that are on the front line to allow them to invest in education. , infrastructure, health.
A considerable influence
At 35, Rihanna, whose real name is Robyn Fenty, has sold 280 million albums, received more than 300 awards, and became the first singer to surpass the billion dollar fortune. But in parallel with her singing career, she has been interested in the subject of climate justice for more than ten years. She was born and raised in a working-class neighborhood of St. Michael in Barbados, in the middle of the Caribbean, with a security officer father and an accountant mother then unemployed. A precarious childhood a thousand leagues from the life she conquered. To encourage aid projects for the most precarious, she set up her foundation in 2012.
She has to her credit dozens of charity concerts, all the profits of which have been donated, for the aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for example, but also for those of the tornadoes in Alabama in 2011, of the hurricane Sandy in 2012, or Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013. Last year alone, it paid 15 million dollars to 18 NGOs to finance so-called resilience projects, in the face of floods, storms, and climate justice, to help those most in need gain access to water, energy and health care. On the website of her foundation, she explains that climate justice requires much more than intermittent and individual philanthropy, it requires agreements, laws, political action.