18 In South Korea, communities have shared their stories of how they are experiencing the extremes in climate conditions, having gone through the worst snowfall in decades, their heaviest rainfall in recorded history, and their worst drought in history. In Indonesia, communities are grappling with the complex issue of deforestation, which further aggravates the climate situation, but both because of climate change and tremendous demand for commodities such as palm oil, their ancient forests are disappearing. Indigenous communities in Indonesia fear for their future, as their forests continue to disappear at an alarming rate of one football pitch every minute. The pilgrimage brought me to India, and the arrival of this inter–faith global environmental movement was seen as an important milestone in a country that has suffered the extremes of climate through heat waves, droughts, floods and cyclones but also shows leadership with massive investment in clean solar power. We walked through the vast solar park in Gujarat, where you can see solar panels as far as the eye can see. I also walked through other places in India including Varanasi, Visakhapatnam, where the communities tearfully described how cyclones, floodings, and heatwaves were destroying their lives and livelihoods. Before I started the pilgrimage, I had the rare fortune of journeying to the Arctic Ocean, aboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza. The ship sailed to the edge of the sea ice near the end of the Arctic summer in 2014. According to our ship captain, the sea ice had been increasingly retreating year by year. Our mission there was to measure the extent of sea ice in the summer but also to bear witness to the dramatic changes taking place. As I witnessed with my own eyes the sublime and spectacular beauty of the Arctic, I realized that we live on a deeply interconnected planet. What happens all over the world affects this region in seriously profound and intricate ways. And what happens in the Arctic affects the entire world. My sojourn to the Arctic, highlighted by our forays to the edge of the sea ice pack and the magnificent glaciers around Svalbard, has been a powerful one. I experienced first-hand the splendour and radiance of nature on the top of the world. Standing on ice floes in the Arctic Ocean and walking beside a melting glacier proved to be breathtaking. It is also interesting to note that 20 Filipinos live in Longyearbyen, the main town in the Svalbard archipelago. The experience reminds me of our minuteness, as well as of my own humble mortality. It is fascinating to realize how small we can be especially when exposed to the harsh elements of this frigid region. But what is disconcerting about the encounter is that it underscores that we live on a very fragile planet, and the Arctic, despite its magnificence, is a very fragile place. What we see in the Arctic is something that is in grave danger of being lost forever. Already, the past ten years have seen the lowest minimum sea ice coverage