One of my modern-day heroes is Christiana Figueres.
If you don’t know who she is, you can check her out here. Short version: she played a crucial role in engineering the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change in which 194 states agreed to (grossly simplifying here) reduce their carbon emissions in order to keep global warming well below 2°C (and ideally 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. (To date, the only state that has activated the process to withdraw its agreement is the United States.) I still remember the moment when I heard that it had finally been signed. I had not been involved one bit in that signature, but I cried – tears of relief after the huge disappointment of Copenhagen 6 years earlier which I had followed at the time, and tears of joy, of feeling uplifted by what humanity can sometimes collectively achieve for the benefit of us all. So little (it doesn’t go far enough for most people in the know), and yet so much (having seen the energy that can go into debating one sentence in contract negotiations with just one other party, I can only imagine what it must be like to get 194 heads of government – coming from different cultures and speaking in different languages – to agree on 25 pages of text).
Since stepping down from the Secretariat of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), she’s continued to lead globally through the climate crisis, including co-writing The Future We Choose, that seeks to inspire and empower each of us to contribute to “moving beyond the climate crisis into a thriving future”. (It gets a rave review from Yuval Noah Harari too, whose brain I have had a serious crush on since 2013 when I first encountered him via Coursera.)
I haven’t read the book yet (I’m waiting to get my hands on the paperback version) but I have started listening to her companion podcast, Outrage and Optimism. In the past few weeks she and her co-hosts have started a series on how we can emerge stronger and better from the Covid-19 crisis. If you want to start with one, I can recommend the latest episode which features an interview with Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Prize for Economics). There’s a lot to take away from the frank and stimulating discussion that ensues, one of which for me is the need for us to develop a coherent systems approach to tackling the multiple interdependent crises that we are facing as humanity: the two that are front of mind right now – health and economics – of course, but also climate and, underpinning all that, inequality between and within nations.
It also got me thinking about the need for both outrage and optimism in making change happen. Certainly on the emergency that is the climate crisis, which seems just too far away from our everyday lives for many of us to actually take action to change our behaviour. How many people across the globe have been inspired into action by the single-minded outrage of Greta Thunberg?
But perhaps, also, in any change that we want to make happen. I’ve often found myself frustrated at feeling frustrated when I see something I perceive as flagrant injustice, lack of moral backbone, unashamed self-interest (yes, I’m still working on turning people into trees). What if that frustration were somehow part and parcel of making change happen? What if, instead of being frustrated at feeling frustrated, we can thank it for showing us that we care, then marry that precious energy together with optimism to fuel positive change?
What do you feel most frustrated about? And how might you leverage that into creating the change you want to see?