Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate will be making her authorial debut this November 2 with her book A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis.

Nakate first drew global attention for being cropped out of a photo featuring Greta Thunberg and three other white European climate activists while striking at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos. According to a press release from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who will be publishing Nakate’s book, Nakate “addresses this incident [in the book] and how it’s indicative of a larger problem in the movement for climate justice.”

In the press release, Nakate says that

The cropping had made it possible to believe that African climate activists were absent from Davos; that Africans weren’t active in the climate change movement; and that there wasn’t a global youth climate movement that included people like me and many others in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt describes Nakate’s A Bigger Picture as a “rousing manifesto and memoir about climate justice.” The book, while following Nakate’s journey to becoming a climate activist, shows that the issue of climate change intersects with issues of race, class, and education.

Nakate is the founder of the Rise Up Climate Movement, now known as the Ponya Earth Foundation, and has raised awareness about the deforestation of the Congo Basin. In 2020, she was named a UN Young Leader for the Sustainable Development Goals and one of BBC’s 100 Women.

​Congratulations, Vanessa Nakate! We look forward to this timely and important book.