Paul Dickinson: OK, so we’ve got the government getting ready for Paris-
Tom Rivett-Carnac: Glasgow, not getting ready for Paris.
Paul Dickinson: Just checking there. Sometimes your interruptions annoy me sometimes they’re actually very helpful because I’m talking rubbish. So we’ve got the governments getting ready towards Glasgow, but we’ve also got you’ve brushed over it but I just really want to emphasise for the listeners- corporations, investors, cities, states, regions, civil society. It’s just extraordinary. We’re all in this together. And that’s so exciting that we can be united under a single brand. A single concept.
Tom Rivett-Carnac: So invigorating..
Paul Dickinson: OK, so who’s on?
Tom Rivett-Carnac: So in the course of the next 30 minutes you are going to hear from Alok Sharma, the COP President Designate who will be the President of COP 26 in Glasgow, Patricia Espinosa, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Christiana’s successor. Nigel Topping the UK’s High Level Champion for Climate Action, and from Mary Anne Hitt, who for 10 years ran the Beyond Coal campaign in the US and is now the campaign’s director for the Sierra Club.
We learned a lot from these conversations, so let’s head into them now. And at the end, we’ll come back to you, Christiana and Paul, to sum it up. Here we go.
Christiana Figueres: [00:10:15] What a true delight and an honor to have you on our podcast. I’ve been thinking about what you bring to COP 26 as a person because I had the pleasure of working with quite a few COP presidents and noticed that although every single COP president has very similar terms of reference in terms of the multilateral role and the neutrality that has to be achieved, every COP president brings a very different background and experience to the job. And you were quite unique because, A, you are definitely a UK citizen, but you were born in India, you were a development secretary. You have now just come from Gabon, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Egypt. I am guessing but I would love to hear from you that all of this background has actually shaped your sense of adaptation, of resilience, of climate justice. All of those issues that frankly are at the heart of the Global South position in a negotiation. Am I overreaching?