Hello, and welcome to unlocking the SDGs a blueprint for the future. In this episode, we'll be exploring how climate change is impacting the achievement of the SDGs. We'll also be taking a look at how SDG 13 Climate Action interacts with the other 16 goals, and assessing whether it falls short of the action needed to address the climate emergency.
In part one, we will be speaking to two professors from UCL who are experts in art, sciences and disasters.
And in part two, we'll be hearing from a UCL master student who represented her country in Jamaica, at COP 26 in Glasgow.
Today, we're joined by Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth Systems Science in the UCL Department of Geography.
We're also joined by Elon Kelman professor of disasters and health at the UCL Institute for risk and Disaster Reduction, and the UCL Institute for Global Health.
So Mark, I would like to start with you. Why is climate action important for achieving sustainable development,
I think there are two things we have to consider. The first is as we try to achieve the sustainable development goals, which are absolutely essential for increasing people's well being around the world, we have to realise that climate change is going to actually impact those goals. So if we're talking about trying to make sure that everybody has access to clean, say, fresh drinking water, which is safe, of course, changes in rainfall, flood patterns, storms will impact that. And we know that form studies that the it's the very vulnerable people, the people that are going to be most supported by the sustainable development goals that are most affected by climate change. But there's also a flip side, which is all the stuff that we're doing in the sustainability development goals are also essential for climate change. So for example, as we educate women and empowered women, they take control of their local environment, they take control of their local economy, and they become less vulnerable to climate change. And they also can do things that are going to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. So it's a win win. If we can deal with climate change, and the sustainable development goals as a sort of holistic approach to our issues, then we really have a way forward in this century.
Mark, I like your point about inter linkages. So not just looking at links between SDG and climate, but vice versa, thinking about links between climate and all SDGs and also creating this win win situation, you talk a lot about kind of the urgency and climate emergency. But I see that we don't use the same kind of language to highlight urgency around sustainable development goals. How do you think they should be prioritising the individual SDGs?
Well, I'm always amazed that we worry about climate change in the future. But very rarely do we sit down and realise the state of the planet now, and I'm always pushing this forward, which is, we have to remember that there are 7 million children that die needlessly every year of preventable diseases, and of starvation. We have 825 million people that go to bed feeling hungry every night. And that's gone up by 25 million over the last five years. And this is in a world where the FAO says that we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. And we only have 7.9 billion at this moment in time. And also we have 1 billion people that still do not have regular access to safe drinking water. So that's the state of humanity now, and we shouldn't be literally screaming and shouting about this. Every opportunity we have, we sort of become numb to the state of humanity. But we're worrying about climate change. So the Sustainable Development Goals are absolutely essential to lift people from extreme poverty into some sort of normality that we all have. At the same time. We need to protect that future by reducing climate change. And so this is why we have to deal with the big issues of this century together, so they are Win, win or even win win win.
Absolutely. I mean, some of the stats you present here absolutely shocking. I mean, it's shocking to think about the state of the world as it stands now and the planet that we're leaving for our future generations, Elon in your view, should ask The G 13 be a separate goal, or integrated into other goals,
while marks points are exactly well taken, and they are so important to emphasise, because focusing on climate change distracts us from these other issues. And other concern is that everything suddenly becomes attributed to human caused climate change. Will we know exactly as Mark has well articulated, there are actually many, many other causes. As such, Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals would not reach what we need, it would not solve these problems that Mark has rightly identified. Part of the challenge is what you've just asked that climate change is separated out as its own goal, rather than being integrated into these wider processes. So it means that people are thinking about climate change as being separate. People are always looking to attribute everything to human caused climate change. And it distracts us from the baselines from the fundamentals, you talk
quite quite eloquently about kind of complexity and how we need to really break down the messaging on sustainable development goals and climate change. Mark, you do a lot of public engagement work in this field, would you be able to share kind of some of your insights and experiences of how we can better communicate those links between climate and sustainable development goals.
For me communicating is about talking to the people, and actually expanding their understanding. I mean, the problem that most of us have is that in our daily lives, we are incredibly busy, normal people out there are working one or two jobs, they're worried about getting their kids to school on time, they're worried about trying to feed them healthy foods, they are worried about whether they're going to have a job next week, and therefore it's really difficult to then engage them says, Oh, by the way, I know you're worried about all these things. But could you also worry about the state of the planet, and the future of humanity. And I think what we need to do is actually make it easier for people to think about things, engage them in things that matter to them. So local environment, actually healthy food, things that they can actually do that are small and really helpful. But I also think that we need to empower them with the knowledge that humans are much more powerful than we actually realise that we, as a global species, impact every part of the environment. And I think the younger generation, really get this with their connectivity, their mobile phones, the internet, they understand how small and fragile our planet is. But the older generations, the ones that have grown up, perhaps without the internet, without Google, you know, they're still in this sort of denial. And that doesn't help that these are the politicians who are actually seeing things in a very myopic, and small way. And they are not thinking globally about how we need to actually address both our environmental impacts our climate impacts, global security, and of course, alleviating extreme poverty around the world.
Given the current status of climate emergency, do you really think that SDG 13 goes far enough to tackle this issue? And if not, what do you think's missing about it?
So I think I agree with Elon and both you and pretty that SDG 13 needs to actually be integrated into every single other SDG it's really about trying to make sure that when we're talking about women's education, we understand that that is also about helping them to understand to protect the environment, to actually protect themselves against climate change. So there is that increased sort of like awareness, when we're talking about sort of like, say, fresh water or food production, we have to actually put into our back of our minds, that there's a changing background of weather and climate, which is going to impact. I think that's the key thing is that integration, that we're constantly aware that it's not a playing field, it's we are on a moving conveyor belt of change. And so therefore, we have to project into the future. Again, when we're dealing with major issues of global health, we also have to think that the current environment that these people are living in in 10 years time will be different in 30 years time will be even more different. And therefore we need to future proof and clan. And for me, it's not just impact on the children, but it's the impact on the next generation. So if children are not healthy, they're not fed properly. They have poor drinking water, the problem is when they grow up as adults, then when they have, perhaps then enough food and water, they will then have complications when they actually want to have children, because, of course, they haven't fully developed. And therefore we then have this crisis, when that generation is trying to give birth to healthy babies with an unhealthy body. So these things are going to reverberate through our future history. I think that's something we have to be aware of. Anything we can do now will make future generations healthier, safer and better. And I think that's why we need this much more integration. I also agree with Elon and yourself, which is, there are no real disciplinary boundaries, those are just there artificially. And I think it's starting to hold us back. Because sometimes when you go into a new area or field, and you want to actually help people, the first thing you should do is sit down and listen to them. The local people, the indigenous people understand their country and their region much better than us, suppose it experts, and actually, they are the experts. And I think that's what we need to develop much more working relationships with normal people. Because these are the people that can actually make change on the ground and improve their own lives, if they're allowed to. So it
really sounds we're also talking about changing the narrative a bit. You know, when you say climate, there's also a danger that people think, oh, gosh, here we go, again, with climate. Here we go, again, with climate. But actually, we're talking about much more than climate, it's about people's lives. And maybe we need to think of how do we really have that narrative, and modify it to really draw people in a little bit more and get them excited about this, but also make them understand the emergency and the challenges that lie ahead?
I think this is one of the reasons why I champion the term the Anthropocene because I think it encompasses all of our impacts. I mean, the idea that humanity is cut down 3 trillion trees, that's half the trees on the planet. For me, that is a much more important fact, than they were warming the temperature by one degree in the last 100 years. Yeah, that really hammers home to people, how we've changed the landscape. And I have to say the one fact that I always give out at talks, which blows people's minds, which is if you take the weight of land, mammals, 30% are humans, okay? Because there are 7.9 billion of us, but 67% of the weight is our livestock and our pets. And only 3% of that weight, are the wild animals that David Attenborough goes around filming for our enjoyment. And when you suddenly realise that those wild animals that we think are roaming free all over the planet, they're not there in small, isolated areas, because humanity really has taken over this planet. And I think that is something we need to actually tell people make sure that they understand that this is a human planet now, and therefore we have responsibilities. We should be custodians, we should be looking after it. But we all feel quite small and insignificant. But when you put us all together, we really are very disruptive. But we don't need to be. I think we do need to change that narrative. I think the problem with climate change is because politicians have not been listening or acting. For 30 years, we've got louder and louder. We've shown more and more evidence, we talk about climate change all the time. But there are other things which are equally damaging to plant to the planet, and humanity that we need to be shouting about just as much. I think now, with COVID we can actually talk about biodiversity, we can talk about ecosystem loss, because it directly affects humanity. We have impinged upon sort of like the natural world too much. And guess what diseases have jumped into humans, which have brought the whole world to its knees for the last two years.
Elon, how can we do better than the SDGs and avoid some of the problems the SDGs create for addressing climate change?
Simple. Let's look beyond the SDGs. Let's think beyond 2030. Let's think beyond the limitations and limitations are so evident throughout the SDGs even goal five which is achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls, but it would be impossible to achieve that without empowering men and boys to contribute actively to gender equity, empowerment and equality the SDGs also like any explicit statement about combating homophobia or accepting all sexualities. So with all these problems we can and should do better with 2030 right on top of us, we need to think beyond that. And it's exactly what was just said about changing the narrative. It was exactly what Mark just brought in about thinking about these wider topics, which means we need to change the narrative away from the trite, rhetorical phrases such as climate crisis and climate emergency. You know, on the pedantic level, it's actually not about climate. It's about human caused climate change, but that's verbiage to some degree. The real challenge is that talking about the climate crisis, and the climate emergency emphasising climate, is it's a clever way from distracting us from all the foundational aspects and all the wider context which Mark mentioned, if we magically solved climate change overnight, and it was no longer an issue, we'd still be destroying the planet, we would still have human slavery, human trafficking, child marriage, genital mutilation. The crisis, the emergency is about human values, focusing on only climate or more correctly human caused climate change, actually does not solve these fundamental issues. So let's deal with reality. Let's talk about the baseline and say exactly what we mean and big complex phrases like social ecological systems, which is just a synonym for reality. Even words like Anthropocene. So academics are wonderful, coined new words. And there's more than a dozen, which have been proposed in line with the Anthropocene, such as capital scene and Plastico scene, which can might be plasticine, actually, in that there's so many scenes or scenes of scenes to pardon the pun, that it gets really confusing and really complex. So I think we need to take the numbers that Mark is putting out there, I think we need to take the day to day lived experiences, we need to look at the major limitations and distractions, which our vocabulary provides, and many scientific inaccuracies and do so much better. As one example of foundation people even talk about climate breakdown, and climate chaos. But we know scientifically, by definition, this statistics of the climate do display mathematical chaotic properties. So climate chaos is the norm. And climate breakdown doesn't make sense. Because no matter what the climate does, it still exists. It's not breaking down per se. So let's just talk about what we mean, people are in trouble. We have all these issues of food, water, energy, equality, equity, empowerment, people are suffering, we're hurting ourselves and the planet, we can do better by starting now to think about the next century and well beyond.
And you both make the case for the need to identify local needs, the sustainable development goals or global goals and aspirations. And in my work with governments in Sub Saharan Africa, I find that there is a need for localization of the SDGs to better meet the needs of local communities and governments.
And pretty Do you think that that's actually feasible? Is it appropriate? Or does it distract from the real baseline causes and local needs?
So in a way, the advantage and beauty of working with local communities and governments is that the agenda is driven by their needs and their priorities. And in coop, I noticed that there was this big debate between adaptation and mitigation, where a lot of nations were making a strong case for finance and investment for adaptation. So I think the debate needs to be driven by local drivers and needs and aspirations from local stakeholders.
And that's actually frightening to hear, because we know that the contrast between adaptation and mitigation is entirely artificial, in thought from the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and even before many scientists were advocating not to use these words, and certainly not to separate them. But of course, that didn't happen. And they were separated. So we've lost more than a generation, even as people were publishing papers saying don't separate them, bring them together. When many languages don't even have a word for adaptation. They just use a word for adjustment. We wonder well, why in English when adjustment was prevalent from the 1960s, to the 1980s in development work, why did climate change suddenly change the discourse to adaptation, and then define adaptation as adjustment? We are so well at obscuring the issues. We are doing so well at confusing people. Let's get back to the fundaments and basically as Mark said, communicate not to each other, but with each other.
I think I really actually need a cup of coffee after this because the sort of chat and the discussion that we're having here is so, so close to my own heart about words. I mean, we could have another whole podcast on linguistics and usage of words and academics wanting to confuse the issue for some people by not keeping things simple, as you say. And it takes me back to when I was learning to be a doctor. And we were always told the acronym kiss, keep it simple, stupid, just to try and say, you know, we don't have to confuse people to have a dialogue. And anon that I just was thinking, Can we drill it down a little bit more into the targets indicators of SDG 13. And that's another thing, isn't it? We talked about so many SDGs. And then we talked about targets, goals, indicators. Another thing that's gets us all very confused. But we do see that this goal is about both adaptation and resilience to climate related disasters, as well as its mitigation, of course. So combating climate change itself by reducing emissions. So Elon, do you think there's enough of a focus on the adaptation and resilience aspect of climate in terms of government action? And is the UK really ready for warmer world?
While the UK obviously is not ready, we've seen that we struggle to deal with a couple of storms, we see that with the politics all geared towards trying to harm as many people as we can during a pandemic, we know that our health systems cannot even deal with the day to day. In fact, every winter, numerous hospitals will declare major incidents, they simply couldn't deal with the people coming in with flus colds and other issues. So of course, you layer a pandemic on it. And the system is really stretched to the limit, with doctors and nurses and all the staff being absolutely exhausted right now, and yet having to deal with more add aspects such as increased heat and humidity related casualties, which we are seeing now in the UK from human caused climate change, and we'll see more, and we are in deep trouble. So what does this mean for adaptation and resilience? Well, resilience means anything that people want it to mean, the number of definitions of resilience, the number of critiques of those definitions of resilience, the number of academic papers saying stop using resilience, the number of academic papers saying, Look, resilience is harming people. So again, what do people need? Well, in the UK, we need health systems. In the UK, we need governments which have the resources and the interest to care about the people they govern. Is that resilient, sure, if you want to call it that, that's fine. But why not just call it caring? Why not call a government, which is interested in all of these systems health and beyond. And same with adaptation? If we're talking about dealing with heat with cold with storms, or floods, with landslides, we have to be doing that anyway. And the UK has many successes, and unfortunately, many failures, irrespective of human caused climate change. Climate change, adaptation brings nothing new to what we need to be doing anyway. So unfold climate change adaptation, and the goals targets indicators, within wider society, wider approaches, trying to bring these ideas of caring, of human values of attitudes and behaviour, to help each other so that ultimately, we help ourselves.
In recent years, much more focus and attention has been given to what we call cop Conference of Parties, with cop 26 taking place in Glasgow now in last November, which Mark and I had the pleasure of attending with amazing colleagues at UCL. But ultimately those targets that are set are voluntary. So Mark, how do we make governments more accountable on climate action as well as SDGs?
Oh, that's a huge question pretty, as you know. So I think the first issue is that we have had cop meetings for the last 30 years, all we have seen is that co2 has continued to rise in the atmosphere. So they have not stopped climate change in any shape or form. But they are a talking shop where 192 countries come together, and are thinking about the environment and climate and are trying in some way to mitigate the worst effects. So I think firstly, we have to see this as a political tool to try and actually get countries to do the right thing. I think it's really important that civil society keeps a watch on countries and actually tells them when they're doing stuff correct or wrongly. And again, this is why the protests The Greta Thornburg, Friday for future XR, you know, all of these are really important because we have to actually hold the countries and leaders to account. But I also think there is something that we have missed over the last couple of decades, which is we need mechanisms to actually educate our politicians, we need politicians to understand how they can actually produce a win win policies that actually are good for the country, are good for people and actually get them reelected. And those are very clear, and very, very easy to actually put together. But they don't have that training. They are usually a career politicians that come straight through university and straight into politics. So we need a way of educating them. One of the frustrating things is that we have seen in COVID, that actually, the people are incredibly responsive, and incredibly trustworthy. When I'm talking to our wonderful colleagues at UCL who look at behaviour, like Professor Susan, Mickey, she basically says before COVID, we were thinking that the weak link was the public. And what we found in COVID, is, if you explain to them simply straightforwardly, and you ask them to do things for the greater good, they do it mask wearing self isolation, mink, there's been really no enforcement. So therefore, we've done this because we are part of a human society, the weakest link has been government. And the interesting thing is people have looked around the world and realise that it's only governments that actually look after the people. And some of them look after the people better than others. It's not the corporations. It's not this neoliberal dream. What happened with COVID? Is many companies literally just went to government say, Please, Sir, can we have a bailout because we haven't got any money. So as people, we were not going to be looked after by the corporations or businesses, we were looked after by our government, and governments should be by the people, for the people. And I pick up on what Elon says, in this country in the UK, why don't we have a world class health service? Why aren't we putting the same amount of GDP as Germany or France or the USA, you know, why do we not have those resources? And again, why do we have poor people, okay, we have enough money to lift everybody out of poverty in this country. And this is the thing that frustrates me because that is a political decision. And again, we need to actually educate our politicians about how to actually produce really good policies that actually make people's lives better.
Ilana, as you know, this, cops are organised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, un F, Triple C, and the United Nations is also behind the Sustainable Development Goals. But how are the UNF Triple C and SDG 13 connected?
What we have to recognise is that United Nations comprises member states, the member states are represented by their governments. And we have all the limitations of government, which Mark has mentioned. So the connections happen only at the behest of the member states and their governments, which means they can divert us away from core issues.
And on that, I really would just like to thank you both for joining us today for this excellent podcast and seeing where we're going to go together hand in hand and how we're going to make the world a better place.
No, that's it. And thank you so much, Monica and pretty for the opportunity, keeping in mind that both of you have taught me so much, you have so much to contribute. So rather than this being question, answer, it really is an exchange. And we can go together with theatre, with art, with poetry, with photography, with dance, in order to do so much better for all of us.
And can I echo what Elon has said, I think this podcast and the four of us sharing ideas and enjoying the conversation here. This really is why I have not left in over 20 years because constantly meeting new, amazing colleagues, constantly having conversations, whether it happens to be in the Slade School of Fine Art, whether it happens to be an English department, which happens to be within medicine or law, within engineering. What's interesting is for some reason, there is this ethos at UCL where we actually share and collaborate. And actually, even though we're stuck in different departments, that really doesn't seem to play on people's minds at all. And that's why these things like these wonderful Podcasts can come out. And also I think there is this incredible respect we have for each other But which allows us to listen and Monica, I am also guilty of not doing this as much as I should. listening to other people is so important and I think that should be the takeaway message from this podcast. Thank you Monica.
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