Host: Benjamin Thompson
Hi, Benjamin Thompson from the Nature Podcast here. Now, we’ve not got a regular show for you this week because I’ve been on a specially organised train taking hundreds of people to the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP26). Our journey begins in Amsterdam and, as we cross Europe and head up to Glasgow where the conference is taking place, I’ll be talking science with several of my fellow passengers and finding out why they’re on board.
[Jingle]
Host: Benjamin Thompson
One of the organisers of Rail to the COP is Mara de Pater, chair of the non-profit organisation Youth for Sustainable Travel. As we made our way across the Netherlands, I caught up with her.
Interviewer: Mara de Pater
So, it’s a campaign set up by youth. It actually came from the project Sail to the COP that we did two years ago when we sailed to the climate conference in Chile, or actually we tried to sail there. It was moved to Madrid and we couldn’t go, and then we came up with the idea to take the train instead, both to Madrid and now to Glasgow as well. So, that’s what we’re doing, and we realised quite soon that we would have a very unique opportunity of having very different groups of people on the train. So, there is youth activists but there is also climate scientists and NGO representatives, delegates, and we saw that as a unique opportunity to really get these people talking to each other about mainly fair and sustainable travel related topics throughout the whole train.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
So, is that, would you say, the main motivation for this, is collaboration?
Interviewer: Mara de Pater
Yeah, but another important motivation for us is also to get people to listen to the youth, especially at a process like the COP.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Yes, because there’s been a lot of events recently where youth activists have said, ‘We are being side-lined. We are not being listened to. But we are the generation that will be directly affected.’ Do you think that will be the case with COP26, or are you hoping for a different outcome this time?
Interviewer: Mara de Pater
I am definitely hoping for a different outcome, but I also know from experience that it’s quite hard. But what I do see is that the youth movement is kind of professionalising, and a lot of the youth that I talk to are experts on certain topics or just COP in general, and I think we’ve really been educating ourselves, which will also give us a little bit more leverage at the COP.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And the vast majority of people on the train were young people, enthusiastically getting involved in the workshops being run as the train sped along. As we left Rotterdam I met Line Skovlund Larsen, a young researcher formerly from Lund University who now works independently as part of a group called the Zetkin Collective. She’s focused on better understanding the social and political effects of climate change.
Interviewee: Line Skovlund Larsen
I have a master’s in political ecology, where we look at the societal effects of environmental and climate crises in Peru. It’s a lot about looking at, for example, the economic system. How does that provoke certain factors that could, for example, be extraction of minerals for batteries or extraction of fossil fuels, and how do these factors affect nature, the local area, the local people, and how can we look at it more like systemically. What can be changed in the bigger scale?
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Part of your work is looking at the effects of climate change on populations around the world, notably in Peru, you’ve been working.
Interviewee: Line Skovlund Larsen
What I focused on in this research in Peru, actually all of it is related to water. Where I did my studies, in Huaraz in Peru, they have two big problems. One of them is water scarcity because glaciers are retreating, but it’s also because of the precipitation changes. And the other is a risk of a glacier lake outburst flood. So, in Huaraz, there is a glacier lake which has become 17 times bigger than it was, and the risk is its burst and create a huge flood. It actually happened once before in 1941. They just found out last year that it was actually related to climate change. All of the water spilled out, ran through the city, destroyed everything in its path and killed thousands of people in the order of a few minutes.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
In addition to her research in Peru, Line is part of the Zetkin Collective, a group of researchers and activists which is trying to get to the bottom of the political ecology of the far right, in particular how this relates to climate denial.
Interviewee: Line Skovlund Larsen
So, there are different forms of climate denial – direct denial where you just say, ‘Well, it doesn’t happen,’ and indirect denial where you accept that it happens but you either say that it’s not so important or you accept that it’s important but you still vote for denialist parties or you still go around doing your emission lifestyle. But the outright denial is what we have been looking most at in the Zetkin Collective, and that surprisingly has actually risen at the same time as the temperature has risen. When you think a little bit about it, it kind of makes sense because the climate crisis is a crisis that, for the individual, can sometimes seem quite difficult to do anything about, which means you can often feel quite hopeless, you can feel that you cannot do anything about it. Or what also happens is that for some people, when they meet this crisis that demands that they have to change their lives a lot, it could, for example, be coalmine workers, we have to basically erase their jobs for the planet to survive, and of course they will have some resistance against that. For those people, it might be easier to outright deny climate change, and something that we’ve focused on is that when society meets crisis, you will often see a need in the public to find strong leaders. And that’s why we have this like, as we call it in the Zetkin Collective, the danger of fossil fascism because there is a danger that if this trend is going to keep rising, then we will see more fascism.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
It’s a very glib question. What’s to be done, do you think?
Interviewee: Line Skovlund Larsen
Something that’s really, really important is to offer people better alternatives to build and keep on building democracy and near-democracy, where people have an influence on their everyday lives and everything. If I should be a bit more concrete on what can be done, I think there is a lot of very concrete and very straightforward things to do. For example, right now, we are on Rail to the COP, and this whole industry, the train industry, we could boost that a lot. We could limit the aviation industry a lot. Another obvious thing to do is to just stop investing in fossil fuels. You hear how there’s still more investments in fossil fuels than in renewables. I mean, that’s crazy.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Line was by no means the only young researcher on the train who’d chosen to focus on climate change. But not everyone had such a clear path. Here’s Vera Hoveling from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Interviewee: Vera Hoveling
So, my background is actually very broad. I first studied art and I have a batchelor’s in fine art, and then I moved onto computer science. I’m doing my master’s now. It’s officially in artificial intelligence techniques, about the automated transcription of music. And I also work at the same university, where we make animations and visualisations for mathematical concepts for students to understand better.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
So, I think it’s fair to say then that you’re not a climate scientist.
Interviewee: Vera Hoveling
No, I’m definitely not a climate scientist. When I found out about the climate crisis, I used one of my free electives to do a course on climate science and ethics, and then I was like, ‘Woah, this is horrendous. And also, if this is, which it is, the story of the time that we live in, then I better spend time on this.’
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And so, learning about something is one thing, but you’ve obviously taken it a step further. You’ve got on a train with I don’t know how many hundreds of other young people to go to COP26. Have you made connections? Have you met people who you can work with in the future, that sort of thing?
Interviewee: Vera Hoveling
Yeah, definitely. I did a workshop on the first train, together with someone who taught me a lot of things that I’d never heard of, like global governance, which is a term that I hadn’t heard of before, and also possibilities there to use artificial intelligence, which is something I study, but I struggle with finding ethically appropriate applications. I mean, I work on music now because I think that can’t really do any harm. But he had very interesting ideas about that. I’m definitely going to be in touch with him just because it was so interesting.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Obviously, you’ve done a lot of research, you’ve done a lot of studying now as well. Do you think this might be a future avenue for you? You said you’d maybe met someone who you can do a bit of collaboration with. Do you think this represents a little bit of a turning point for your academic career?
Interviewee: Vera Hoveling
In the end, I look a lot for purpose in my work, and that will have, in some way or another, to include addressing the climate crisis. I graduate in a year. I have no idea yet what I’ll do, but I know I want it to be related, to at least make it about how are we going to be good human beings in the time that’s coming. At first I thought, ‘Well, then I have to apply my academic skills to marginally approve rendering times for solar panel simulations,’ but it just made me very unhappy. I haven’t figured out what it will mean exactly, but it will address this in one way or another, for sure.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
I mean, this is your first COP. If you had a message that you could give to the people at the centre of the COP from the people on this train, what would it be, do you think?
Interviewee: Vera Hoveling
I think many on the train will agree, that I think policies should be made with people that are born in 100 years in mind, and the conditions that should be there for them.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
I left Vera pondering her academic future, but she wasn’t going to wait to work out how her research could help in the fight against climate change. She wanted to take action now. And so, like so many on the train, she was heading to COP as an activist. On the second leg of the journey, from London to Glasgow, I met Adélaïde, a young activist leader from Belgium, who among other things helped organise the school strikes there. Although she’s not a scientist, she told me how she has actively placed science at the centre of her cause.
Interviewee: Adélaïde Charlier
So, my name is Adélaïde Charlier. I am part of the movement Youth for Climate in Belgium, and so I am a member of that movement and I am going to the COP as a climate activist and part of the Youth for Climate.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
So, climate activism has been a big part of your life for many years in Belgium, right?
Interviewee: Adélaïde Charlier
Yeah, it’s been two and a half years that I’ve been involved in the climate movement in Belgium. It’s been pretty intense since then, yes, organising many actions to put pressure on politicians and to make sure citizens are aware of the urgency behind climate change. We reach those goals thanks to actions like strikes or other ways for us to keep reaching these goals.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And you enlisted the help of a bunch of climate scientists as well to make your case to Belgian politicians, right?
Interviewee: Adélaïde Charlier
Exactly. So, of course, actually as soon as we started striking, the first question that politicians that asked us or the media asked us was, ‘Okay, climate, but what do you want us to do?’ And we thought, ‘Wow, this is the world upside down – adults are asking us kids what we should be doing facing the urgency of climate change.’ So, we thought, ‘Okay, we cannot give complete responses to that. We are clearly not experts.’ So, we thought we are going to have a request towards experts to help us write down, concretely on paper what can we do here in Belgium to reach a better ambition, facing the urgency, which we did, and we reached out to more than 120 experts and scientists. And together they worked on a report and that report has 27 concrete recommendations that can today be directly implemented it to the Belgian law. That’s crucial. It’s super important for us because these are the lines that can be followed by our politicians to really be able to be aligned to the Paris agreement, for example. So, today when people us ask now the question, ‘Okay, what should we do about climate?’ We can tell you we’ve got the answer. Here in this report you’ve got everything, and it’s not just kids that are shouting in the streets that tell you this, it’s experts, it’s science.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
There was so much hope and appetite for change from so many of the young people I spoke to, and yet no one was under any illusions that the COP process moves slowly. And so, as we hurtled towards COP26, I wanted to delve deeper into why. And who better to ask that an ex-co-chair of the IPCC, and one of the experts that Adélaïde commissioned for her report.
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
My name is Jean-Pascal van Ypersele. I’m a climate scientist and professor of climatology and environment of sciences at the Université catholique de Louvain, and I was vice chair of the IPCC from 2008 until 2015.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
So, why are you on the Rail to the COP today then?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Well, this is probably my 25th COP out of 26. I was at COP1 in 1995, and I’ve been as a scientific advisor in the Belgian delegations since that first COP. For every COP taking place in Europe, I’ve always tried to attend it by train instead of flying, every time it was possible because, as I gave many interviews talking about the importance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, if my own behaviour is not coherent with that, rightfully so, it would be criticised.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Obviously, there’s a lot of young people on the train today making their voice heard. Are you impressed with this endeavour?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Yes, that’s a very positive evolution because I was on the train to Copenhagen in 2009. There were many more older people then, and it’s very good that there is a very strong, young delegation because they are so full of energy. They are so frustrated by the lack of action – so are so many scientists actually – that they come with a lot of energy to push decision makers and governments to act much more.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And I think ‘frustration’ is the right word to use from the sense that I’ve got on the train so far today. How do you think COP26 will go? I mean, there’s been enough warnings over the past 30 years.
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Yeah, well, it’s one COP in a series. It’s certainly not the last one. It’s not the COP of the last chance. I think it’s very dangerous to say that, actually, as some do. It’s a COP where some progress will be done, inevitably, and again, it won’t be enough. It will be 10 times, 100 times maybe, too slow, too little, but still, it will be progress, and it’s very important that countries and non-government participants learn from what the others have succeeded to do or failed to do, agree on measures to take together because many measures are much more accepted when they are applied to everyone.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
And what’s your role in the next couple of weeks? What are you there for?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Well, I’m a scientific advisor in the Belgian delegation, and I will try to contribute my knowledge and my experience to help the negotiations go in the right direction.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
Do you think they will go in the right direction?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
Yeah, I think the direction will be good. There is a sense of urgency and an understanding that climate change is now really there. It’s not just a projection in the future. Now, some will not move as fast or as much as what is really needed, but many will move in the right direction. So, overall, I think some progress will be made.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
I mean, reports this week coming out are saying potentially we’re looking at 2.7 degrees of warming as things stand. I mean, that’s catastrophic, right?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
And I think that’s an underestimate because, very frankly, how can you determine the temperature that you will have in 2100 from commitments that extend essentially until 2030 or 2035? Because the temperature will very much be the result also of the emissions taking place after 2030 or even after 2050. And I wouldn’t be surprised if actually it was an even higher number than 2.7.
Interviewer: Benjamin Thompson
I mean, obviously, we’ll wait and see when the dust settles what gets agreed in the next two weeks, but what one thing would you really like to see that at the end of COP has been agreed among the nations there?
Interviewee: Jean-Pascal van Ypersele
A very important decision that might be taken, at least on the political level even if it’s not formally decided in a legalistic way, is to revise the country commitments at a higher frequency than every 5 or 10 years because it doesn’t give the opportunity for those countries to really benefit from the experience they have, from the evolution of technologies, from the experience of some other countries et cetera. A faster rate of revision, possibly every year. Why not? Why not try to revise the plans at every COP or at least give the opportunity to those who can? That would be significant progress, I think.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Something like 11 hours after we set off from Amsterdam, we finally made it to Scotland. And once again, we all piled off the train, accompanied by a bagpiper who was there at the station to meet us. Throughout this journey, I was struck by the energy, enthusiasm and knowledge of the young people I’d met. And yet, their enthusiasm was tempered with a heavy dose of cynicism. It’s yet to be seen what progress will be made at this year’s COP but, regardless, young people are increasingly making their voices heard, and science is at the heart of that message. We’ll find out how successful they are over the next couple of weeks.
COP26 climate summit: A scientists’ guide to a momentous meeting
Young people will be key to climate justice at COP26
