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Every weekday morning, children from the south Asian community in this Lancashire town would gather before making their way to school. It was the 1970s, a period when the National Front were actively organizing, and they were the offspring of immigrant laborers who had come to Britain ten years before to work in understaffed industries.

Among them was the young Asad, who had come to the community with his family from Pakistan at the age of four. “We walked in groups,” he recalls, “because it was dangerous to walk alone. Younger children in the middle, older children around the edge, because we’d be attacked on the way.”

Things were no better at school. Pupils would give fascist salutes and hurl racial epithets at them. They shared the National Front newspaper without concealment at school. Minority children “every day, at break times, we secured ourselves into a classroom, to avoid being targeted.”

“I initiated conversations to everybody,” says Rehman. Collectively, they chose to challenge the teachers who had failed to protect them by jointly deciding not to attend. “declaring that the reason was the schools were unsafe for us.” This became Rehman’s first taste of organising. When he became part of wider antiracism movements that were formed across the country, it influenced his activist perspective.

“We started to protect our community which taught me that crucial insight which I've carried: we are much more powerful acting together compared to acting alone. Groups are necessary to coordinate efforts along with a shared goal to hold you together.”

This summer, Rehman was appointed CEO of the conservation group this major campaigning network. Historically, the poster child of climate breakdown was arctic wildlife drifting on an ice floe. Now, addressing the climate crisis while ignoring inequality and discrimination has become all but unthinkable. He has stood as a leader of this evolution.

“This role appealed to me due to the enormous challenge out there,” he told reporters at a climate justice protest near government offices recently. “These issues are linked of climate, [of] inequality, of financial structures that have been rigged against ordinary people. At its core a crisis of justice.

“And there is only one organisation has consistently focused on fairness – environmental justice and global climate fairness – that’s Friends of the Earth.”

Having a quarter-million members and 233 local action groups, Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland (with an independent Scottish branch) represents Britain's largest green activist community. Recently, it invested more than £10m on activism from judicial reviews on official regulations to local campaigns against councils’ use of pesticides in public spaces.

Yet it – perhaps unfairly – earned a reputation as relatively moderate versus other groups. Focusing on awareness campaigns rather than direct action.

The selection of a stalwartly class-conscious campaigner like Rehman could be a strategic move to shed that image.

And it is not the beginning he's been involved with the charity.

Post-education, he persisted fighting discrimination, working with an anti-racism group at a time as nationalist movements was still a force in the capital.

“It was running campaigns, and it was doing casework, deeply connected locally,” he recalls. “This taught me being a community organiser.”

However, unsatisfied than just responding to everyday prejudice and institutional bias he, along with many others, aimed to elevate equality work within a rights framework. That brought him to the human rights organization, where over the next decade he partnered with international campaigners to advocate for significant change in the understanding of human rights. “Previously, Amnesty didn’t campaign on financial and community issues. they only campaigned on civil and political rights,” he says.

By the end of that decade, his activism with Amnesty had brought him into contact with multiple worldwide activist networks. During that period they had coalesced into the counter-globalisation movement against neoliberalism. The insights he gained from them shaped his ongoing activism.

“I was going and working with these people, and each person discussed the climate crisis, unsustainable practices, how it was displacing people,” he recalls. “And I was like! All our achievements and won could be undone because of environmental collapse. And this thing that is happening, termed environmental crisis – however nobody’s talking about it with urgency.”

Which directed him to begin working at the environmental charity in 2006. At the time, many activists discussed climate change as a problem for the future.

“This network stood out as the sole activist body that separated away from the rest of the environment movement. and was one of the founders creating climate equity activism,” he says.

Rehman worked to include perspectives of affected communities to the table. This approach wasn't earn him friends. On one occasion, he shares, after a meeting involving ministers with activist organizations, a politician contacted his boss demanding he call off his strong advocacy. He didn't reveal who made the call.

“There was a sense: ‘Why does he operate differently?’ You know, green issues are important, we can all agree and talk. [But] For me it represented addressing inequality, advocating for freedoms … about power structures.”

Justice narratives gained traction among activists. But the converse was also happening. with justice-oriented groups increasingly tackling sustainability concerns.

This led to the charity supported by unions {