the most pivotal moment in human history.

(gentle music)

- Hi, I'm Christiana Figueres.

I have been working on climate change

for longer than you would care to know,

first as a negotiator of the Climate Convention

for my home country, Costa Rica,

from which I am speaking today,

and then undertaking several responsibilities

at the international level,

including delivering the Paris Agreement in 2015.

- My name is Tom Rivett-Carnac,

I was the head of political strategy for the Paris Agreement

working with Christiana,

and I've continued to collaborate with her ever since.

We run a podcast together called Outrage and Optimism

and we recently co-authored the book "The Future We Choose."

- The book is meant to be a helpful guide

to what each of us as individuals can do

to contribute to climate solutions.

Yes, of course, we need systemic policies

and financial investments that are also going to help,

but as we have learned from coronavirus,

we need both systemic changes,

as well as individual behavior changes, we need both.

Every one of us should know what our carbon footprint is.

Usually we check our bank account at least once a week

to know how we're doing on our bank account.

We should also know how we're doing on our carbon account.

And if you don't know what your carbon footprint is,

it's pretty simple to find out.

You go to Google, you type in carbon calculator,

and up comes a long list of carbon calculators

that have been put out by many reputable institutions.

Every one of us should know what our starting line is.

Some of us will have a higher footprint than others,

don't condemn yourself for having a high footprint,

it's just where we all start.

The important thing is not where we start,

the important thing is that we commit

to reducing that carbon footprint.

The questions that will be asked of you

will also be very helpful

because they will already indicate to you

where you can reduce your carbon footprint.

- Climate change used to be something

that was separated from us by a timeline.

It was supposed to happen in the future,

but we're already seeing continents burning.

Australia has burned with half a billion animals lost,

many endemic species,

the Amazon has been on fire, California, the Arctic.

These are early signs and this is just gonna get worse

if we don't get on top of it.

Getting on top of it means that we need to be at net zero

well before 2050.

If we are not,

then temperature rise will go beyond 1.5 degrees

and what will happen is the climate of the planet

will spin out of control

and we will lose the ability to have any impact on this

even if we reduce emissions.

That's the nightmare scenario that we need to avoid,

so to get there, we need to halve emissions

50% less than they are right now by 2030.

After that, we need to be at net zero as soon as possible,

ideally by 2040, but certainly by 2050.

Those are the decades we have, no one else is gonna do this.

If this is gonna be done,

if it's gonna be successful or if it's gonna be a failure,

it's gonna be us that does it.

If we think about our footprint in a 10-year timeframe,

that's enough time to do this, right?

That 10-year period will probably encompass

a whole range of changes

in the capital-intensive items of your life.

Most emissions will come from a boiler,

they'll come from a car or a furnace or something like that,

and many of those items will be replaced

within a 10-year timeframe anyway.

So thinking about it in that slightly longer timeframe

gives you a chance to kind of make different decisions

when those big capital-intensive investments come up.

- You can also be much more mindful about our transport,

whether it's by land or by air or maritime.

One thing that we have learned now

with this coronavirus epidemic

is that maybe we don't need to transport ourselves as much

as we think is necessary.

Maybe we actually do much more telecommuting

for our daily work or even for meetings.

- I mean, who knew that we would get a chance

to see whether the world

can shift to telecommuting so quickly?

But what's amazing is we've seen an unprecedented transition

as a result of the pandemic

that people have had to stay home,

they've had to make telecommuting work.

Much of our work can carry on engaging remotely.

So, for the vast majority of us

who live in Europe or North America,

our footprint will mainly consist of two things:

if we get on a plane, it will be that, and what we eat.

The amount of emissions

that goes into producing meat is huge,

so beef is the worst culprit,

but pork and chicken and lamb are all part of that too.

Now, we can all make a difference

if we aren't yet ready and prepared

to give up meat or go plant-based,

which is very good for your health

and you feel better on it, which I can personally attest to,

then you can just stop eating it either one day a week

or two days a week or one meal a day.

Try and add more meals in your life that are vegetarian,

that are plant-based.

It'll make a difference to how you feel

and it will make a big difference to the planet.

- You can also look at the energy that you're using.

Are you wasting energy?

And all of us, I promise, all of us waste energy.

But we leave things on longer than they need to,

we turn lights on in one room

and they we leave and we don't turn it off,

so we can all be much more energy-efficient.

- So while none of us can leave our homes,

one thing that's really worth doing is trying to figure out

where the emissions from your home come from.

That's actually pretty easy to do,

you can find all kinds of websites

that will give you direction.

And there's a whole bunch of stuff

that you can do either yourself

or by engaging with those companies

that provide you with services to reduce your emissions.

I mean, one basic thing you can do

is if you live in a home that has drafts,

you can go around even right now and close off those drafts,

it can make a massive difference to your energy bills.

The other thing you can do

is actually talk to your suppliers

and find out if they can provide you

with a renewable energy tariff.

If they can't, there are certainly others

in the competitive landscape who can do that,

and increasingly you don't even have to pay any more.

- You can also be much more mindful

of which companies are you actually

buying goods and services from.

There are companies that are being

much more responsible on climate,

and others that are being much more irresponsible.

The force and the strength of consumers and clients

is very strong, hopefully you are voting with your wallet.

We have unfortunately grown up in cultures

that are based on irresponsible consumerism

and consuming more than we need is not helpful to us

and certainly not helpful to the planet,

so we have to learn when enough is enough.

- Right now, we can't leave our homes,

but there's a huge amount that we can do.

So I would encourage everybody who's at home

to participate in digital strikes,

which are already and still going on,

and also to use this moment

to find out who your elected representative is

and make your voice heard.

We all have a few minutes now, now that we're home,

that will make more of a difference than you realize.

Most elected representatives

never hear from their constituents about climate change,

let's change that while we're all under lockdown.

- Don't be afraid to engage in politics,

don't be afraid to engage.

It's very important to plant the flag

of where we know we have to go

and what we want for our future.

One of the mindsets that we talk about in the book

is stubborn optimism, and what we mean by that

is that while it is absolutely understandable

that we are all in deep grief

about the losses that we are seeing,

and while it is very understandable

that we get angry about the fact

that decisions are not being made quickly enough,

it is also very important

to not allow that anger and that grief

to drop us into a hole of hopelessness and helplessness,

because if we allow ourselves to drop into that hole,

we are not being helpful

to the transition that we have to make.

So our suggestion is certainly to honor that grief,

to honor that anger, which we also partake in,

but at the same time be courageous enough,

out of the anger and out of the grief, to play your part.

So I invite all of you to become members

of a growing family of stubborn optimists around the world.

(uplifting music)