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Are you Swiss and planning to move abroad? Or maybe you've already taken the leap? Swiss Info has a new podcast just for you. It's coming out on November 25th. It's called Ade Merci Schweez. Or maybe that should be Adieu Merci la Suisse. It's available in Swiss, German and French. It covers everything you need to know about setting up your new life abroad. We speak to Swiss around the world who've already made the move and and we ask experts to share their experiences. You'll find Adamerci Schweets wherever you get your podcasts or in our SW app. This is Inside Geneva. I'm your host, Imogen folks, and this is a production from Swiss Info, the international public media company of Switzerland.
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In today's program in this arena of.
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Cop 30, your job here is not.
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To fight one another. Your job here is to fight this climate crisis together. I'm actually quite hopeful and I think that the answer is probably coming from the countries and the communities that have the most to lose.
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Indigenous peoples are on the point of the spear. They are on the front lines protecting what is sacred for the planet.
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The answer is us. And that was part of the campaign that we had as an indigenous peoples pay attention right to the world. That basically the solution that many of us are looking is already been happening at the indigenous local community.
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It's called the Endangerment finding. It's a landmark scientific determination that that.
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Planet warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health.
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These are clever people who want what's best for you and can read a temperature graph and they know that there are concrete actions that you can take which are good for your health as well as good for the planet. It's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated.
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On the world, in my opinion. The US is usually a blocker and sometimes having the biggest polluters not in the room allows for consensus to be reached. And so in this forum, decisions have to be made and they will be made with or without the United States.
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Hello and welcome again to Inside Geneva. I'm Imogen, folks, and today we're going to talk about climate change and whether amid all the conflicts and tensions around the world, we're neglecting a problem that is a genuine challenge to us all and that we can only solve if we work together. In Brazil, the COP30 climate conference has just finished. After much wrangling this year, for the first time, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States didn't attend. President Trump has called climate change a con job. And the US has abandoned the Paris Climate Change Agreement. But for many people, the consequences of climate change and good news here, here, the solutions to it are already very real. And today we're going to hear from some of them.
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I'm David Campbellndram. I'm the head of the WHO's Climate Change and Health Program.
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My name is Deborah Sanchez. I'm from the Miskito community in the eastern coast of Honduras. And I've been advocacy for the rights of indigenous peoples since my youth.
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Hi, Imogen. My name is Candy Ofime. I am a researcher and legal advisor in the Climate justice team at Amnesty International. My main role at Amnesty is to document the impacts of the climate crisis.
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Climate change is, as we said, a challenge to all of us on many different levels. It challenges our health, it challenges our way of life. If our sea levels are rising or our ancestral lands are subject to drought or flooding, but also if we work in the fossil fuel industry, tackling climate change challenges our livelihoods. But let's start with health. Just before COP 30 began, the medical journal the Lancet and the World Health Organization produced a new shocking study suggesting that climate change and our inaction in the face of it is already claiming millions of lives a year. To find out more, I caught up with Dermid Campbell Lendrum, head of the Climate Change and Health Unit at the who.
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C
Climate change hits on health in many ways, some of them obvious and direct. So heat waves take a lot of lives every year. And the latest report from the Lancet that we're also collaborators on indicates that extreme heat now takes about 540,000 lives every year. That's a huge number, but it also hits in many other ways as well. So the impact of floods or droughts has immediate effects, but also long lasting effects. So we're now starting to find out that the impacts of floods in fact take perhaps 10 times as many lives after the effect as it does in the event itself. Climate change also makes it easier to transmit infectious diseases and, for example, those transmitted by insects or by contaminated food or water. But most fundamentally of all, it undermines the environmental determinants of health on which we all depend. It makes it harder to provide clean, fresh water to populations or safe and sufficient food. So this is why WHO has identified climate change as potentially the greatest health threat of this century.
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A
And when you bring those reports to governments, do they accept this data, this evidence that you bring? Because there is, you know, there is debate about whether climate Change is really happening.
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C
Well, there is debate about whether climate change is happening, but not scientific debate. The scientific consensus on the main points is absolutely clear and has been for decades now. It's, it is happening. It's mainly due to human activities. It is bad, including for health. And this has been documented in sequential reports, for example, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is getting worse. But the final point is perhaps the most important one. We can fix this and it is actually good news for jobs, the economy and health if we take the actions that we need to fix it.
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A
These changes you're talking about, though, it's not going to happen overnight. And meantime, you are seeing, you are recording harm to health because of climate change. We hear a lot about the strain on our health systems. Are they prepared? Are there things they need to do?
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C
Well, you're right that health systems around the world are already doing, in some sense, a fantastic job in improving people's lives, protecting people's lives. But there's probably not a health system anywhere in the world that isn't already under strain. The demands always exceed the resources available, and climate change just piles up problems on top of that. If you have an overstretched health service which is then hit by a heat wave which sends a lot of particularly old people, for example, to hospital, then you're further overburdening your health system. And countries around the world are getting better prepared for these now. And in many cases, we know what to do. So we know, for example, that heat health warning systems, telling people a heat wave is coming, telling them what public health measures they should put into place to protect themselves, are effective. And they're also a really good investment. So we've looked as who, we've assessed just five climate and health interventions, the ones with the best evidence. The evidence there is that if we deploy those across the world, we could save about 2 million lives every year and the benefits would outweigh the costs by a factor of at least 4 to 1, probably much more than that. Those are the kinds of things that in fact, we need to put into place now if we're not going to have climate change and climate extremes tipping our health services over the edge. And in many cases, you would think.
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Listening to that, that governments the world over would be thinking, we need an answer to this and fast. Indigenous peoples continue to be some of the leading solution focused voices on the climate crisis. As it turns out, there are groups in the world who know a lot about working with our planet, who know how to conserve our Environment Leaders of indigenous communities from around the world world are also attending. Indigenous peoples made their voices heard loud and clear at COP30. Their knowledge can help to tackle climate change, particularly when it comes to preserving forests, the lungs of our planet. Deborah Sanchez works for Clarify, a group that works to support indigenous peoples over land rights, conservation, climate change, adaptation and sustainable management of territories.
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The answer is us. And that was part of the campaign that we had as an indigenous peoples pay attention right to the world that basically the solution that many of us are looking is already been happening at the indigenous local community.
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Tell me about that, because I've heard that from a number of different groups. The answer is us. Our communities have knowledge, we have experience, we can help with this. Give me some specific examples what you mean by that.
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Yeah, so for example, when we are seeing the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we already are working and have several projects with the indigenous peoples, but also with the local community and we did a mapping and now you can see in the maps those lands that had been secured or recognized for those indigenous peoples are still intact forest and they are making the living there and they have their communities there and they have sacred places there, but they still conserve, still manage. And if you see surrounded areas beyond that, there are already a lot of deforestation happening on those lands. So this is a very practical example of how tradition, knowledge, customary tenure actually are supporting, for example, deforestation, holding deforestation on the very key biodiversity areas in the world.
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And of course forests are something we very much need if we're going to tackle climate change.
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Absolutely, yes.
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Some people might say though, look, the kind of world we live in now, to produce the things we need, even to produce the renewables we need, we are going to have to do different things with land and some of it might interfere with how indigenous peoples live.
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Yeah, and that's true because we need to really make sure the solution that we are bringing into the table are sustainable solutions. Right. So if we are doing renewables one hand, but then we are deforesting or the, or destroying ecosystem, on the other hand, we are actually not solving the problem. Right. We're just putting the problem somewhere else, but not actually bringing a real solution. And that's where communities are asking for being informed and has consensus around what are we going to do with the land and what we are going to do with the resources. And then I hear, for example, we had a meeting with the pastoralists from Eastern Africa and those are dry lands, not like rainforest, but dry forest. And they say, you know, the potential for lands to solar energy, for example, is there because it's a land with a lot of sunlight. But how communities participate, how consents and decision making is happening is the key. So it's just not about the what, but it's about the how we are bringing those solutions into the conversation.
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You might have heard a lot about what shifting away from fossil fuels should look like. The truth is this needs to be a just transition that means shifting to an environmentally sustainable economy in a way that's fair to everyone.
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What Dermot and Deborah have to say is, I'm sure, compelling for many of our listeners. Lots of us are frustrated with the slow pace of change. We're worried we won't be able to keep global temperature rises within 1.5 degrees centigrade. And some of us are already suffering the health effects of extreme heat. We want to know what we can do personally to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Some of us are trading in our petrol cars for electric vehicles and turning to renewables to heat our homes. But, says Candy Ofime of Amnesty International, we do need to think carefully and aim for a just transition.
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I think for most people, transitioning to renewable energy might mean changing your gas stove, buying a. An electric car. But I think if we want the transition to be just, fair, equitable and rights respecting, we have to think about the whole supply chain model that we're transitioning from into. At Amnesty, we spend a lot of time documenting the impact of renewable energy transition projects on groups in different parts of the world. If you think, for example, about an electric car, a lot of them were built with critical minerals, cobalt among others, that are extracted away in a way that's polluting and that has a huge human rights cost on communities in different parts of the world. I've documented the impact of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both mine industrially and through artisanal mining. And today, cobalt is everywhere. You see it in electric vehicles, energy storage facilities. It's a mineral that's 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 for industrial sites to expand. And a lot of artisanal miners are actually risking their lives on a daily basis to mine without protective equipment. And so it's easy if you just think about what you see, what's before you, to think that your individual consumer habits might be more sustainable, if you don't think about tracing the sort of ecosystem within which your energy is supplied and the goods that you actually have tangibly before you where they come from.
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Do you think that pot has been addressing that particular side of it sufficiently? I mean, we've had the indigenous groups protesting about fossil fuels, but is there a consciousness that when we if as we switch to renewables, that the extraction of these critical minerals, rare earths and so on, that that has to be done fairly within a human rights framework?
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I think these are demands that civil society have been bringing to the attention of COP leaders. I think we're far from it in terms of outcome documents that particularly embed a human rights framework. To think about the energy transition now, what civil society is demanding is not just a transition to renewable energy. In the abstract, you'll hear the phrase just transition a lot. It's coming from the labor movements and it encompasses both a process that leaves no one behind and that starts with the workers of the fossil fuel industry who will have to be rescaled and provided alternative opportunities for their subsistence all the way to the consumption and the production models that will pivot to while we transition away from fossil fuels. So we are barely at the stage where COP leaders are considering discussing the elephant in the room.
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How much will climate change cost us and what will it cost us to stop it?
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But even while Candy and her colleagues argue for a just transition in the world's wealthiest countries, some people are beginning to doubt that any kind of transition is worth it or even necessary.
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We will drill, baby, drill.
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They worry about the cost to themselves. The who's Dermid Campbell Lendrum suggests the current fossil fuel based financial model needs more scrutiny.
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At the moment, the world is massively subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels. So if you're a taxpayer, you should probably be aware that 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 subsidize the consumption of fossil fuels, which are also taking many lives from air pollution now and also driving the climate crisis which is messing up the future for you and your children. So you should probably take an interest in the fact that for most people, your taxes are actually going to subsidize the climate crisis.
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Well, you say that, but a lot of people, particularly in the west, in the developed countries, are personally thinking this is going to cost me too much. I'm going to have to make unnecessary sacrifices.
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Well, I think perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way. The evidence on the economics is very, very clear. Clean energy is now the cheapest source of energy. So there are upfront investment costs in order to make the transition that we need to make to protect the climate. And in any country around the world, those investment costs are upfront, but in a relatively short period of time, they pay themselves back. So typically, after say six or eight years, you've got back the money that you've invested just financially, and from that point on, you're effectively in profit, you're making more money back. So it's obviously a good deal just for the economy, but it's an even better deal from a health point of view, because if you factor in the fact that air pollution takes about 7 million lives every year, that's a death every few seconds. And most of the drivers of air pollution are actually the same drivers as they are of the climate crisis. If you factor in the health gains that you would get from cleaning up our energy systems. In fact, those health gains are bigger than the costs that it takes to fix climate change. So these are things we should be doing anyway. To be honest, even if you didn't care about climate change, you should be doing it for clean air and more sustainable and healthy food systems and so on. It's absolutely clear from a scientific point of view, if not a political point of view, that this is a good deal for individual countries as well as for the planet as a whole. Net 0 net 0 net 0 net 0 net 0 Net 0 net 0 net 0 madness.
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Dermid's points are persuasive, but still the fears about the cost of transition remain. Candiofime @ amnesty has heard them too, and warns that many of the arguments over cost are being fuelled by one particular lobby.
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These are flawed arguments, often fueled by, you know, fossil fuel lobbyists in the industry that has a vested interest in spreading those narratives. These are also, in many parts of the world, narratives that are connected to the rise of authoritarianism. You see interesting strings that are attached to this fantasy of a romanticized past where economic growth was attached to modalities of production and consumption that are changing. And so I think there's a way to counter a narrative that's based in fear. Looking at opportunities that renewable energy projects offer across the world and that are not complicated to imagine. I think we have to remember that our collective imagination is limited by design. They are corporate interests that are invested in preserving the status quo. And if we want to think creatively about liberation, and if we want to think holistically about how to protect our planet for future generations, I think we need to be very mindful and unpack the forces that are at play. We're talking about billions and billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies that states provide to fossil fuel companies. So when we talk about corporate greed and when we talk about limitations and possibilities, these are dimensions that I think a lot of people ignore. And if we had more political will and corporate interest in forging an alternative that's sustainable, I think the conversation would be in a different place. In many parts of the world in the past half hour, leaders at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil have agreed on a deal that ends the summit but fails to mention fossil fuels.
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So where is the political and corporate will? COP 30 has now ended with a very modest agreement which makes no mention of more commitment to phasing out fossil fuels. And the entire conference was held without the world's most powerful country, biggest consumer of fossil fuels, and also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States. You might imagine that the people I've been talking to today would be disappointed, but it's not as simple as that. Candy or female?
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Again, you might be surprised by my answer, but I'm actually quite hopeful. And I think that the answer is probably coming from the countries and the communities that have the most to lose. So we've seen incredible examples of political leadership coming from small island countries like Tuvalu, Fiji island, places that will disappear in the next few decades if we don't do something immediately. Small island countries, developing nations that actually have a lot to lose in the current state of play, have really been stepping up on the international political stage to push for the conversation to shift. So surprisingly, I think because maybe I'm interacting with groups and communities around the world that have just demonstrated so much innovation around climate solutions. I feel like they're there. We just have to pay attention to them and bring them to the centers of decision making.
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Has it been helpful or a hindrance that the United States, the world's biggest emitter, has not been at COP30?
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I think consensus from civil society would be that it's been helpful. The US is usually a blocker and sometimes having the biggest polluters not in the room allows for consensus to be reached. And I think if we secure positive outcome on fossil fuel phase out at this cop, it would most likely have been helped by the absence of the United States, who most likely would have objected.
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Okay, so that's interesting. World's only superpower gets left out. You're not the first person to say that to me that, okay, fine, they're not here.
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Good.
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We need to get this Done, we do it without them.
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Yeah, international negotiations, that's where multilateral, multilateralism and can never pronounce that word. You know, you keep, keep going. And so right now the US is really using its influence internationally to leverage its economic and trade deals to disincentivize and to push really regressive policies on climate. And so in this forum, decisions have to be made and they will be made with or without the United States.
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And Deborah Sanchez believes this year's COP with its focus on indigenous peoples has laid good foundations and she's already building.
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For next year from our side. We'll be supporting as much as we can the governments to really understand what are those action points the communities are bringing and how from where policymakers can make a decision to actually advance these commitments that they have been done in cop. So by next year when we are in COP again, we have some results. So for example, we had supported in the policy around land tenure for indigenous peoples in DRC and now in this COP, we already see 150,000 hectares of land being recognized for indigenous peoples and local community. And if we continue supporting that conversation and that work together between communities, countries in philanthropy, channeling the funds there, next year in cop, we want to see bigger, right? We want to see probably 1 million hectares. And that will be a massive achievement around tackling climate change, but also from an angle of human rights and justice and environment justice and climate justice. That is what we are advocating for.
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And Dermot Campbell, Lendrum of the who puts his faith not in the climate deniers who populate our social media media feeds, but ordinary people the world over who every opinion poll shows want to protect our planet.
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Well, first off, I think they may need less convincing than you think that we need action on climate change. The polling from around the world shows that there is a very strong majority in basically every country in the world to do more about climate change. We've fallen into this narrative that it's all pain and no gain and it's all doom and gloom and no benefit. The evidence is if we look at the actual solutions that we need to put into place, many of those are pretty popular. So people are actually in favor of clean air. They actually want air that is safe for their children to breathe. They are in favor, I think, of spending less of their taxpayers money and their and their own money on subsidizing the climate crisis and putting that money into things which are actually useful for society. So the message that we have is to talk much more about the solutions because those are popular, and those are empowering. Rather than just telling people the world's going to hell unless we all act to the extreme now, there's nothing we can do about it. When you break it down into practical actions that individuals can take and governments can take, you get a lot more support. The final thing I'd like to say on this is that the health community is absolutely behind this. So we work with health professionals from around the world and there is a very clear consensus amongst frontline health professionals, your doctors and your nurses, that we need to take action on climate change and that it's good for your health. And the final thing I would say to the woman or man in the street is that you probably trust your doctors and nurses to be telling you what's good for you. These are clever people who want what's best for you and can read a temperature graph. And they know that there are concrete actions that you can take which are good for your health as well as good for the planet.
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And with those wise words from the who, a gentle reminder, in fact, that listening to the scientific advice is always, always recommended. We come to the end of this edition of Inside Geneva. My thanks to Dermot, Deborah and Candy for their time and their insights. We hope you enjoyed the program. Next time on Inside Geneva.
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Attention.
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Judges from Britain, America, Russia and France assemble in Nuremberg's courthouse. Imagination sickens as the crimes laid upon the accused. Now stripped of the trappings of power, the world's writ has run to Nuremberg and justice waits.
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It's 80 years since the Nuremberg trials, 80 years since the founding of the United nations, and 80 years since the world agreed on some basic international laws to keep us all safe. But 80 years on is 2025, the year we threw it all away. Join us on December 9th for a fascinating discussion. And just before we go, here's some news of another Swiss Info podcast that some of our listeners might be interested in. Are you Swiss and planning to move abroad? Or maybe you've already taken the leap? Swiss Info has a new podcast just for you. It's coming out on November 25th. It's called ADE Merci Schwyz. Or maybe that should be Adieu Merci la Suisse. It's available in Swiss, German and French. It covers everything you need to know about setting up your new life abroad. We speak to Swiss around the world who've already made the move, and we ask experts to share their experiences. You'll find adamercychweets wherever you get your podcasts or in our SW app. A reminder you've been listening to Inside Geneva, a Swiss info production. You can subscribe to us and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our previous episodes how the International Red Cross Unites Prisoners of War with Their Families or why Survivors of Human Rights Violations Turn to the UN In Geneva for Justice. I'm Imogen folks, thanks again for listening.