THE 2015 Paris Agreement marked a turning point in the fight to protect our planet against climate catastrophe. For the first time in more than 20 years of UN climate negotiations, all member states made a binding and universal pledge to reduce their carbon emissions as soon as possible, and to do their best to keep global warming well below 2°C while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
As executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres led these negotiations, supported by her political advisor and strategist at the UN, Tom Rivett-Carnac. They later left the UN and set up Global Optimism, an organisation focused on bringing about environmental and social change by working with key campaigners, including Greta Thunberg, Al Gore and David Attenborough.
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In their new book, The Future We Choose: Surviving the climate crisis, they present two scenarios for how Earth will look in 2050: one where we have failed to meet the targets set out in the Paris Agreement, the other where we have succeeded and now inhabit a carbon-neutral planet. They also outline how individuals can best encourage positive environmental change.
Rowan Hooper: Your book builds on the progress made during the Paris climate negotiations and sets a framework for what we can do as individuals to save the planet. What inspired you to write it now?
Tom Rivett-Carnac: We are facing probably the most consequential decade in human history. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has set out 196 scenarios through which we can limit warming to 1.5°C, and none of them shows us peaking emissions later than this year. We can’t prevaricate any longer. We need to start now, and by 2030 we need to be at half our current emissions. We need to bring all of ourselves to this moment and realise that this is a crisis moment, it’s an emergency moment. We need to face it and then we need to act.
Christiana Figueres: We want to wake people up to the fact that they are implicitly already making a choice. It’s an unconscious, perhaps an unwilled choice, but it is a choice. Of course, we can go on with business as usual, but that’s going to end up in a world of destruction and suffering. Instead, we can and must make a conscious and intentional choice to change the way we live our daily lives and create a much better world.
At the beginning of the book, you paint a horrific picture of what the world could look like in 2050 if we continue with business as usual, with extreme flooding, rampant disease and malnutrition and the loss of coral reefs. Why was it important to show that?
CF: It was very intentional to present that world first, which is the business-as-usual consequence of what we’re doing right now, and to put it in very stark terms. There is no exaggeration; it is completely consistent with what the science has been saying. The scary thing is that some of those things are occurring now, 30 years early, such as the forest fires in Australia. But we also wanted to contrast that world with one that is so much better, where we regenerated the soils, the land, the air – and where we have much more of a sharing culture. We thought it was important to describe the two realities we are choosing between.
TRC: It’s a fascinating question, how you change the world. The fear of what’s at stake has to play a role, but it also has to pivot into a gritty, determined sense of possibility and optimism, in which the knowledge of that fear takes you on a journey to where you are going to dig in, make a deep commitment to be part of the solution and play your role.
CF: And it’s no anathema for us to do this as humans. If a parent is told that their child is sick because they have XYZ, the first thing that hits you as a parent is the consequence of that sickness. The second thing you do, is you say: “OK, if that’s the challenge that I’m being faced with, now what do I do for my child?” Parents will do everything that is possible for that child to regain health. That is the kind of determination that we would like to unleash here. Our planet really is in danger and we have to unleash our collective stewardship, to be able to dig into all of our innovation, ingenuity and determination to bring the planet back into the safe zone and improve human life.
Is it right to place this responsibility on individuals, though?
TRC: This is the responsibility of everyone. If you look back at history, at the great transitional moments, they were moments where we had to dig deep and do everything we could as individuals, but also at every other level of society. We don’t believe that individual actions are meaningless – far from it. But we also would argue that individuals can’t do it on their own. Individuals need to engage with power structures, to engage with politics so that those leaders can take the steps that they need to move us forward as well.
CF: We aren’t blaming individuals. Far from it. What we are saying is, “Wake up to the power that you have. Realise the agency that you have.” It’s quite remarkable when you think about the presence of humans on this planet: we have never had the agency, the technology or the capital that we have right now. We have never understood the policies better, never had the wherewithal or the impetus that we have right now to be able, over the next 10 years, to decide the future of many, many generations to come. It is an incredible responsibility and we can’t be blind about it.
And yet, despite a big rise in social pressure, through Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, for example, we still haven’t reduced emissions. Why not?
TRC: The relationship between civil engagement and political change is non-linear. You push, and you push, and you push and nothing happens, then it suddenly shifts. Extinction Rebellion talks about this a lot. Once you reach about 3.5 per cent of a population that is actively engaging in a particular issue and pushing for it consciously, consistently and publicly, then there has never been a scenario where a group like that has failed to achieve its objectives, whether that’s the women’s suffrage or civil rights movements or the end of colonialism. There are very positive and encouraging early signs that the political winds are now moving in this direction. But like everything else on climate, they aren’t moving fast enough. We need to accelerate them.
Christiana, you are famously optimistic. How did you feel when the newly-elected US President Donald Trump announced in the summer of 2017 that he was pulling his nation out of the Paris Agreement?
CF: I listened to his speech and was shocked that the leader of the world’s most powerful country could be so misinformed about something so consequential. However, the US economy hasn’t followed that lead. From a political perspective, the US will pull out of the Paris Agreement in November of this year, but its economy – which is made up of the states, the cities and the corporations – continues to decarbonise. I am concerned, actually, for the competitiveness of US industry, because it’s very evident that China, India and other countries are clearly investing in the new technologies that will dominate the future market in solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries for charging those vehicles and supporting the electric grid. The US will not be able to keep up in that race.
President Trump has said he supports the Trillion Trees Initiative, which aims to protect and grow a trillion trees by 2050. Is that a good thing?
CF: We were all surprised that he came out with this statement. However, I am holding on to the possibility that a trillion trees will be planted by millions of people around the world. We must reduce emissions, but we must also increase the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon from the air and to put carbon back into the soil where it belongs, improving its fertility and regreening Earth. Planting trees is a technology that has existed for thousands of years. It is quite cheap and very effective, so we should all get to it.
Tom, you spent some time in a forest in South-East Asia, living as a Buddhist monk. How does that feed into the philosophy that the two of you have put together?
TRC: One of the things I took away from that experience is this saying: “A bright mind is both the first step on the path and the final goal.” The Buddha was very clear that to make progress on your spiritual path, you must approach your own internal state with a degree of curiosity, intrigue and gritty determination – and that you have to do it looking forward so that you can shine a light on where you go. I think that kind of brightness of mind, that sense of possibility and exploration is critical to what has been achieved so far. We saw that in Paris. Once the attitude of everybody shifted from “this is impossible, we’re never going to do it” to “actually we can do something really remarkable here”, it became the most fun party in town and everyone climbed on board – and then we really made progress.
“An increasing number of people are waking up to the reality that we can create something completely different”
If there was a single thing that you would like people to do, what would it be?
TRC: To realise the privilege of living at this moment. Future generations will look back and think, “My God, they lived at the fulcrum of this massive change.” And they will either say “they were unable to deliver their responsibilities” or “they dug in and did something remarkable”. I think bringing that consciousness to mind can turn this problem into something that we really feel engaged with.
CF: Related to that, I think an increasing number of people are waking up to the fun of this, to the reality that we can create something completely different, and that this could be the most exciting experiment in the history of humankind. My parents didn’t have this choice, and my children won’t have it either. It is those of us who are adults right now that have this choice to make in the next 10 years. That’s it. How exciting is that? To wake up to our agency, to our power, to our creativity, to our innovation. So, what I would really love is for people to experience the joy of co-creating a better world.
Listen to the big interview podcast
with Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
