Speaker 1: Welcome to Zero. I am Uctra Drati. This week war
Speaker 1: on a Heating Planet. Hello, upshut hi mightily. It's been
Speaker 1: six months you've been producing Zero. What's your experience being like?
Speaker 2: When I tell people about this job, I say, this
Speaker 2: is a show about climate change and emissions, but I
Speaker 2: think very quickly start talking about all the other topics
Speaker 2: that this show ends up touching. So we've done just
Speaker 2: in the last couple of weeks alone shows about refrigeration,
Speaker 2: and talked about tomatoes. We've talked about health policy, We've
Speaker 2: talked about.
Speaker 1: Shock skins, shack skins, help farms, and electric transformers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's a wide range, and that I think
Speaker 2: is one of the things that has kept this job
Speaker 2: really interesting. Obviously, one thing we returned to a lot
Speaker 2: is politics.
Speaker 1: Well, also because this has been such an election year,
Speaker 1: and I think we will talk about politics a lot more.
Speaker 2: And this week's episode feels particularly timely off the news
Speaker 2: we've been reading about from Germany, where the government has
Speaker 2: instituted new expanded border patrols after coming under a lot
Speaker 2: of pressure to control immigration.
Speaker 1: And it's only weeks after there was a knife attack
Speaker 1: where a Syrian man who had been denied asylum went
Speaker 1: donn a stabbingspree.
Speaker 2: We mentioned all this because today's guest is Andrew Gilmour.
Speaker 2: He's the executive director of the Berghoff Foundation based in Berlin,
Speaker 2: and he spent thirty years with the United Nations, and
Speaker 2: he's been thinking a lot about how pressure on the
Speaker 2: climate can lead directly and indirectly to more migration and
Speaker 2: more conflict, particularly as the planet gets warmer. Take a listen.
Speaker 3: Under even the best case scenario, there's going to be
Speaker 3: a much higher increase of refugees and migrants coming to
Speaker 3: Western Europe and North America. But to do it in
Speaker 3: a way that then doesn't lead to such elitical reaction
Speaker 3: that the far right is the beneficiary, and that's going
Speaker 3: to be an extremely hard balancing lag and it will
Speaker 3: require a lot of courage on the part of politicians
Speaker 3: to start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing.
Speaker 1: And Andrew has distilled all this into a book it's
Speaker 1: called The Burning Question, which both of us read. It
Speaker 1: addresses climate and conflict and asks why does it matter?
Speaker 1: What I really liked is it's a wide ranging look
Speaker 1: at this question, which, as climate journalists we've had at
Speaker 1: the back of our mind over the past few years,
Speaker 1: especially with the wars in Ghaza and Ukraine and Sudan,
Speaker 1: and it helped me think through how exactly climate links
Speaker 1: to all this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that the book
Speaker 2: starts looking at what took place well before this man
Speaker 2: made excel in warming that we're seeing, going back to
Speaker 2: how the al Nino effect perhaps played a cause in
Speaker 2: contributing to the French Revolution, or how climate variability led
Speaker 2: to weakening the Spanish Empire and the Ottoman Empire, things
Speaker 2: that we don't really think about, where weather patterns have
Speaker 2: a direct impact on how people live and how empires
Speaker 2: rise and fall.
Speaker 1: That's right, and that's particularly interesting right now with the
Speaker 1: migration patterns and what it's doing to politics. The UN
Speaker 1: estimates that nearly three million refugees will need to be
Speaker 1: resettled next year. That's from conflicts, economic crises, and climate change,
Speaker 1: and that number has gone up twenty percent. So I
Speaker 1: learned a lot from speaking to Andrew and drawing on
Speaker 1: his insights. We spoke about how much full link can
Speaker 1: you really draw between climate and wars happening today and
Speaker 1: what can you do to address both climate change and
Speaker 1: bring peace to the world. Andrey, you're welcome to the show,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. So it's particularly interesting reading a
Speaker 1: book like this and speaking with you now in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four at a time when there are so many
Speaker 1: wars going on around the world in Gaza and Sudan
Speaker 1: and Ukraine. But the thing that stood out to me
Speaker 1: was that few, if any conflicts in the world can
Speaker 1: be shown to be caused by climate change. And yet
Speaker 1: throughout the book you point out how climate change is
Speaker 1: acting as a threat multiplier, often increasing the risk of conflict.
Speaker 1: Are there any modern wars that have been directly caused
Speaker 1: by climate change?
Speaker 3: To this day, I'm not aware of any war in
Speaker 3: history that has been solely caused even primarily caused by
Speaker 3: climate change. However, I'm convinced and there is a large
Speaker 3: body of evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Speaker 3: Not that climate directly causes war, but that it contributes
Speaker 3: to war, that it is a major exacerbating factor, that
Speaker 3: it complicates matters, that it heightens tensions and makes conditions
Speaker 3: so hard that communities find it harder to live with
Speaker 3: one another than they did before. There are many parts
Speaker 3: of the world I would say, particularly in Central Africa
Speaker 3: and the Sahel region, and also parts of the Middle East,
Speaker 3: in particular Syria and Iraq, where recent increases of temperature
Speaker 3: have almost certainly played a role in making conflict worse
Speaker 3: and harder to resolve. What I think is more important, however,
Speaker 3: than the academic debate that has taken place so far
Speaker 3: regarding whether the one degree of global warming that we've
Speaker 3: seen so far has contributed much to conflict, is I
Speaker 3: think the projections that the next degree, that is we're
Speaker 3: heading quite fast towards reaching the next degree of global warming,
Speaker 3: will lead to more conflict.
Speaker 1: Let's look at what happened in Yemen, going back to
Speaker 1: the oil boom in Saudi Arabia of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: There are so many variables involved in any conflict. Could
Speaker 1: you explain what has happened over the past few decades
Speaker 1: in Yemen and how we've ended up in a place
Speaker 1: where a terrorist group is able to hold the global
Speaker 1: supply chain back in the Red Sea right.
Speaker 3: One of the key points of Yemen is that, quite
Speaker 3: aside from the fact that that has been growing desertification
Speaker 3: and frequent rout is also the fact that the underground aquifers,
Speaker 3: the water supplies underneath the ground have been grown mostly overused,
Speaker 3: and paradoxically, it was the use of solar power pumps
Speaker 3: for irrigation that has made things worse. That sounds almost
Speaker 3: counterintuitive that something as benign as renewable energy can actually
Speaker 3: lead to worse effects of climate change, but that has happened.
Speaker 3: The use of solar energy has made it easier to
Speaker 3: pump water out from the agrivis, which means that the
Speaker 3: reserves are now incredibly low, so much so that the
Speaker 3: viability of entire communities is at stake now. During the
Speaker 3: seventies and eighties, a number of people from the Yemen
Speaker 3: went to Saudi Arabia in the oil boom to start
Speaker 3: working from there. During those periods, a number of local
Speaker 3: terraces for farmland and villages collapsed because there was no
Speaker 3: manpower to look after them, which speeded up the erosion
Speaker 3: and the collapse of local vegetation and the situation we
Speaker 3: are now seeing now. The wars of the last nine
Speaker 3: years since twenty fifteen have certainly made things considerably worse
Speaker 3: in terms of environmental degradation, but it's not a direct
Speaker 3: impact of climate change.
Speaker 1: But are there any lessons that we can draw from.
Speaker 1: How over these five decades where there was migration because
Speaker 1: of an oil boom that led to lower agriculture and
Speaker 1: thus poorer soils. Then that led to lower rainfall droughts
Speaker 1: which caused, as you say, use of pumps to draw
Speaker 1: from aquifers, and sort of this poor spiral that things
Speaker 1: get into until you get at her risk group that
Speaker 1: is holding a global supply chain to account. Are there
Speaker 1: lessons that we can draw from this conflict to avoid
Speaker 1: future conflict?
Speaker 3: Strangely, since Yemen, despite the extent of the environmental degradation
Speaker 3: and the overuse of the water supply, I would say
Speaker 3: lessons could perhaps more easily be drawn from other countries
Speaker 3: that experienced the Arab Spring, such as Libya and Syria.
Speaker 3: And what we saw there in Syria but also in
Speaker 3: Iraq was a prolonged drought which took place against a
Speaker 3: backdrop of a very repressive regime in Syria, and one
Speaker 3: also that was corrupt and where local farmers were already
Speaker 3: in the very very dire straits indeed as a result
Speaker 3: of the desertification, meaning that their farms were no longer viable.
Speaker 3: And in fact I was living in nearby Iraq during
Speaker 3: the fighting of two thousand and six in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight, and you could see the frequency of sandstorms
Speaker 3: which people said they had never seen of such intensity
Speaker 3: in and see in their lives before. And this was
Speaker 3: actually part of a five year drought that in both
Speaker 3: Syria and Iraq came on top of serious human rights abuses,
Speaker 3: on top of really strong levels of corruption and leading
Speaker 3: to communities having to leave their houses and their abilities
Speaker 3: and moved to cities where they lived in terrible conditions
Speaker 3: and were actually ripe for discontent. And when the Islamic
Speaker 3: State burst upon the scene in both Syria and Iraq,
Speaker 3: taking advantage of the discontent, it pushed them into joining
Speaker 3: the most extreme group of all, the Islamic State. And
Speaker 3: I think that is a particularly strong example of how
Speaker 3: the interplay between human rights abuses and bad governance in general,
Speaker 3: when combined with a major ecological disaster such as emanated
Speaker 3: from the drought, that can lead to something as explosive
Speaker 3: as we saw.
Speaker 1: Now let's talk about Ukraine, because you write in the book,
Speaker 1: nobody would claim that Russia's motivation for invading, occupying, and
Speaker 1: seeking to eradicate the idea of Ukraine as a nation
Speaker 1: in February twenty twenty two was related to climate change
Speaker 1: directly or even indirectly. But the Ukraine world does have
Speaker 1: climate implications.
Speaker 3: Yes it does, and thank you for making that point,
Speaker 3: because I would never claim that the major reason for
Speaker 3: Putin deciding to invade was anything to do with that.
Speaker 3: But there are certainly a number of implications, one of
Speaker 3: which was the example the rocketing increased spiral of oil
Speaker 3: prices as a result, which led to a positive result
Speaker 3: for once it led to a greater determination to find
Speaker 3: renewable energies as a cheaper source of fuel. Both Gaza
Speaker 3: and Ukraine have very much increased the divide between the
Speaker 3: developed world and the lesser developing countries, and this has
Speaker 3: also led to more difficulties coming up in climate negotiations.
Speaker 3: And this has taken even further when it comes to
Speaker 3: example the Russian veto of measures at the United Nations
Speaker 3: that could resist climate insecurity.
Speaker 1: And you end the chapter on Ukraine by saying the
Speaker 1: entire field of climate insecurity has therefore suddenly taken on
Speaker 1: a new and additional meaning, even if policymakers don't seem
Speaker 1: to have grasped it yet. But sitting here knowing what
Speaker 1: we know about climate and what it's going to do
Speaker 1: to the planet with greater certainty than ever before. It
Speaker 1: is something that militaries have started to think about, at
Speaker 1: least over the past decade or even two decades, and
Speaker 1: this phrase that climate change is a threat multiplier is
Speaker 1: something that is now talked in security circles. So have
Speaker 1: you seen that open the door for better planning and
Speaker 1: policy making in the future.
Speaker 3: Yes, I definitely have, and I would encourage this, but
Speaker 3: not everybody does. Indeed, the entire expression climate security is
Speaker 3: a phrase that some people shy away from because they
Speaker 3: believe that even using that phrase encourages a security first
Speaker 3: approach to what is not fundamentally a security issue, and
Speaker 3: I would take issue with that. I think there is
Speaker 3: a strong argument, for example, either using the United Nation
Speaker 3: Security Council to get involved in matters relating to climate
Speaker 3: change and their impact on dec security, but also involving militaries,
Speaker 3: and they can be extremely positive and I myself saw
Speaker 3: that in Iraq during the war, where for reasons that
Speaker 3: weren't necessarily connected to fear of climate change in general,
Speaker 3: but for a very practical desire to save the lives
Speaker 3: of US troops. There was a very important initiative that
Speaker 3: took place amongst the military who because they needed to
Speaker 3: provide diesel fuel to their forward operating basis in large
Speaker 3: quantities in order to help their soldiers live under bearable
Speaker 3: conditions in the desert using air conditioning. But their great
Speaker 3: concern was that their fuel convoys were being targeted to
Speaker 3: ambush by groups connected to al Qaeda and later the
Speaker 3: Islamic States. So they took the perfectly sensible decision that
Speaker 3: to reduce the number of convoys and thereby to reduce
Speaker 3: the number of deaths of people on those convoys, they
Speaker 3: would start using solar energy. And because they are so
Speaker 3: well resourced, militaries can often do things at scale on
Speaker 3: a way that civilian agencies do not have the capacity
Speaker 3: to do so. So Yes, indeed, I've seen in many instances,
Speaker 3: and the US military is clearly whatever that the political
Speaker 3: views of the people concerned. They seem to be very
Speaker 3: well aware of the climate implications of what can happen
Speaker 3: to them as a result of example, rising sea levels,
Speaker 3: and they know that obviously their basis that can become
Speaker 3: underwaterhare in a few years time, are going to be
Speaker 3: completely useless. So there is definitely hope in my view
Speaker 3: from engaging with the militaries.
Speaker 1: And so when it comes to potential solutions that would
Speaker 1: try and tackle this nexus of climate conflict and migration,
Speaker 1: there are two sets of solutions. One is, obviously we
Speaker 1: have to tackle climate change by reducing emissions, and that
Speaker 1: is an example you talked about, which is militaries around
Speaker 1: the world which are huge users of fossil fuels can
Speaker 1: start to reduce their own greenose gas impact. But then
Speaker 1: there is a whole set of other solutions that can
Speaker 1: be applied on the policy making on climate adaptation, on
Speaker 1: environmental peace building that you mentioned that would allow for
Speaker 1: reduction in conflicts. Could you talk through these solutions, because
Speaker 1: you have mentioned those in your book, but they all
Speaker 1: seem to be at quite an early stage.
Speaker 3: That is correct, They are indeed at an early stage,
Speaker 3: and I will indeed go through some of them, one
Speaker 3: of which is the relatively new practice of environmental peace building.
Speaker 3: This I think has great potential, but it has only
Speaker 3: been tried in relatively few places to date. It is
Speaker 3: based on the thinking that you might be able to
Speaker 3: resolve tension between communities if you don't go straight for
Speaker 3: the most important issues that has divided them, but actually
Speaker 3: focus on some lower hanging fruit, as it were, first
Speaker 3: of all, teaching them about the impact of climate change
Speaker 3: and how it affects not just them but other peoples.
Speaker 3: They know that each time they have a new drought,
Speaker 3: each time there is a flash flood, that there may
Speaker 3: be an increase in recruitment into extremist radical groups, but
Speaker 3: they don't necessarily know that it is even affecting the
Speaker 3: whole of their country. I'm talking about places like Somalia
Speaker 3: now or Iraq and many other places actually also in
Speaker 3: the Sahel Malei, chad Nisia and places. Many of them
Speaker 3: of course, are concluding that it is no longer possible
Speaker 3: living in areas that are so exposed to extreme heat
Speaker 3: and desertification that they have in some cases decided that
Speaker 3: there is no point even trying to live there. So
Speaker 3: they're going to try to migrate either within their their
Speaker 3: own country to cities or further down the road, presumably
Speaker 3: to other countries and other continents. So to break that that,
Speaker 3: one has to be able to start coming up with
Speaker 3: measures in the countries that they are leaving to persuade
Speaker 3: them that there's actually a future there, and I think
Speaker 3: that environmental peace building and the development measures that would
Speaker 3: come with them could be a way of doing that.
Speaker 1: And could you talk through the success stories, even if
Speaker 1: they are at a small scale right now.
Speaker 3: Yes, my own organization, the Bako Foundation, of example, we've
Speaker 3: been working for three years in Somalia and a bit
Speaker 3: less in Iraq, precisely in the conditions that I've been
Speaker 3: talking about, working with communities that are very much at
Speaker 3: odds with some of their neighbors, whether it's for ethnic reasons,
Speaker 3: or for sectarian reasons, or for reasons of competition over
Speaker 3: natural resources. But getting them to sit down together and
Speaker 3: confronting some of their problems and seeing that actually cooperation
Speaker 3: on these issues can actually lead to progress. There, we
Speaker 3: are finding successes. The common solutions could be, for example,
Speaker 3: a solar powered irrigation scheme. It could be joint management
Speaker 3: of a wildlife serve, it could be a desalination project.
Speaker 3: We've been doing that most recently in the south of Iraq,
Speaker 3: where working with people who have been forced to leave
Speaker 3: their farmlands and move into urban areas, where as in
Speaker 3: many other parts of the world the urban areas do
Speaker 3: not welcome Suddenly a large influx of income is so
Speaker 3: very major tensions and violence has broken out between them,
Speaker 3: but we are finding that we're able to help resolve
Speaker 3: those tensions.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the conflicts that start tend to
Speaker 1: start because of resources, either its land or its water.
Speaker 1: Now those are cause for creating conflict, but could they
Speaker 1: be used to find ways to build peace?
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean what are the main drivers of displacement?
Speaker 3: The displacement that is caused as a result of both
Speaker 3: conflict and climate change is any country's ability or inability
Speaker 3: to feed itself. So I think investing in forms of
Speaker 3: agriculture that could be better suited to a change in
Speaker 3: climate would help enable that adaptation and thereby remove sources
Speaker 3: of tension and also the need to seek life elsewhere.
Speaker 3: One example that I think has a lot of promise
Speaker 3: is known as the system of rice intensification, which is
Speaker 3: an example of targeted as system. It's an agro ecological
Speaker 3: approach used in places like Afghanistan or Nigeria and Mali,
Speaker 3: which can include tripling grain yield, enhancing incomes, and helping
Speaker 3: water conservation as well as lowering meat emission. So it
Speaker 3: has many advantages, but in this particular context. By providing
Speaker 3: higher incomes to farmers, it can help people a stay
Speaker 3: on their lands and feel less of an imperative to
Speaker 3: compete with their neighbors.
Speaker 1: After the break, Andrew and I talk about how some
Speaker 1: politicians are turning refugees into a wedge issue. If you're
Speaker 1: finding this episode insightful, please take a moment to rate
Speaker 1: and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and even YouTube.
Speaker 1: It helps other listeners find the show. One of the
Speaker 1: stats that stood out to me from your book was
Speaker 1: that as of May twenty twenty two, there are about
Speaker 1: one hundred million people who'd been displaced from their countries
Speaker 1: as a result of many things, but about a third
Speaker 1: of those were because of climate events. Now, with climate
Speaker 1: change on the March, we are likely to see that
Speaker 1: number grow quite rapidly, and it comes at a time
Speaker 1: when evil actors, bad actors, politicians can actually use that
Speaker 1: kind of event to their advantage. You write about how
Speaker 1: Russia used its influence over Belarus in twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: to push migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq into Poland, Lithuania,
Speaker 1: and Latvia in a way that was engineered to drum
Speaker 1: up fear of migrants and destabilize the politics in those democracies.
Speaker 1: Will we see more of this happening as the planet
Speaker 1: is being warmed.
Speaker 3: Yes, I think we will. We are seeing a number
Speaker 3: of very allowing trends at the moment. One, we are
Speaker 3: currently living through a period of more conflicts than at
Speaker 3: any time since nineteen forty five. It's estimated that there
Speaker 3: are fifty nine separate conflicts going on at the moment. Secondly,
Speaker 3: we are seeing an ever increasing rate of global warming
Speaker 3: as new records seem to be being reached every week
Speaker 3: almost And Thirdly, we are seeing the growth of right
Speaker 3: wing parties in the United States and Europe that are
Speaker 3: anti immigrants but also to climate change skeptics or more
Speaker 3: often deniers. So it's like a perverse irony in a
Speaker 3: way that the same people who prevent governments from doing
Speaker 3: major measures to help combat climate change are those that
Speaker 3: then profit from what they call a flood of migrants
Speaker 3: coming in who have been forced to come because the
Speaker 3: North hasn't actually taken proper measures to reduce emissions and
Speaker 3: do major adaptation measures. So I think these are very
Speaker 3: run trends, and the key is to find ways to
Speaker 3: understand that there is going to be under even the
Speaker 3: best case scenario, there's going to be a much higher
Speaker 3: increase of refugees and migrants coming to Western Europe and
Speaker 3: North America. But to do it in a way that
Speaker 3: then doesn't lead to such a political reaction that the
Speaker 3: far right is the beneficiary, and that's going to be
Speaker 3: an extremely hard balancing to act, and it will require
Speaker 3: a lot of courage on the part of politicians to
Speaker 3: start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing,
Speaker 3: that actually, in an era where there's actually a population
Speaker 3: decline in Western countries and indeed many other countries, immigrants
Speaker 3: are going to play a very important role in keeping
Speaker 3: economies and societies flourishing.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm a reporter who's been covering climate change and
Speaker 1: impacts and solutions for the past six seven years, and
Speaker 1: what I have noticed is that as a person who
Speaker 1: understands the world, who is learning about the world, climate
Speaker 1: change is forcing me to be empathetic in ways that
Speaker 1: I had not been empathetic in the past. You have,
Speaker 1: of course, worked in all sorts of areas. You've worked
Speaker 1: in conflict areas and human rights, and now you're focused
Speaker 1: on climate. Are you seeing that change come through in
Speaker 1: people you meet, is their higher level of global empathy
Speaker 1: being grown because these climate events are global, and there
Speaker 1: are all these interconnections that you're able to draw from
Speaker 1: human rights to conflict to resources in the work that
Speaker 1: you do.
Speaker 3: I certainly see that people younger than me I'm sixty
Speaker 3: years old, that people twenty thirty forty years younger than
Speaker 3: me are much more open to compassion and empathy for
Speaker 3: victims of human rights in general, but particularly those forced
Speaker 3: to leave their homes as a result of climate change,
Speaker 3: because their environmental awareness is so much higher than those
Speaker 3: people who are nearer my age. And in that sense,
Speaker 3: it is one of the areas of optimism that we
Speaker 3: can indeed point.
Speaker 1: To now when we talk about climate solutions, which is
Speaker 1: what I do day in and day out, there is
Speaker 1: a tendency among many climate activists that holds back some
Speaker 1: of the climate solutions because they want it to be
Speaker 1: done in a perfect way. But when I take a
Speaker 1: step back, and I'm taking a really big step back,
Speaker 1: I look at how the world has changed over the
Speaker 1: past century, say, and I look at trends which show progress.
Speaker 1: So when the Spanish flu happened in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: you know, fifty million to one hundred million people died.
Speaker 1: We had a similar event in the COVID nineteen pandemic,
Speaker 1: and of course we still had many millions of people die.
Speaker 1: It was nowhere close to the disaster that was the
Speaker 1: Spanish globe because of technology but also because of our
Speaker 1: ability to communicate at scale. Does not mean there was
Speaker 1: no disinformation, but there has been progress. And so when
Speaker 1: I look at climate conflict and migration. While reading your book,
Speaker 1: it felt to me that many of the solutions are there,
Speaker 1: they are sometimes too hard. Trying to get them all
Speaker 1: to line up in the perfect way is likely to
Speaker 1: be really difficult. Given there are so many variables involved
Speaker 1: in getting these solutions to work, I have greater appreciation
Speaker 1: for how difficult it's going to be. So rather than
Speaker 1: trying to find a perfect solution, do you think the
Speaker 1: goal is now just to be less wrong, to not
Speaker 1: commit as many mistakes as we did on environment and
Speaker 1: on human rights in the pert and does hopefully that
Speaker 1: will lead to fewer conflicts.
Speaker 3: Well, I worked for the United Nations for thirty years.
Speaker 3: I think I can safely say that quite early on
Speaker 3: in my career I lost any hope that I might
Speaker 3: have had that there are perfect solutions for anything, so
Speaker 3: I certainly don't look for perfect solutions. A great UN
Speaker 3: Secretary journal Dicomer Show, once said, the purpose of the
Speaker 3: UN isn't to take people to heaven, is to save
Speaker 3: them from hell, and and there are many variants of that.
Speaker 3: If you can make people's lives a little bit less awful,
Speaker 3: then you've achieved your job. Your job isn't necessary to
Speaker 3: bring world peace, it is to reduce conflict. Frankly, when
Speaker 3: I started getting interested in this about twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: I would have been very surprised to see the level
Speaker 3: of climate denihalism that there still is, whether it's in
Speaker 3: the aspects of the US press or the British press
Speaker 3: such as the Daily Telegraph, or any paths of Germany
Speaker 3: and elsewhere as well. I didn't think that would happen.
Speaker 3: I thought that given the unanimity with which the world
Speaker 3: science community recognizes the issues, the fact that there is
Speaker 3: such anhalism is surprising to me. But all it shows
Speaker 3: is that the struggle is going to be even harder
Speaker 3: than one expected it to be, and so whatever one
Speaker 3: can do, there are things that we can try to do.
Speaker 3: For example, working on finance. Do you know Extraordinarily, according
Speaker 3: to a UNTP report a couple of years ago, highly
Speaker 3: fragile countries, the most fragile countries such as for example,
Speaker 3: Soudan and Iraq, receive only one percent but capita of
Speaker 3: the funds going to more stable countries. And one understands
Speaker 3: in a way because investors need stability or that's what
Speaker 3: they cover it. But there are ways you can encourage
Speaker 3: private investors from richer countries to start investing by providing
Speaker 3: in guarantees so that you can indemnify the private sector
Speaker 3: for some of the potential losses in high risk settings,
Speaker 3: because we have to change that figure. If only one
Speaker 3: percent per capita is going to the most vulnerable climate
Speaker 3: and conflict affected countries compared to others, then we have
Speaker 3: a major problem because these are the countries that are
Speaker 3: on the front line of climate change, they are on
Speaker 3: the front line of conflict, and they're the ones who
Speaker 3: are going to be sending forth their populations who can
Speaker 3: no longer live there. So we have to find ways,
Speaker 3: and there are ways out there. People have come up
Speaker 3: with very creative solutions. Gordon Brown, the former UK Prime Minister,
Speaker 3: has come up with a number of areas relating to finance,
Speaker 3: for example, and the last but one cop there was
Speaker 3: the Loss and Damage Agreement that can help mitigate the
Speaker 3: major climate in justice, whereby it is the countries that
Speaker 3: don't admit that are on the front line of climate change.
Speaker 3: So there are many ways, but it is definitely going
Speaker 3: to be very very hard road, and we do not
Speaker 3: have that much time either.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Andrew, Thank you very much. Thank you for
Speaker 1: listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
Speaker 1: That's the sound of a container ship leading port, probably
Speaker 1: carrying your next Amazon order. Small things that all adapt
Speaker 1: to big impacts on the planet. If you like this episode,
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