157: Presenting: ‘Who Cares Wins’ with Lily Cole and Christiana Figueres
Today, a special bonus episode in your feed from British model, actress, climate activist and podcaster, Lily Cole.
About this episode
In this episode of ‘Who Cares Wins’, Host Lily Cole interviews Christiana Figueres on how to maintain daily optimism, why more women in leadership will deliver a better world, and how systemic change and a livable future can begin with me and you.
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Who Cares Wins with Lily Cole
Full Transcript
Transcript generated by AI. While we aim for accuracy, errors may still occur. Please refer to the episode’s audio for the definitive version
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Christiana Figueres: Hello, and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Christiana Figueres. Today, we bring you a bonus episode, my interview on Lily Cole's podcast. Thanks for being here. So friends, Lily Cole is, of course, exceedingly well known, but in case there are some of you struggling to put the pieces of information together, let me just refresh your memory. Lily Cole is a British model, she's a film director, she's an actress, she's an entrepreneur, and she is a climate activist. As of 2020, she is also a published author. Lily spent four years researching this book on climate change and interviewing hundreds of people around the world who are working on environmental solutions. And then she brilliantly summarized and brought all of these solutions into one very handy book. The book is entitled Who Cares Wins? Reasons for Optimism in Our Changing World. And she has started a podcast with the same name, Who Cares Wins? And that is the podcast where this conversation between the two of us was recorded. What I absolutely love and admire about what Lily has done is that she has decided to use her platform, her very large and powerful microphone, if you will, to raise climate awareness and to encourage active engagement on the part of all of us, on issues that are near and dear to her heart and critical to all of us, such as climate crisis and the transformation of businesses so that they can become forces for good. Now, we had the pleasure of having Lily on our podcast a while ago, and that is episode 65, if you would like to listen to Lily explain her engagement in climate change. But the link to Lily's podcast, Who Cares Wins, is going to be in our show notes today. Thanks for listening. Bye.
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Kelsey (producer, Who Cares Wins): Who Cares Wins? Phrase or meaningful question. A podcast for the deep thinker, the curious intellect, and for those who care deeply about the planet. Also, sometimes referred to as Who Cares Who Wins.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Hello and welcome to Who Cares Wins with me, Lily Cole. I'm deeply in love with and also very concerned for our planet. And in this podcast series, I want to unearth different climate solutions that we can get on board with. Including looking at contradictions and divergent opinions. And in case you're not a walking Wikipedia, we'll be hearing more from our lovely producer, Kelsey, who'll be springing in from time to time to help clarify any moments or statistics for you.
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Kelsey (producer, Who Cares Wins): Hi, Lily.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Joining me today, I'm very excited to introduce an incredibly important influential person in the international climate movement. Now, you might have noticed that there's a sort of theme emerging through the second season of Who Cares Wins, where we are taking a gender lens on thinking about environmental change and action. And today we'll be exploring the role that women can and have played in leadership positions in order to create environmental change. Christiana Figueres is a Costa Rican diplomat who's dedicated her professional life to developing international climate policy. She was the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2010. And in that role, she was the lead negotiator of the historic 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Akin to Who Cares Wins' focus on optimism and solutions, optimism has been a theme of Christiana's messaging for many years. She's the co-founder of Global Optimism and the co-host of the Outrage and Optimism podcast. It's a true honor to welcome Christiana Figueres to speak to us today. Hi, Christiana, lovely to see you.
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Christiana Figueres: Good to see you.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): How's the year been so far? How's 2022 treating you?
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Christiana Figueres: Well, I mean, I feel like every time we wake up, we're slapped in the face again. What a year, we thought last year was challenging, but this year is just really calling upon us to keep our strength up. It's a very challenging few months at the start of this year.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): I wanted to speak to that because both of us have optimism as a theme in our work and our approach to climate action. I mean, very explicitly so. Obviously, you have your podcast, Outrage and Optimism. My book has the subtitle, Reasons for Optimism. How's your optimism doing? I found mine has been challenged of late. I'm curious if you ever find that kind of challenging position to hold, or if you turn towards Outrage, where you're at in that spectrum yourself.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, I inhabit both either at different minutes of the day or at the same moment of the day, because I actually don't think that they're separable. You know, for me, when I think about the optimism that I'd like to hang on to, I think of it as a choice, Lily, right? I think of it as a choice of moral courage, of moral valor, of strength in the face of adversity. I don't think of optimism as a trip into La La Land or into denying the realities that are slapping us in the face. I think about optimism as being fully apprised of what is going on, and then precisely because of those challenges, to choose to move into a space of agency. I just cannot imagine me as an individual, as a woman, as a mother, as a sister, as a friend. I cannot imagine that as a global citizen. I can't imagine the space where we are slapped in the face by something, and then I crawl into a corner and just accept that. And you don't either, right? You definitely do not accept that. I think among the many things that we share is precisely when those slaps in the face come. That's when we stand up, and that's when we do what we feel is the right thing to do. So that's the optimism for me. It's not, you know, Alice in Wonderland.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Yeah, totally. And I've spoken to actually in similar terms of it being a choice that you can make, but I have to say I found it harder in the last year or so to make that choice. I mean, I'm still making it. I'm not giving up, but it does feel fairly relentless sometimes, the backwards steps, the challenges that the world's being given at the moment.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, no, no, I totally agree with you. That's why I put the adjective stubborn in front of optimism, because we have to be stubborn. We have to be determined about this. I mean, I'm with you, right? Every morning I wake up and see the news. I just, you know, I'm like, oh, shit, you know, where do we go from here? But the thing is, as I said, if we crawl back into bed and draw the covers over our head, then we have zero possibility of moving forward. So the bigger the challenge, the deeper the commitment has to be.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): And given the, I mean, you've been working obviously in the climate space for a very long time. And I mean, I feel like I've been working for a long time. You've been working longer than me. I wanted to ask you about gender and what your thoughts are on the kind of role of women leadership in climate negotiations. Obviously, you're one of the chief architects of the Paris Agreement in 2015. There were lots of other women involved in that agreement.
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Christiana Figueres: Lots.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Yeah. And there's lots of data that I'm very, I'm sure you're aware of that looks at the fact that women, if put in positions of power, tend to be more proactive with environmental legislation, that women have a higher make up of environmental organizations. Without necessarily going into like the why of that, is that your experience that women have played instrumental roles in climate leadership? And what are your thoughts around the role of women in making this transition?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah. I mean, as you say, we don't have to invent anything. There is lots of literature that says that women typically, and not all women by the way, but that women typically have traits that make them particularly adept at taking decisions that are more long-term than short-term, particularly adept at being more inclusive and more oriented toward collective decisions and leadership. Women tend to be more adept at making decisions out of collaboration and solidarity rather than confrontation.
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Kelsey (producer, Who Cares Wins): And the literature and studies are there to back it up. Women Deliver, a global advocacy agency reported the many ways in which a country, government or business can prosper when more women take those leadership roles. And there's a link to the study in the show notes.
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Christiana Figueres: Having said that, I would quickly add, that doesn't mean that all women do it, it doesn't mean that no men do it, it just means that there is somewhat of a, let's say a trend toward that. And it has been, in my experience, very evident that in negotiations or actually even in climate action, women just rock it. I mean, it is really impressive how when there is enough presence and input from women, how things really move forward in such a different way. And my memory goes back to two very interesting moments in the negotiations when I was an active part of them. One was at the South African COP, where we had a COP president who was a female. She was the Minister of Foreign Affairs. We had head of G77, who was a female. We had a head of the South African delegation, who was a female. We had a head of security, who was a female. And we had an executive secretary, who was a female myself. And I am telling you, that COP basically held in that space by five women, had a very different tone than other COPs, a very, very different tone. And it's one that I really, the memories of which I really treasure. In addition to the fact that it was the occasion of the publication of one of the most beautiful books that I've ever seen, which was published by the then COP president. And it was a beautiful book of stories of adaptation to climate change that were being led by women on the ground.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): When you say the tone of the COP was different, can you elaborate more on that? In what way was it different?
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Christiana Figueres: So the COP stands for COP, Conference of the Parties, which is under the climate convention. It's the yearly maximum point of negotiation and decision making that central governments, national governments undertake. They come together at the end of the year to incorporate the work that has been done throughout the year and take legally binding decisions for the work that then moves forward. And as you can imagine, there are 196 countries that participate and they have wildly different needs and interests. So, a pretty complicated process every year. And that was the process in 2015 in Paris, which gathered the work that had been done throughout the five years prior to then come to the legally binding Paris Agreement. But it was evident certainly in South Africa and beyond that women are just so much more inclusive. I just really remember the few women in the room, looking around to make sure that the critical voices would be present in the room. What a difference to be in the hands of a female security head, who was so sensitive to the presence of so many people who were not governments. And honestly, who was such a fantastic lesson for UN security, people after that were so much more, in fact, went even beyond sensitivity and were very supportive of all of the other stakeholders that need to be there and need to have their voices heard. But the other story that I wanted to tell you is one that is called The Doha Miracle, which is at the COP that took place in Doha. And Mary Robinson, you know, an unbelievable leader for women's rights and rights in general, she had contacted me prior. And she had said, Christiana, do you know that the Climate Convention was born without any mention of gender whatsoever? And I went, are you serious? So I go back, you know, and check. And I go, Mary, you're absolutely right. She goes, so we're going to change this. I'm going, OK, how are we going to change it? You command, right? And Mary put together a several-year process to bring women together, usually in the office of the Irish Embassy in New York, to every year before the COP, figure out what text and what decisions could be incorporated into each of these yearly decision-making processes that would begin to open the door and then expand that space for women, both for female negotiators, but also for the participation of women in climate action, and very importantly, for the recognition of the outsized negative impact that climate has on women. And, you know, God bless Mary Robinson. She put together such an amazing, amazing plan, brought so many women together, and we figured out a little strategy where the negotiators would put forward texts, and then it was my responsibility, because I was not a negotiator, I was holding the space for the UN, to figure out how those texts that would be put forward by the negotiators could actually be adopted and figure out the process. And in Doha, we thought this is going to be completely impossible because we're in a pretty, pretty male-driven society out there and culture. We had the aspiration of having a groundbreaking decision that would really open the space within the negotiating process for women and create a work plan and a program that would continue for decades to open more space for women. And we thought, how are we going to do this? So we did devise a little plan and lo and behold, Mary pushing from one side and I pushing from the other side. And in the end, we had a text that is the first time that these issues were legally incorporated into that process. But we were faced with a situation that we did not have enough support from enough countries to adopt the text. And so as I say, Mary pushing from one side and I pushing from the other, we lovingly encouraged the cop president to put this text forward as his initiative. Because cop presidents have the possibility of bringing their own initiatives. Now you can imagine the reaction, right? This is a very male-driven culture and the fact that we were asking him to put it forward as his initiative did not immediately meet with enthusiasm. But we worked hard enough on it and with enough support and encouragement to him that he did put it forward and was then very proud of it because it was adopted. And Mary and I then celebrated what we called the Doha miracle. So a lot of the work on gender within that very, very strict process can be traced back to the Doha miracle.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): And for somebody who's listening, who doesn't necessarily connect issues of gender with issues of climate, why did that feel so important to you and Mary? Why is it an oversight to not be kind of bringing gender into a prism of thinking about climate change and climate solutions?
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Christiana Figueres: Well, for several reasons. First, because every process, every institution, every table should have gender parity, 50-50. I mean, you know, we don't even have to discuss that. And it's very clear that that was not the case. We're getting better, but it's still not the case. Secondly, because there's a lot of literature that proves that women are disproportionately negatively affected by climate change, because we're more responsible for our family care, for feeding children, especially in developing countries, where women very often lead single-parent homes because the men have left for many different reasons, and women are left at home taking care of food, water and fire. And food, water and fire are very, very often negatively impacted by climate, because the increasing heat means more drought, less water, less food. It also means less water available. And for fire, which is the predominant cooking method, it means more deforestation, means that women have to walk farther and farther away from homes to gather firewood. And, you know, one of the most appalling data points that I carry with me is that 50% of all women, I'm not talking about women in developing countries, no, 50% of all women on this planet are still cooking with firewood on open wood stoves.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Wow.
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Christiana Figueres: Check that one out. That is just unbelievable because the consequences of that, that they have to walk farther and farther to gather firewood that very often they're sexually accosted on their way to get firewood or water or food. The fact that then when they finally come back with food, water and firewood, that they cook on open wood fires means that their lungs are affected, the lungs of children are affected. In addition to the fact that all of the impacts of climate as I said before really affect them as the primary caregivers for their families. And this has made all the more unjust because if you take a strict gender approach, I think it's fair to say that men are more responsible for climate change than women because men have taken most of the decisions over the hundred years during which climate change has occurred, during which emissions have risen. Most of those decisions to invest in fossil fuels, to extract fossil fuels, to burn fossil fuels, etc., etc., etc., to deforest, most of those decisions and actions have been taken by men. So, you know, add to the long list of injustices of climate, add the fact that men have been primarily responsible for causing climate change and women are primarily negatively affected by climate change.
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Kelsey (producer, Who Cares Wins): And the social injustices that women face on a daily basis are exacerbated when disaster strikes. Plan Ireland reports that women and children are 14 times more likely to die during disasters.
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Christiana Figueres: So for all of these reasons, very important to include the gender perspective. On the positive side of this ledger, Lily, what Maita's book shows is that women are primarily the ones that have these creative, innovative ways to adapt to climate change, probably because they're directly affected. And so they figure out how do they adapt. And that is such a beautiful testament to the fact that we tend not to take the slaps of the face lying down. We tend to stand up and go, okay, but I'm responsible for my family. What do I do? And then have very creative ways of adapting to the negative impacts of climate change. So many different reasons why gender needs to be considered.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): The last thing you made around the fact that historically men and obviously a small proportion in a way of men have been defining the systems that have created the climate crisis as we know it today, leads me into a different question, which is maybe a slightly deeper, more philosophical one. I look at my book at the kind of eco feminism movement and sort of question the idea that simply putting women into positions of power in the existing power structures, whether that's as CEOs, even as presidents, et cetera, without questioning the power structures themselves may not be the deep kind of shift to solution that we need, because arguably those structures were designed by, for the most part, privileged predominantly white men in the past. So much of the feminist movement has been looking to put women in the positions of power without questioning necessarily those power structures themselves and how they were designed in the first place. If women had been in positions of power for the last few hundred thousand years or at least equality, how we might have very different systems anyway. There's an analogy to that in my mind with one of the biggest kind of conflicts I have right now with the environmental movement internally is the simplicity of the drive towards net zero. And I've lobbied for net zero. I was at the Houses of Parliament a few years ago pushing for it. I was very happy that UK made that commitment. I mean, it's great to see all the companies and countries around the world making the commitment to net zero and pushing towards decarbonisation. But I went last month to Chile, to the Atacama Desert, to visit people who've been resisting lithium mining and trying to understand why some of the indigenous communities there are resisting the boom in lithium mining that's obviously being kind of driven by the green tech net zero ambitions of the world. And my takeaway from that was sort of similar to the feminist argument I just made that if we just, if we don't question the systems and we just try to do the systems in a different way, i.e. if we just replace every fossil fuel car with an electric car without questioning the consumption model and questioning the growth model, we may end up not fundamentally solving the crisis and just kind of having a different version of environmental crisis.
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Christiana Figueres: Substituting it.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Substituting it. Exactly. I'm curious if you have any reservations around the depth of transition that's needed and whether the kind of net zero goals and decarbonization and putting women into positions of existing power structures is really going to go deep enough in the face of this existential threat.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, no, really, really good point. I tend to think in little pictures, Lily, just because it's easier for me. And so, as you were speaking, I was envisioning an iceberg because the tip of the iceberg, what is most visible, what gets most attraction, what is most reported on is, as you mentioned, the decarbonization, how many gigatons here, how many gigatons there. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Actually, most of the challenge of the iceberg is under water. And that tip wouldn't exist if all of the underwater weight weren't there. So we do have a responsibility to stop ourselves from what I would call reductionist analysis of climate change that look only at megatons and really have a much more holistic approach, understanding that all of these issues are intertwined. That's what makes it both hugely challenging, but also hugely exciting to understand that all of this is, you know, sort of a huge web of connections that, yes, the carbon intensity of our economy is one factor, but so is gender, so is race, so is social divisions, so is geographical divisions. All of that is part of the same web that we have spun for hundreds of years, and we are perhaps paying more attention to one thread of that web, which is decarbonization, but it is not independent from, and will not be radically changed. It will be marginally changed, but not radically changed unless we understand all of the other threads that are interwoven. So I totally agree with you, and I have full respect for the complexity of this. Full respect for the complexity. I don't think, you know, in the history of social change, political change, I don't think we have ever benefited by the depth of the analysis and the understanding that we have now. I think when we look at the history of social change, and, you know, I'm happy to be wrong, I hope that I'm wrong, but my sense is that we have picked up one social injustice, one economic injustice, and gone at it individually, almost in a linear fashion, independent of everything else. And this is the first time that we are, as a society, generating the capacity to understand that all of this is interlinked. That just means that it's all the more complex and all the more necessary and urgent, both at the same time.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): I had a more tangible question I wanted to ask that speaks to that, which is about degrowth. So following my trip to the Atacama Desert and looking at the situation around lithium mining, I feel increasingly interested in looking at degrowth and different economic ideas around degrowth. And I know that that's not something that's been a particularly hot topic, at least on a kind of policy level. I know that there are lots of environmentalists talking about degrowth, but it feels still very niche and not something that's being discussed by many companies or politicians. Is that your impression? Like, do you have a position on whether the continued emphasis on infinite growth of GDP is problematic and whether that needs to be at the heart of environmental negotiation conversations?
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Christiana Figueres: So I'm smiling because you said GDP, and that reminds me of my favorite quote on GDP, which comes from not from John Kennedy, but from Robert Kennedy, who said GDP is the measurement of everything, except everything that is important. So there you go.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): I guess critiques around the attachment to growth and whether you think there is any appetite for that, or whether you think that's actually still a very kind of challenging conversation for politicians, corporations, et cetera, to have.
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, undoubtedly, it is a challenging conversation because we humans still haven't learned the very basic lesson that enough is enough. And it's not difficult to understand. And we have to learn that lesson in our personal life, in our corporate life, in the economic systems, enough is enough. And as we get very, very close, perilously close, or in fact, even overstep an increasing number of planetary boundaries, we have to understand that enough is enough and that unlimited extraction is actually unlimited destruction. So we have to understand that. And I do agree with you that it's a difficult conversation, but one that needs to be pushed. And at the same time, Lily, coming from a developing country, I really do have to raise a voice of warning here. Degrowth or slower growth or less growth is a very important conversation for the global north. It is not a conversation for the global south because there is still too much poverty and increasing levels of poverty because of climate change. So to invite any country in the south to a conversation about degrowth, less growth, slow growth, in fact, even enough is enough, doesn't make any sense because the average citizen in global south is not yet living a dignified life. So it has to be a nuanced conversation. And that conversation has actually been at the heart of the climate convention and negotiations for years and years and years, only it's been a disguised conversation. The way that it is there, think back to our iceberg, is the conversation around responsibility for emission reductions, where the global south continuously argues that those that need to reduce their emissions think not just emissions but growth, economic growth, because currently economic growth in most countries is still actually coincidental with emissions. So the global south continues to argue, guys, you're the ones that need to bring down your emissions, i.e. you're the ones that have to slow your growth. We need space in that budget that is every day a smaller and more restricted budget. We need space for our development. So it is a very different conversation, depending on where you're standing and how you're looking at this, but it is an important conversation because of the limited nature of the carbon budget, because of the limited nature of planetary boundaries, all of them, and hence it is not just an economic conversation, it's a moral conversation. It's a morality issue about who needs to have access to what is everyday scarcer space.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): That's a really beautiful answer and very helpful. Is there anything you think the world can learn from Costa Rica as an example? Because it seems quite an extraordinary leader in many ways from a climate perspective. I also love that there's no military, right? Although I have read that there's some challenges to that from the extraction position around gas more recently.
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Christiana Figueres: Well, you put me in a difficult space with that question, Lily, because I'm a very proud citizen of my wonderful little country. And I do think that we have done many things right. But I would like to preface that with the caution that just because Costa Rica did that, doesn't mean that it's a copy paste situation. Every country is completely unique. Every country has its own historical development, its own natural resources, its own cultural specificities. So having made that clear, let me just say a couple of things that I think that Costa Rica has done right. As you say, the abolishing of the army in 1948 was clearly a landmark decision taken by the way by my father.
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Kelsey (producer, Who Cares Wins): So a little context here. Christiana had politics in her blood. Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times between 1948 and 1974. As she said, he abolished the country's army. He nationalized its banking sector and granted women the right to vote. His son, Christiana's brother, José María Figueres, also became president in 1994.
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Christiana Figueres: He not only abolished the national army, he actually abolished his own revolutionary army because he had to call up an army because democracy was under threat. And so he called up a revolutionary army of peasants and intellectuals from the university. Very strange combination. And he led a successful revolution to force the then government out of power. And when the revolution was successful, then he asked his own revolutionary colleagues to turn in their arms and go back to till the soil or to their books, as he said. And then he abolished the national army because in his way of thinking, army budgets are completely misplaced. So the abolishing of the army, absolutely brilliant and courageous move. And then he decided to take the budget that had gone to the army and he invested it in education. Hence, Costa Rica has one of the highest levels of education in Latin America. And he invested another part of that into protection of biodiversity. Hence we have one of the best protected national park levels in Latin America or in fact even in the world. And we have become an eco destination for so many people who want to come to see the amazing nature that we have. We've also invested a lot into what we call eco education. So that most Costa Ricans, we actually do know the flora and fauna that surrounds us. And by knowing it and getting to love it as children, we're actually pretty protective of it. So we've done that well. We also never had any coal or gas or oil to speak of. And so from the very beginning, we used first our rivers to generate hydro electricity. And then later on, now we have mix, we have hydro, we have geothermal, we have wind, and we have some solar. So we have a completely clean energy matrix, which means that we can press, and this is something we haven't done as much yet. We can press for electric transport because all our electricity is clean. But as you mentioned, to everybody's astonishment, and my disbelief, there are some voices that have over the past few years been raised to say that we should go back to look for oil and gas in case we are sitting on reserves that would be worth exploiting. That despite the fact that we now have a legal moratorium on oil and gas and what we're fighting for here is actually to move from the moratorium to a complete prohibition. And it was because of our fight for the prohibition of the exploitation of oil and gas that these other voices on the other side raise their ugly head and say, wait, wait, wait, before we progress from moratorium to prohibition, can we walk in the other direction and open for the exploitation of oil and gas? So that's just a small example that Costa Rica is sadly not perfect, but it still continues to be a pretty amazing country.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): And very quickly, was the decision to not exploit and not explore for oil and gas originally ecological? Or was it in economic because it was good to be in tourism or what was the, why was Costa Rica so unique in taking that stance early on?
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Christiana Figueres: To us, Lily, economics and ecology are the same thing, because most of our income as a country comes from all of you wonderful eco-tourists who come to Costa Rica to see nature. That is our income. We have two main sources of income. One is eco-tourism and the other one is high technology because we have quite a few centers here of high technology. So to us, the protection of ecology is not charity, it's not saving the planet, it's not altruism. It is fundamentally our bread and butter. And so the fact that we do not differentiate between those two, we don't say either we have to protect our biodiversity or we have to have an income. No, we have our income because we're protecting our biodiversity. And that coincidence of the ecological and the economic imperatives is a very, very strong coincidence. Oh, we're not a coincidence, it's an overlap, right? It's a mutual reinforcement. And that is what keeps us with constantly improving policies because, you know, when we take a new law to be discussed or when we want further protection policies, it's not about altruism, it's not about charity. It's about we have to protect what our income is. And that makes it a very powerful argument. So because of the consistency of our policy that goes beyond political parties, we've been able to go from a forest cover that was down to 25% of the territory up to more than 59% of our territory is forest cover now.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): I love it. I'm going to move to Costa Rica. Sign me up.
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Christiana Figueres: You won't be the only one.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): No, I know, I know. But anyone who listens, who really cares, is there any actions you would suggest? Like what can people do to try and help contribute to the situation right now?
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Christiana Figueres: First, at the level of individuals, what we eat is really important, where it comes from is really important. So be mindful of the signals that you're giving to the market through what comes onto your plate. Secondly, the way that we transport ourselves. If we're transporting ourselves solo in high carbon vehicles, I mean, how irresponsible is that? If you can go to public transport in those countries where that's possible, or move to electrified transport in any way, etc. So food, transport, very important. For those who have the privilege of having savings, where are those savings? Are those savings still supporting high carbon assets or companies, or have you asked your asset manager to move over? It's very important to give those signals to the market as well. In democratic countries, and not all countries are democratic, how we vote, how we vote at local levels, at regional, at national level is really important because politics is important, policy is important. And then how do we turn up in the world, right? And Lily, you are such a brilliant example of using yourself as instrument and turning up at all of those moments in which we have to raise our voices on the streets or in front of buildings wherever it is. It's proven in history that no big social or economic change ever, ever occurred without civil disobedience. And so I am a huge supporter of peaceful, peaceful civil disobedience because history shows that that's important and is very key in changing policy and also changing public sentiment. So that, of course, being a Costa Rican, planting trees, planting trees, planting trees.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Thank you. And is there anything else you want to promote or mention? You have a new podcast series, is that right?
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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have, well, on our podcast, Outrage and Optimism. Thanks for the mention of that. But also, Lily, supporting women who are in this, it's a really, really tough area that we're all in. And supporting each other, being mindful that this is really, really, really tough job, and that the job is better done with more women. And especially from my perspective, at my 65 years of age, supporting young women, I think, is so important because it is the young women of your generation, Lily, who are coming to this with many more skills, with many more assets, with certainly much more delightful energy than us oldies can bring to this anymore. And furthermore, this is all about you, right?
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): I mean, it's lovely for you to say that, but I actually think that the intergenerational part is so critical because yes, we saw it a little bit maybe in Scotland, where there's a kind of divisiveness sometimes in activism today.
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Christiana Figueres: Absolutely.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Or identity politics or whatever it is, that I think is really counter to the movement and actually building bridges across different generations, different genders, different countries, different economic positions that for me, bridge building is so important and allyship to actually all get where we need to go.
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Christiana Figueres: I totally agree with you. All of this is interrelated and we have to understand that. And so to build artificial walls between sectors, between generations, between genders, between whatever, doesn't make any sense. We're just shooting ourselves in the foot. So yes, I think the intergenerational dynamic is one that we should really focus on because there has been quite a bit of polarization around that, which is exactly why I'm mentioning it. Because I do think that, first of all, you know, to speak for myself, plus many of my women friends who are in a similar generation, we do have a responsibility to reach out and support those that are coming after us. A, on a personal level because most of you are so much more brilliant than we are. But also, also because we are the ancestors now. We are the ancestors. We are the ancestors of the future. So we have an ancestral responsibility, just like we are grateful for the ancestors that we have. Some of whom are here, some of whom are not here. You know, in fact, all of us were alive right now. But especially those in the oldies department, we are the ancestors. So we have an ancestral responsibility to help to fertilize the ground of possibility into the future.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Boom. That was a good ending line. Thank you so much, Christiana. It's so lovely to talk to you.
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Christiana Figueres: Thank you.
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Lily Cole (host, Who Cares Wins): Thank you so much for listening to Who Cares Wins with me, Lily Cole. We are so grateful for the guidance and resources from She Changes Climate on this series, an organization enabling women in all their diversity to lead just climate action globally, and for the music that's been provided by the very wonderful musician Cosmo Sheldrake. If you liked this episode and would like other people to hear it, we'd be so grateful if you would rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts from. And to hear reasons to be optimistic, we have another little Who Cares Wins drop this Friday. This is a Mags Creative production. Catch you next time. Bye.
