Mount Royal University to award 2019 Calgary Peace Prize to former Kirbati president and climate change activist

The former president has worked for decades as a global advocate against the urgent danger posed by climate change. Rising sea levels already threaten Kiribati’s existence and potentially create a need to relocate the island’s entire population.

“Climate Change is a global challenge which demands a contribution from every citizen of this planet,” Tong said via email. “Not only are we responsible for causing it, (we) must certainly take responsibility for addressing it, because it matters to our children and grandchildren.”

Tong said he believes anyone with the capacity to work against climate change is obliged to do so, including Canadians. It’s his hope that he can inspire Canadians here in Calgary to lend their voices to finding credible solutions for international issues.

“Because of its current political climate, Canada is well placed to take greater leadership on the global stage on global moral challenges such as climate change,” Tong said.

Tong has been recognized around the world for his work in the past. He’s a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and his work, along with the threat rising sea levels bring to Kiribati, was chronicled in the 2018 documentary Anote’s Ark, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

“Receiving the Calgary Peace Prize is of course a pleasant surprise and a great honour and a humbling experience. I feel the pressure to do better so that I can truly be worthy of it,” Tong said.

MRU’s Peace Studies Initiative works to develop interdisciplinary knowledge about peace and violence. The group’s marquee event is its annual Calgary Peace Prize ceremony, which has rewarded both Canadian and international recipients for their work to make the world a less violent, more just and safer place. Tong will be awarded with the 2019 prize on April 3.

Peace Studies Initiative director Mark Ayyash said that what made Tong an ideal candidate for this prize is how he’s worked to bring the international threat of climate change to the forefront of people’s minds around the world.

This is especially true in Canada, where Ayyash said that climate change still seems like a distant threat to many people.

“Sure, the smoke last summer maybe made people feel a little bit more about the current effects of global climate change, but the worst-case scenarios only really happen in disaster movies, in adventure movies, in our public imaginary,” Ayyash said.

“This worst-case scenario of an entire way of life being eradicated is already a real thing for people all over the Pacific. President Tong, in all of his work, makes clear that this existential threat is already a real thing. Those islands will most likely not be in existence by the end of this century.”

Calgary Peace Prize nominees are put forward by the public, with a small committee of initiative members and the local community selecting a recipient. What also stood out to Ayyash and this committee about Tong was his ability to work both inside and outside existing institutions to achieve reform.

“The word activist usually conjures up a non-institutional form of action. But he was the former president of Kiribati, and he took many institutional steps to address the issue,” Ayyash said.

“He moves back and forth between this world of working within institutions to transform them and also doing some work that may resemble more of an activist form of action.”