Mongabay Newscast7 Jan 2025

Christiana Figueres remains optimistic on climate action

General frustration with the result of the most recent UN climate conference (UNFCCC COP29) spurred the former UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres – under whose leadership the Paris Agreement was struck – to co-author a letter to the UN urging an overhaul to the COP process, and calling it "no longer fit for purpose."

Figueres joins this episode to speak about why the world's governments seemingly cannot agree to move decisively on climate action, and what can be done about it.

She shares why – despite these frustrations and disappointments – she remains optimistic about the global effort to decarbonize economies and transport systems, citing recent advancements in the deployment of renewable energy and the power of everyday actions:

"I used to think that it was our collective responsibility to guarantee to future generations that they would have a perfect world. And now that I am a recent grandmother, I really look back at that and I go, 'my God, we cannot guarantee to future generations that they're going to have a perfect world.' We cannot. So, what can we do? We can do our darndest and we can wake up every morning and make a choice and say 'where am I going to put my energy today?'" she says.

Figueres is also the co-host of the popular podcast, Outrage + Optimism, which features conversations and analysis about the climate crisis.

Episoder(360)

A 'coalition of the willing' to urge the world to drop fossil fuels

A group of 57 nations mostly from the Global South, describing themselves as "coalition of the willing" intent on making the Transition Away From Fossil Fuels, or TAFF, convened in the Colombian city ...

2 Jun 33min

Australia claims it's 'on track' to meet its environment targets. Scientists disagree

Australia is one of 17 "megadiverse" countries that account for 70% of Earth's biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world. That makes cons...

26 Mai 42min

The world must address pandemic threats urgently, says former CDC officer

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threat...

19 Mai 35min

Protest works, but it needs your help now more than ever, veteran activists say

"We are experiencing what some people call sort of a shutdown of the public square in the United States and around the world," says veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Along with the forme...

12 Mai 51min

A new Netflix documentary captures rare mountain gorilla behavior

"That might be something that you see in a decade, not in two years of filming," Tara Stoinksi, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, tells me. The behavior she's referring to occurs in mountain gorill...

5 Mai 38min

Centering an Indigenous approach to forestry through reciprocity, not extraction

Forester and scientist Suzanne Simard is well known for her landmark 1997 paper, which demonstrated that two distinct species of trees could share resources. At the time, it turned traditional Western...

28 Apr 41min

Across oceans, seabird flyways gain recognition — and a chance at protection

The routes taken by migratory birds, known as flyways, often cross vast expanses of ocean. Six of these marine flyways have now been formally recognized by the U.N.'s Convention on Migratory Species,...

21 Apr 28min

The coyotes next door: What we get wrong about America's 'song dog'

Coyotes are now present in almost every major urban-metropolitan area in the United States, yet conflicts between the canines and humans are exceptionally low. Between 1960 and 2006, only 146 docume...

14 Apr 44min