The climate challenge – is there reason to hope?

The diplomatic cavalcade that descended on Geneva this weekend, with serried ranks of suited negotiators and uniformed military top brass, came to town with a serious purpose: bringing peace to Ukraine.

Whether the plan under discussion is really serious is open to debate, the first draft appeared to demand some quite astonishing concessions on Ukraine’s part.

But meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Brazil, other diplomats were engaged in serious negotiations too, trying to craft a meaningful outcome to conclude the COP30 conference on climate change.

President Trump may call global warming a “hoax” and a “con job”, but among the scientific community (the people we need to trust on this) there is no doubt that climate change is now threatening lives and livelihoods worldwide.

A recent report by the medical journal The Lancet and the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that “climate inaction is killing people now in all countries”, with extreme heat related deaths alone accounting for more than half a million deaths annually.

But this year’s COP took place without the United States, and it ended not with a bang, but a whimper – a final document that contained no commitment to phasing out fossil fuels, though it did agree to scale up climate finance.

Given many scientists now believe we are likely to breach, at least temporarily, the 1.5°C rise in global temperatures agreed by the Paris Accord, is there still reason to hope we can tackle the challenge of climate change? That is our topic on Inside Geneva this week.

Listen to this week’s podcast:

Surprising optimism

Our three guests are Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, head of the WHO’s Climate Change and Health Unit, Candy Ofime, of Amnesty International’s climate justice team, and Deborah Sanchez, of Clarifi, a group that works to support indigenous peoples over land rights, conservation, climate change adaptation, and sustainable management of their territories.

What surprised me, given that these three know all too well the harm climate change is already doing, is their relative optimism.

Campbell-Lendrum pointed out that despite the climate change deniers populating our social media feeds, opinion polls consistently show that “there is a very strong majority in basically every country in the world to do more about climate change”. Most people, he is convinced, do not dispute the science.

“The scientific consensus on the main points is absolutely clear and has been for decades now,” he told Inside Geneva. “It is happening. It’s mainly due to human activities. It is bad, including for health.”

Read more from our COP30 coverage:

Use the local knowledge

But, the fact that millions of people in the world’s richest countries are convinced by the science, and want to do more to tackle climate change, is, sometimes, greeted with a weary sigh by indigenous peoples. They made their voices heard loud and clear at COP30, primarily, Deborah Sanchez of Clarifi explained, to remind the rest of us that there is plenty of knowledge out there about how to safeguard are planet, if we would only pay attention.

“The answer is us,” she told me. “Basically the solution that many of us are looking for has already been happening in the indigenous local communities.”

Clarifi is working on innovative projects supporting indigenous groups to protect their ancestral lands, while at the same time preserving the forests (the lungs of our planet and integral to combatting climate change). Instead of seeing indigenous groups as obstacles in the way of development, Clarifi is persuading governments to including them in the land conservation process, with 150,000 hectares of land secured for indigenous peoples.

“Next year at COP we want to see bigger,” said Sanchez. “We want to see probably one million hectares. And that will be a massive achievement around tackling climate change, but also from an angle of human rights, and environment justice and climate justice, which is what we are advocating for.”

Just transition

Climate justice is also Amnesty International’s Ofime’s focus. It is actually a much more complex topic than we might realise. Many of us in the developed world do want, as Campbell-Lendrum said, to do more to protect our climate. We may be switching to electric vehicles, or turning to renewables to heat our homes.

All good moves, but Ofime wants us to be conscious of where our climate friendly new technology is coming from, and how it is produced. Cobalt, she points out, is used in electric vehicles, and is “essential for the energy transition. But what most people do not know is that the world’s largest reserves are located in the Congo, and people are evicted from their land or industrial sites to expand. And a lot of artisanal miners are actually risking their lives on a daily basis to mine without protective equipment.”

Ofime goes further; as well as protecting the lives of workers in the new green technology “the workers of the fossil fuel industry will have to be reskilled and provided alternative opportunities”.

Read more from our COP30 coverage:

False narratives

But concerns over the cost of phasing out fossil fuels are boosting a growing sense, in some countries, that a transition away from them is not just unnecessary, but way too expensive. Could those ordinary people that the WHO’s Campbell-Lendrum believes still really want to tackle global warming be changing their minds? He has a powerful economic argument for them; many governments continue to heavily subsidise fossil fuels.

“Governments around the world are on average providing about $3,000 per household per year on top of the energy bills that you pay in order to subsidise the consumption of fossil fuels,” he told Inside Geneva. Renewables, on the hand, “are the cheapest source of energy. In a relatively short period of time, they pay themselves back.”

Ofime too argues against what she calls “flawed arguments” in favour of heavily subsidised fossil fuels. We should try, she says to “counter a narrative that’s based on fear, looking at opportunities that renewable energy projects offer”.

US elephant not in the room

But what about the absence of the US, not just from COP30, but from the Paris climate treaty, and from any multilateral effort on climate change? If the US president, the most powerful man in the world, is also a climate denier, can the rest of us do the job without him and his powerful economy?

Again, my guests on Inside Geneva surprised me. Sanchez is heartened by the support from many other countries and philanthropic organisations. Campbell-Lendrum points out that “people are in favour of clean air. They actually want air that is safe for their children to breathe”, and doing something about that goes hand in hand with tackling global warming.

And, Ofime suggests, sometimes it’s just easier to get things done without the opposition. “The US is usually a blocker, and sometimes having the biggest polluters not in the room allows for consensus to be reached. In this forum, decisions have to be made, and they will be made with or without the United States.”

Listen to Inside Geneva, and find out why there’s hope to tackle climate change.

vm