CLIMATE OPTIMIST

Scepticism about climate change should push us not into despair but action, says Paris Agreement negotiator Christiana Figueres.

Paris negotiator sees sunny way forward

Looking out at an audience of hundreds, the woman who helped to lead the negotiations for the historic Paris Agreement on climate change delivered an ultimatum: “Decide today whether you are going to be part of the solution or not.”

Despite the damage inflicted on the environment by humans in just the last 50 years, it is not too late, Christiana Figueres declared.

“There is no reason why the Anthropocene has to be … the era of human destruction of all natural systems,” she said, using a proposed term for the current geological era that emphasises humanity’s impact.

“My invitation is that we actually all consciously decide that the Anthropocene is going to be the geological era of human betterment. … It’s the era in which we turned history around.”

The scene was her keynote speech at the Ecosperity Conference in Singapore in June, three-and-a-half years after the Paris Agreement was signed in December 2015. To watch Ms Figueres on stage was to glimpse the conviction and energy that she brought to the Paris negotiations while serving as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“Many people have asked me, ‘So how was the Paris Agreement achieved?’” Her reply: lock everyone in a room and don’t let them leave until they agree, she quipped, to laughter from the crowd.

Behind that jesting answer lay a hint of the steel that underlies her stance. Soon afterward, sitting down to an interview, Ms Figueres dismisses the very idea of being pessimistic about efforts to tackle climate change.

“We cannot afford pessimism. We cannot afford to be fatalistic,” she says. “Science tells us we still have the chance. They’re also telling us, you’re running out of time — but they’re telling us you still have the chance.”

Never mind the increasingly alarming reports from climate scientists, or the fact that the Trump administration intends to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement next year. Those are reasons not for despair, but for action, she insists: “The obligation of everyone alive right now is to figure out how to contribute to the solution.”

REASONS FOR OPTIMISM

The 62-year-old Costa Rican diplomat is, after all, the founding partner of “purpose-driven enterprise” called Global Optimism, which aims to drive social and environmental change by turning pessimism into optimism. “Global Optimism is trying to teach people like you that you have to be optimistic,” she tells her interviewer.

This is not about being blindly sanguine. Quite the opposite: it is precisely because she is concerned about the planet’s fate that she sees a need to do something about it.

And having optimism as a starting point improves the chances of succeeding: “It’s about seeing where you want to go and putting everything in place, to have a positive attitude that you’re actually going to get there.”

Without optimism, there can be no motivation to act, not least when facing global issues such as tackling climate change. As she puts it: “If we, as a global humanity, think that we can’t do this, we definitely won’t.”

Besides, there are good reasons to be optimistic today, she points out. “We have the instruments and the tools to collaborate on many things that we didn’t have before.”

From technology and capital, to the capacity for global communication and coordination, the world community has vast resources at hand for tackling the problem.

Furthermore, even in the few years since the Paris Agreement, awareness has risen. Granted, one reason is far from cheerful: extreme weather events have been occurring more frequently, in stark illustration of the consequences of climate change.

Yet other developments are causing markets, too, to awaken. As green technologies mature and costs fall, profit motives are beginning to align with environmental goals.

“So many of these technologies are now becoming so competitive that they just make an extraordinary amount of sense,” says Ms Figueres.

It helps that advances in green technologies are consistent with the broad direction of technological development, she adds. Digitisation and artificial intelligence, for instance, are important in areas such as renewable energy, given the relatively unpredictable nature of wind or solar power.

Market forces may have a role in the current green wave, but Ms Figueres’ own environmental awakening was more personal. She did not start out in climate science; rather, after a bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from the liberal arts college Swarthmore College in the US and a master’s in social anthropology from the London School of Economics, she began her working life in the Costa Rican government in 1982.

“I come from a political family. There’s quite a bit of tradition of public service in my family,” she says, in something of an understatement. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, served three separate terms as the president of Costa Rica; one of her brothers, Jose Maria Figueres, has also served as president.

In 1990, however, she left her role as chief of staff to Costa Rica’s minister of agriculture. After gaining qualifications in organisation development and organisation and systems design, and a stint with the public affairs firm The Hawthorn Group, she joined the Renewable Energy in the Americas initiative of the US Export Council for Renewable Energy in 1994, as director of its technical secretariat.

“I moved into climate change when my two girls were very young,” she explains. “I realised I had the responsibility, as a mother, to hand over a planet that is better and not a planet that is worse.

“The terms of reference for any parent is never to turn over a worse future for your kids.”

Her environmental turn may have set the tone for her own family, with both of her daughters now in sustainability-related startups. One of them works in impact investment — directing capital to where it can do the most social or environmental good — and the other is active in “conscious co-living”, promoting co-living arrangements that are also sustainable.

Then again, Costa Rica itself has had “a very clear commitment to sound environmental policies” since the 1940s, Ms Figueres points out.

She reels off statistics: national parks cover a quarter of the Central American country’s territory, more than half the country is covered in forest, and practically all of its electricity consumption is powered by renewables. What enables Costa Rica to make these environmental commitments? “Leadership really does matter in terms of defining policy,” she replies.

It’s certainly a far cry from some other countries, not least the world’s second-largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. But Ms Figueres is not particularly interested in focusing on America’s current reluctance to do its part in mitigating climate change.

“The US will come around eventually,” she says. “You can’t be against science forever.” In any case, the current “political reality” in Washington notwithstanding, there is plenty of progress being made around the country, she notes.

“You do see that there are an extraordinary number of states — California, New York, Massachusetts — that actually have understood that it is in their benefit to invest in the technologies of the 21st century, even if Washington DC has decided that they would rather stay in the 20th century.”

Clinging to fossil fuels in defiance of the rise of renewables is like insisting on landlines in an era of mobile phones, she says. “They are preventing themselves from moving with technology and benefiting from the advantages of technology.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving forward. China, for instance, is surely “delighted” about the opportunities for dominance in the electric vehicle market, with the Trump administration preferring to reverse earlier gains in favour of traditional fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles instead.

“You cannot unwind decarbonisation. That’s going to happen anyway,” she says. “And the only question is, who’s going to benefit? Where are those products and services going to be produced, who’s going to sell them, who’s going to export them?”

THE FUTURE IS GREEN

Even if businesses are not in an obviously eco-related industry, they can still be part of the climate solution.

Apart from aiming to reduce their own carbon footprints, there is an important question they should ask themselves, says Ms Figueres: “Is your investment going into a high-carbon asset or a low-carbon asset?

“If it’s going into a high-carbon asset, it probably is not a very good investment because it doesn’t have a long shelf life.

“You can find it now but it’s probably not going to be an asset that will be around for much longer, because there is financial and social intolerance for those assets,” she adds, noting that top global asset managers and private funds already see a “huge risk to high-carbon assets”.

In other words, low-carbon investment simply makes sense if one is interested in long-term viability.

The decarbonisation wave also means massive opportunities for startups and new business models. Declares Ms Figueres: “Every sector must be decarbonised.”

From transport and construction to consumer industries such as food and packaging, there is plenty of room for change: “The opportunity to create a disruptive business model and a disruptive technology has never been greater than now.”

Large-scale disruption and innovation is key given the ambitious targets that the world has set itself — and which it must achieve, if climate catastrophe is to be averted. Each year, humans produce some 40 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. By 2030, this must be halved to 20 gigatonnes; by 2040, halved again to 10; and by 2050, down to five.

It’s a daunting task. But as Ms Figueres told her audience: “This is the age of exponentials.”

And things are indeed moving. If you had asked her just five years ago, she says, she would not have expected the world to already be moving out of coal today.

Yet banks are now divesting from coal companies, and insurers are refusing to quote premiums for coal-fired plants. “Private capital will no longer take on the risk of coal.”

What about the entrenched oil and gas industry? After coal, she sees oil as the next fossil fuel that the world will reject: “We will be moving out of oil through the electrification of mobility.”

As electric vehicles proliferate, demand for petrol will fall. Alternatives such as biofuels are also being developed for use in aviation.

As for natural gas, it currently serves as a bridging fuel “to firm up renewables on the grids”, due to the intermittent nature of energy sources such as wind, waves, or sunlight.

“But as soon as technology of batteries and storage comes on at a scale and at a price that are competitive, then you will soon have grids that are fed by renewables with storage, and that will then decrease the demand for gas.” Renewables now provide about a quarter of global electricity.

Admittedly, even as progress is being made on these fronts, other areas lag behind. These include “food systems” and land use, where the world has yet to be persuaded to move from deforestation to reforestation.

“I think on land use … I don’t think we have developed strong enough business models to make it attract capital,” says Ms Figueres, though she points out that there can be a business case for planting trees, for instance, if they are later harvested for timber.

What about the role of ordinary citizens, not least those who might feel powerless or dispirited due to their government leaders being out of tune with the eco-friendly spirit of the times?

Everyone can play a part in being part of change, she replies. “Consumers or citizens are hugely important because products are produced according to demand.”

Plant-based protein is a clear case in point, with Beyond Meat having had a runaway initial public offering this year. “So you have capital flowing to those products because they can see consumer demand.”

Single-use plastics is another example of “a huge area where there’s very, very quick change occurring because of pressure from the bottom”.

So consumers should not underestimate their role in the fight against climate change. From the global level to the individual, it all comes back to the motivating force that belief and, yes, optimism can provide.

“You create the reality that you conceive,” she sums up. “If you close yourself to the possibility, well, there’s none. If you open yourself to the possibility of a solution, then there’s a lot of opportunity.”

Optimism is not a matter of having been born with a positive outlook: “I chose to be optimistic because I don’t think anything else is responsible.”

She stares her interviewer down, friendly yet firm, and asks: “What are you going to choose?”

We cannot afford pessimism. We cannot afford to be fatalistic. Science tells us we still have the chance. They’re also telling us, you’re running out of time — but they’re telling us you still have the chance

So many of these [green] technologies are now becoming so competitive that they just make an extraordinary amount of sense