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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm Laura and in this episode i'm joined by Rwayda and Rebecca to talk about COP26 and why scientists and engineers should care about it i don't know a whole lot about cop26 um what i do know is that it's a conference that's organized by the united nations to talk about climate change and decide
on what to do about it but that's about it uh but rebecca you're an official observer at cop26 so can you expand on my simple understanding of the climate summit yes of course i can so i'm a senior lecturer at abertay university and as part of the cop 26 conference what they've done is they've enabled ngos or non-governmental organizations to be official observers because it's a very inclusive process and they want to have as many voices and as many opinions as possible
to help them in making the decision so cop 26 stands for conference of the parties and this is the 26th year that the climate change conference of the parties has happened so and when we talk about cop 26 in this case we're talking about the the climate change uh conferences that happen and it's the united nations framework convention on climate change so the unfccc so all of the people that are signatories to that convention are the parties for the conference of the
parties and um most of them are nation states so nearly 200 nations are signatories or parties but there's some other bodies involved as well um you know united nations world bank global charities all of that kind of thing so the reason for having these conferences is to negotiate how we move forward to tackle a global challenge and the global challenge in this case is climate change so we need to have national contributions and we need to have a global picture where all the
national contributions add up to trying to meet the challenge and in this case the challenge is keeping global temperature rise as close to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial global average temperatures so all of the nations have got to do their nationally determined contributions and those contributions go to the big jigsaw puzzle of contributions and globally they need to add up to trying to keep our global temperature down so we have targets right now but what
we're looking for at cop26 is a really clear picture of the actions that will deliver those targets so all the pieces of the puzzle and all of the actions have to come together to have a meaningful kind of trajectory towards keeping that global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees or as close as possible to it yeah there's loads to impact there i like the idea that everyone's contributing to this sort of jigsaw of actions that will all come together to solve this global challenge
i mean one one and a half degrees celsius doesn't sound like a lot but on a global scale i guess trying to even just trying to figure out how that is and how to unpack that is quite difficult and i guess we'll get into that a bit more as as we go through this conversation and now ruder uh given your background as a lecturer and civil engineer what's your interest in cop26 basically the civil engineering industry as other industries is changing to accumulate challenges for the
environment we have at the moment and my role as an academic and a civil engineer is to help guiding the new generation through that change and that's where my interest for cobb 26 and similar climate change conferences come and that's why new generation of civil engineers need to be aware of what's happening globally so i guess that's about investing in the future with the next generation of engineers exactly is about extracting the knowledge moving them through to the
next generation and passing that knowledge on it kind of reminds me it's been a long time since i did my undergraduate degree and it wasn't in engineering um but part of my undergraduate degree did involve looking at some climate science i think the module i did was a paleoclimatology and that was looking at how you could see how the climate had changed by looking at the rock record and ice cores and things like that and there was something in there about how our orbit
around the sun affects the climate because it wobbles very slightly it's a term i think it's called orbital forcing but it's been nearly 20 years since i studied this makes me sound so old back then no one was entirely sure whether global warming was caused by human activity or whether it was just part of this sort of natural cycle of how the climate has changed over very very long time scales things have changed since then which is why we are where we are now with cop26
20 years is a long time to do science yeah and that's absolutely right laura and i think that you know if we would have looked at the received knowledge 20 30 years ago there was still really a debate about that anthropogenic or human induced climate change but um just in the last year the the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change which is really you know it's a a sort of a research pool it's a pool of hundreds of scientists globally that come together to give the technical and
scientific basis for what's happening to our planet and in the latest report their uh report number six they have said that it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere ocean and land that widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere ocean cryosphere and biosphere have occurred as a result of human influence and that we're now on a really dangerous trajectory of warming and the thing that's really interesting about that is the amount of evidence behind that
statement and it's also really interesting to think about how strong that statement is because as scientists we might be normally expected to think about you know from the available evidence or thinking about couching things in terms where it allows some gray area because we don't you know science is always a moving feast you know there's always more to learn but this statement of unequivocal human influence is the strongest statement and that's the headline statement for
this latest report for the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change and that is the body of scientists and they don't advise nations on what to do about that they just say this is the science and this is the way it's going and here's the evidence so scientists have a really important fundamental role to play in you know laying the groundwork the evidence the ground truth for then the policymakers coming in and making their decisions and the reason why cop 26 is is so historic
it's not just because we're more convinced of the science now it's so historic because in paris you've probably heard of the paris agreement so the paris agreement was
signed at cop 21 in 2015. and at that point all of these parties came together and they decided we're going to have these targets and five years from now we're going to know how we're going to meet those targets well here we are five years from now and now we have to have action we need to know how we're going to meet those targets so all of those decades of science have really created this huge and really important evidence base you know it's based on tree rings
on ice cores that go back thousands of years it's based on reductionist laboratory science and observation of the natural environment it's got the entire gamut of scientific method and types of evidence backing it up it's got you know digital and analog it's got modeling and predictions and estimates and monitoring and measurement it's got everything so cop 26 is really important it is history in the making we're basing it on that fundamental science the fundamental
science has been translated into policy and targets and actions and cop 26 in glasgow is going to really be a testing ground for whether all of the different parties have come together with reasonable suggestions for how they're going to meet their targets with the actions that they're suggesting so it really does inform the future of our planet but most importantly of human existence on this planet because we don't manage to moderate our warming then it will be
very disastrous for humankind it won't necessarily mean the end of planet earth but it'll be very very uncomfortable and for people to be living on the planet so we really do have a vested interest in trying to make this work that's why we're doing it the planet has been through ice ages and all sorts it'll still be here for quite a long time but it's about humans and what we can do now and what cop26 can achieve towards that and i mean cot26 is it means different
things to different people i guess since it's involved everybody is is the event is open to public uh well rebecca you mentioned you're an observer do you think that that would be a good representation for everyone being involved presently we could not fit the whole population of the world into glasgow especially with the social distancing no so that's a really good question they are trying to be inclusive as possible so there are the u.n negotiators and all
of those nation states and all of those delegates and they need to be there for the for the discussions um and for the voting and for all the different pieces that have to happen at these multiple negotiations multiple voting multiple um kind of conversations and that's all based on a whole lot of work that's been done by the scientists and the politics and the economists and the the social policy people prior to actually coming to cop so um as an official observer i
can actually engage in the conference by going along and being there in person i can view what's happening i have a voice you know i can have conversations i can contribute to debate but i can't vote so it's only the people that the signatures to the convention that can vote and they have the ability to agree or disagree the eventual outcomes
from cop 26. but it's not just the blue zone the u.n zone that's occurring at cop26 there's a green zone as well which is the public zone so the geography of the conference and the way it works out is that there's the blue zone which is official u.n territory for the uh two weeks of the conference and that's at the um scottish events campus and just across the river clyde at glasgow science center that's where the green zone is and that's the public zone and there are bookable free tickets to
attend events in the public zone so it is about trying to be as inclusive and get people along and there's also an awful lot of people who are going to be demonstrating there's going to be a lot of people that want to have their voice heard in different ways and not through the official uh conversations that are happening in the un zone but also it's a really accessible conference this year more than ever before because you know here we are speaking through a digital media and
we've all been teaching and learning and communicating through online presence over the last year and a half and indeed cop 26 has taken advantage of us all having that capacity to join in online so there's actually a cop 26 youtube channel and you can join in and you can at least view what's happening so anyone anywhere in the world uh they don't have to come to glasgow to understand what's going on at cop they can tune in the youtube channel and other um platforms
where you'll be able to get news all the time of what's going on that's good to know sparkle's not too far from me it's only a couple of hours on the train i am very tempted to go to see what that public access though it'll be like and the sort of festival activities that i can imagine would be happening it sounds like quite a nice atmosphere but it's also been years since i've been a public event of that size so i'm not too sure how i feel about suddenly being surrounded by home
do you have to be careful with covid you know they're taking extra measures and extra restrictions so whereas in previous cops they might have been you know all crushed into the room so everyone could see as much as how as possible and maybe standing up around the back and in the aisles you know so they could be a part of the audience even if there wasn't a seat of course we're not doing that this time you know they're taking precautions they're saying you know there's a maximum
capacity for these spaces it's a covered um restriction we're not having standing room only you know every if there's a seat you can take it if there's not a seat then you have to wait and so that's even more important to have the online presence yeah because not everybody's going to get into every room that they want to go into as well but also i think moving around the glasgow would be difficult because you would be moving by mainly feet because they blocked most of the rods to make
sure of the security of the and secure passes for the people in the conference so if you go to glasgow prepare to walk a lot because most of the roads are blocked i think i'll be wearing comfortable shoes i mean there's going to be 25 000 or more extra people in glasgow and actually a lot of the delegates are staying in edinburgh or probably further away than you are laura and i've heard that some people are staying in london wow because maybe if you're coming from the
other side of the world that's relatively close i don't know but um i think that you know there's a lot of extra people that are going to be around some roads are closed there's going to be disruption and you know with the best will in the world even if i've got a schedule for what i want to to see and be involved in it might be a capacity and i might not get in i might not be able to get there through all the people traffic that are around or the other kind of traffic there might be
demonstrations in my way you know i'm just really keeping my mind open i'm not quite sure what i'm going to expect to see until i get there well maybe i won't go in maybe i'll just look it up on youtube but so you mentioned that cop 26 is about negotiations you mentioned voting and i guess that's how the negotiations will conclude because that's i guess how i would do things if i were trying to decide on something but it's also about climate science so what exactly are they
negotiating so actually the climate science is the basis for it so the climate science those observed increases in greenhouse gases the the way in which the concentration of those greenhouse gases has changed since about 1800 is really the critical foundation that is the basis now that's not being
negotiated at cop 26. the science has been presented and all of the nations have had an opportunity to respond to the science and the way it's been presented in the wording that's been used to present it so there's been a right to reply and there always is with these sort of science reports that are global science reports so it's like having a critical review process the different stakeholders get to give their critical review so that's not being negotiated
what's being negotiated are the actions based on the science so it's really the socio-economic and political side of things that's going to come to the fore those negotiations are fragile you know they are um they're subject to lots of other influences and so you really need fantastic leadership really good persuasion skills and excellent negotiation skills to make a difference and and one of the people that i want to bring to your attention is christiana figueres and she was
actually involved in the paris agreement which i mentioned to you um just a few minutes ago so she's an internationally recognized leader on global climate change she was the executive secretary of this un framework convention on
climate change from 2010 to 2016. and so that meant that she assumed responsibility for those climate negotiations and she was really determined to lead the process towards a universal agreement and she managed to do that in that historic paris agreement so she'd been to previous negotiations she'd seen them fail and she was determined to make them work and part of that was her method of leadership and her method of communication she could appeal to people's professional and personal aspirations
for the future and i think that ability to think with empathy as a leader to be an empathetic leader to be able to relate to people on a personal basis as well as to understand the business case and the corporate case for actions and decisions is really critical so she's a real role model and i mean i saw her she was here for the earthshot prize in the uk the other day and i think she's going to be quite a big presence at cop 26 as well and she certainly is a you know a really
amazing female leader and certainly somebody to to look up to i think so this is a very impressive set of skulls and as in communication you kind of mentioned that do you think that is related to her background that's skills that she could imply on her negotiations uh yeah possibly um because you know she's actually from costa rica and costa rica have a really forward thinking approach to the environment they have reversed their degradation of the environment and made it a real success story
you know i think that she understands she's got that really you know she's got a scientific and technical understanding she's got a real link to nature and to environment herself and she's uh you know an executive level really understands business practices and policy so i think that she is just an amazing um you know sort of leader and and that different way of leading i wonder if that's something that we should have more of in our world rather than that really kind of ambitious you know kind
of power or finance led kind of approach i think understanding about the the greater good if you like understanding about what's right and understanding about what we can do for each other rather than in a selfish way for ourselves as an individual or for a nation or for a company it's about understanding what's right and i think that she is very good at communicating the importance of that but also the way in which that opens up opportunities for individuals
corporations and nations and that's the really powerful argument that's being made at the moment you know if we don't act we'll lose out if we do act we'll find the opportunities and the possibilities and that really is the argument at the moment it's about not only doing this because it's right because it's good and because it'll help us in the long run but actually there are opportunities within it it's good for our economy it's good for our nations it's good for people and planet
so i think she's quite good at making that argument that sounds so impressive it sounds like she's been quite pivotal to all of this i think you've just found a new hero for me someone i can aspire to be as a leader and i guess i mean it's a scientist because she's saying that because it came from the science and how that interacted with people and place and economics and politics that's so amazing and so you said that cop 21 was about setting the targets for the global rise
in temperature and christina fergus was quite central to that um but cop 26 is about negotiating what actions each nation will take so i guess they're based on science but they also based on social and financial aspects as well yeah absolutely you know that's critical so it's all very well to have a target but you have to figure out how you're going to get there and getting there has to be a combination of what's possible and what's practical and what's affordable so it has to bring in society
economy and policy social policy and and economic policy so yeah the um the nationally determined contributions mean that every nation is going to make those decisions based on what's practicable and possible and affordable for them so it really does come down to this nation by nation and it's social science and economics and politics and all sorts of different aspects that come into it so yeah the ipcc is the scientific basis the scientists present the science they
don't advise on policy but they do seek responses as i mentioned before and based on their science the governments and their advisors start to seek solutions to define the policy and the actions that they can take and that they will take to meet the targets so for example in the uk the climate change committee ccc is an independent statutory body and it was actually formed under the climate change act which is an act of parliament that went through in the uk in 2008 and
the purpose of the climate change committee is to advise the uk and the devolved governments on emissions targets and how they will report to parliament on their progress and they think about how the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions can help prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change that are predicted and as i said those predictions are much more set in you know confident science now than they were perhaps 20 or more years ago so they provide independent evidence on
setting and meeting carbon budgets and preparing for climate change and they can look at what the government say that they'll do and they can critique it they can be critical of it because they're independent of government and so they can give us a really good kind of um you know test the temperature a little bit in terms of what's been suggested and what's likely to make a difference i have this image in my head of um i guess the climate change committee is a mix of
people that includes scientists different backgrounds sort of pulling all this information together all the three technical details stuff that i've seen people with phds delve into the minute details of and they pull it all together and package it in a way that makes sense to people who haven't spent all that time delving into the details so people in parliament yeah i mean we need the technicians at this stage as well and the scientists of course we do because you can't just say um
oh we'll have all these electric vehicles in place in 10 years time you know do we have the technology is it robust you know does the science work can we roll it out can we do this at scale you need a whole suite of different individuals to help answer that question so if your target is replace all diesel engines with electric engines you actually need to have a whole load of scientific and technical and infrastructure informed people around so you need people from all sorts of aspects of stem
you know science technology engineering all that sort of stuff you need to be able to do the modeling you need to be able to to work with industry to to see is this you know do we have the capacity to actually do this are we promising something that's practicable and if it's not practical now what do we need to do to make it practical if that's what our target is i feel like you're bringing us back to one of our episodes on um batteries and electric cars and some of the challenges
that we identified with rolling that out as a national infrastructure challenge and how to mine the lithium if people want to listen to that go and look at our black catalogue yeah so what do you think our roles as scientists and engineer what should we do to take an action now for a better future i think we don't have any choice but to take action and actually i think we'll be really behind the curve if we don't do something now and the great news is that our professions are doing something
so there's already been action there is action it's actually ramping up and there's more going on i would say we probably need to do it a bit faster and a bit better a bit sooner but it is beginning to happen so one example is you know the sort of ice the institution of civil engineers state of the nation report routes to net zero that have been developed by um our professional bodies but also by many of the environmental consultants and in engineering consultancies thinking about the way
they do business how they design and how they deliver plans for their clients by the the power companies so whether it's ssc or scottish power or you know many different power companies they all have routes to net zero and so an example from what engineers are doing now the institution of civil engineers and the institution of structural engineers they accredit the programs that we teach on radar you know so we're teaching the next generation and we're already doing our best to try
and teach them about sustainable approaches to their science and their engineering and their contribution but we're going to be required as part of our accreditation of those courses we're going to be required to really deliver an understanding of the climate emergency and how to approach it from our professional perspective is going to be a prerequisite for the next set of professional accreditations so not only are we already doing our best to help these young engineers to
hit the ground running we're going to be required to make them prepared to hit the ground running in the next few years that's a lot of extra work for you guys as lecturers to what refresh all your lecture series read away notes what we're a lot of what they're looking for you know department like ours is doing a lot of that already we've got a program called civil and environmental engineering so we've got it embedded and threaded throughout but we're really
going to have to make it explicit we're going to have to assess it you know we're going to have to make sure that we you know strengthen that component part and i think that it doesn't just rely on what we already know in the teaching but it's continuing with the you know research projects and things to develop new technologies so that the actual research side as well as the teaching side is really critical for us and working with industry partners to think
about how we can do things better in all aspects of engineering and all aspects of science so that our actions and themselves as we're working don't contribute more than they need to the problem but also that the work that we're doing contributes to the solution so at all levels whether it's blue sky thinking and research and you know horizon scanning or whether it's boots on the ground now we need the whole lot i like that you said blue sky thinking because that's sort of like that's just
i want to do this science and i want to get into this i'm not really bothered about an application i just i'm curious about something and i want to go and pursue it that's why i got into science because i was curious it wasn't necessarily about solving a problem or designing a new technology which i think is what a lot of people see science as but it was more about just being curious i feel like a lot of that gets missed but i mean related you're you're an engineer right so
yeah i'm more of applied science kind of person so the science is the curiosity you're talking about though then this curiosity would generate knowledge so i need to use this knowledge apply it and put it into practice so that i think a main difference between a scientist and an engineer so we would take the science we generate new science sometimes but we mainly take the science from other stuff implement the science so for me civil engineering is a mixture between
math and physics so we need the physics science we need the math science we mush them together and get a practical session on how to design something how to design a bridge out of timber how to design a bridge out of concrete or so on so we use them math and physics mush them together and generate an applied science uh approach to things so that is more as the science type of stuff that i would deal with rather than just curiosity as you mentioned someone like me could think of
some somewhat idea if you're doing something and then someone like you can turn that into something practical yeah i think that's the main thing between a scientist and an engineer we take what you produce put that into applied sciences i think that's why they call us applied sciences well at least this is my point of view on things people might disagree with that i've been part of quite a few engineering schools and departments at universities when i was doing research so some people
think of me as an engineer i don't think of myself as much you do think like an engineer laura that from my experience with you during the broadcast so you do think like an engineer i think we have influenced you and added you to our back good to know you know i think that's part of the problem guys i think the fact that we parcel ourselves into these sort of professions and silos and you know ways of thinking is exactly part of the problem we need to get out of that
if we're going to solve some of these global challenges and we need to embrace the you know the blue sky thinking along with the applied solutions we need to embrace the fact that actually it's not just engineers or just climate scientists that can solve this we need the political scientists the social uh policy people the behavior change experts you know to be able to understand how we can communicate the message and and be able to implement what we know and if it wasn't for blue
sky thinking or even blue sky research you know we might not have known about the hole in the ozone layer literally blue sky with you know um somebody had to think how can we find out what's up there you know without disturbing it how can we sample it how can so somebody had to think of how are we going to get a sample where in the world are we going to do it how do we know if it's representative you know then what do we do with the data and how long do we need to monitor it
for before we understand something about the meaningfulness of those data yeah over the last 50 years the way in which we've been able to monitor the world and i think particularly now thinking about the way we can monitor from space so remote this is really kind of bringing sort of satellite science and technology and physics and you know space science and and land monitoring into all of this bringing it all together so i don't care if you call yourself an engineer or whatever but
somehow we've all managed to work together to get brilliant um aerial monitoring of the planet so from space we can view a resolution that we could never view before even the health of wetlands the migration of species on the planet the um the extent to which we have droughts and floods and and how where storms are coming from and how much advanced warning we can give people to help reduce the impact of those storms so you know it's really amazing so we don't
need to necessarily think of ourselves as engineers maybe we all need to go back to being natural scientists like alexander von humboldt or something like that being these polymaths that can think from all different perspectives because on the edges of our disciplines and where we rub against where we think the start of another discipline is that's often where the sparks fly that's often where the great ideas come from and maybe that links back to what i was saying about those
empathetic leadership discussions it's about not just thinking in your role as a you know a corporate ceo it's maybe thinking about your role as a dad and a husband and a grandfather or a mother or a grandmother in that role and maybe that's the thing that makes you realize your values and gets you to move forward or to listen to the science or to change the way in which you operate in a professional basis so i realize i've gone a little bit off topic but i just wanted to say that it's
working across sectors not in our silos that's actually gonna you know give us the right solutions yeah yeah that's true that that does happen quite a lot in science people i specialize in this and that's what i'm gonna focus on but i mean i was laughing because you said we should all be natural sciences that is what my undergraduate degree started off being called i was i started off studying natural sciences and i just sort of picked all these like kind of random subjects through my career
and always spanned across things but yeah you're right it's about identifying like what is your interest and what can you bring to this and what i guess what solutions can you bring whether that's the blue sky thinking uh that someone else can act on or making a new device or engineering something to be better i think also communication could be needed in the set of skills you just mentioned i just needed to jump in just to say add communication because if you don't communicate your science
no one would know about it that's very true that's what i used to tell my phd students all the time there's no point in you doing something if you can't write it down in your thesis or in a paper that you'll have peer reviewed and published you can't just do it in isolation you need to let people know about it so they can also build on it right that's what scientists do they should be building on each other and trying to collaborate i know there are often differences of um
viewpoints based on different evidence in science but i think the climate debate is one where all many many scientists have come together to say yes this we're agreed this is happening we need to do something so that's what brings us back to the actions that everyone can take it's not just about the scientists and engineers that can help with the climate emergency i think everyone has a role to play like you know what do you do if you're not a scientist so yeah you can take in that
information right but then what do you do with it exactly so i mean if you're not a scientist and you're not kind of you know contributing in one of those silos that we were just talking about as an engineer or some other kind of professional or a ceo what can you do well i mean i think every single one of us has got a power actually it's maybe strange to think about it in that way every single one of us has got power in this equation we um we've got the ability to change the questions that we
ask ourselves to to change the ways that we act so maybe we could instead of taking a half hour i mean a half a mile journey in the car that's an easy walk or a cycle and if all of those half mile journeys or one mile journeys we're not done with um combustion engines then collectively we'd make a big difference in the world and equally you know we can think about our diet what we're what we're eating i mean there's lots of evidence to say that you know if you
you take red meat out of your diet for one or two meals a week that if everybody did that it would make a huge difference to emissions and to you know carbon budgets um and similarly you know just little things like maybe not using the washing machine as often and that brings me to a really funny story actually about behavior change so you know if you're in a hotel you get the towels and you think well that's nice fluffy towel use that and you could put it down on the floor and it'll get
washed but you must all have seen those um hotels that have the little sign that says you know help us save the environment you know don't use you don't put your towel in the wash if you don't need to maybe you could use it again but we're happy to wash it if you want us to wash it when they first started rolling out that campaign there was a bit of a study so this was a social science a behavior change science study that was done to try and figure out what the most
effective message would be to get people to use their towels more than once if they were staying for more than one night and so they tried out different messages and they in different rooms they had different messages to see which ones were most effective at changing the laundry because every time you have to do more laundry it's power so you need energy for the laundry you need water and you're potentially polluting the environment because you're using detergents and probably you're shipping
it off in a car to a laundret somewhere else so you're using fossil fuels and you're creating emissions so a really good thing we could do is try and reduce all of that so what do you think they find out was it saving the environment that made people change was it saving energy saving water that made people change their behaviors no it was thinking about what other people did so the message that seemed to change the behavior the most was to say you know nine out of ten people that use
this room before you have chosen to use their towel for a second day and so people understanding that they were not doing something different that they were doing something good but it was okay because everyone else was doing it too that helps the behavior is contagious that's what you're saying or maybe just there's that thing about acceptance and and and you know people being a bit worried about their behaviors and what's okay and what's not okay and what you know might be frowned
upon or seen as not being the right thing to do i think if you have this feeling that other people are doing it too it's hugely empowering it gives you that kind of confidence to maybe do it so yeah we all do have power and i think actually that that lovely story about the towels actually just reminds me that if we talk about climate actions that we're taking as individuals it becomes okay for your neighbor or your friend or person on the bus that you speak to
through your mask it becomes okay for them to do those actions too because they realize that you know first of all they might not realize they could do it and second of all they realize that other people around them are doing those actions so you don't have to be a scientist or an engineer or a ceo to make a difference every single one of us can make a difference towards these targets and you certainly don't have to go to cop and take part in negotiations to make a difference no funny you should
say about those signs in hotel rooms for towels because i've been seeing those for well over 10 years now well before there was all this talk about the climate summits and various other things so that i can remember anyway and i always thought yeah i want to do that i want to do the thing with the towels and every time i hung my towel up on the hook so i could reuse it rather than putting it on the floor it would still get washed yeah and i got so annoyed of it getting
washed when i didn't want it to yeah i have the same experience with the hotel sometimes i hide my towel underneath the pillow that won't get washed and they find it i guess that's their job they're there to make sure everything is as clean and as as the hotel says it should be unless someone else has i think it you know it's funny isn't it and i think maybe something like cop 26 and all the press it's getting you know maybe i'm you know just listening to the radio occasionally
if i went through to get a cup of tea or or a lunch today while i was working all of the radios um the talk shows on the radio we do four different radio stations radio scotland they all seem to have you know a topic around climate change and it was it's very much in the public forum at the moment and and i think the more that it becomes a normal thing to talk about and to discuss and to to realize is important then then hopefully you know it won't be about trying to stop people from washing
your towels if you don't want them to it'll be about you know well you don't get your towel washed unless you absolutely ask for it because we all know it will become common sense common knowledge common practice yeah i think it will become more aware uh social awareness is the the word for it yeah i mean just general awareness and i think you know people are beginning to demand it so um there was a study that came out last week i think from natural england and he said that 80
of young people wanted to do more to protect the planet now all of those young people have got parents and all those young people are going to be going to through school they're going to be going into work experience they're going to be going into uni you've got 80 that is a large majority of that youth population that is already aware of the need to do something so i don't think that they'll be if they go into to work for these hotels and things like that
they might not necessarily be picking up those towels and putting them in the wash because they already have that perspective of wanting to do something so i have a huge hope although there's still a lot of negotiations to be had there's a lot of agreements and conversations and voting and all the rest of it to be had and there's some doubts about the success of cop26 i don't think it's in the bag yet but i've got hope it's interesting you mentioned this study about the 80 percent of the
younger generation because a few weeks back and on d we had the giant dorm and he was listening to the kids talking and all the children and the kids were talking about how this giant prophet is made of the stuff that the the sea spelled out and how they should not throw us through uh throw stuff near the sea on the sea and put the stuff in the pen instead it was not only one kid like it was i listened to few random conversation i overheard it when i was moving around
and it seems all the kids are very aware that is pollution is a huge issue that is threatening the sea and the sea creatures and they need to protect that so that aligns quite very well with what you said there about the study yeah i mean i think if we don't if we don't make the change within our teaching we'll be behind the carver waiter you know this is the time that is what the the kids are expecting us to be teaching front and center you know when they come into a degree program like us
so we have to step up you know it's our responsibility it's one of the things one of the powers that we have is to do that more and to do it better you know on behalf of the next generation because they need to have the skills and the knowledge to hit the ground running they are not going to be able to to hang about and wait until somebody else does something so we need to help them i feel like this could be like the the script of a film where like the students are coming in and telling
the lecturers how it is and what they should be doing and telling them they're doing things wrong yeah well i mean you know we have to be agile we have to move with the times and you know what i mean it's important isn't it i mean i was at that same event that router was just talking about it was a cop 26 celebration event in in dundee and um they had this big uh puppet 10 meters tall made out of recycled and i was actually running a a public science communication event there where i had a
house and rain gardens i was explaining nature-based solutions and the way in which it relates to my research thinking about getting multiple benefits from the way in which we engineer the environment for managing water but also for biodiversity carbon capture and all the rest of it there was so much interest from young people from parents from teachers who came along that wanted to know you know could we do this in our school yard can we do this in our backyard so there was just a tremendous
amount of interest so i would absolutely support what rueda said about you know overhearing those conversations about that interest that there is particularly among young people and you know our teachers are responding we're lecturers we're responding the professions are responding so that's what gives me hope i do have hope and i do have a lot of optimism but i also you know do have a practical and realistic head on my shoulders as well and i know that there's still hurdles to overcome and
let's just hope that the cop 26 negotiations can overcome those political and socioeconomic hurdles to help us all head in the right direction because the sooner we do it the better it will be yeah let's hope so i'll see some more positive actions that will uh lead to a brighter future yeah so nature-based solutions it's so critical i mean i think that these nature-based solutions of working with nature and natural processes so there was a study published in nature oh the
nature as in the scientific journal in may of this year and it suggested that working with nature-based solutions could basically have a 10 gigaton carbon equivalent difference so 5 gigatons would be about avoided emissions because we were putting nature there rather than something else that would otherwise have had emissions and five gigatons of that would be about carbon sequestration so because we've worked with nature and vegetation takes in carbon and it stores carbon
but that 10 gigatons is equivalent to the all of the global transport emissions so nature-based solutions using plants thinking about inclusive blue and green infrastructure so still it's still infrastructure so we're engineering nature but we're using nature we're working with natural processes it's really applied sort of um landscape and engineering science you're getting functional engineering benefits but you're also getting biodiversity and all sorts of good health benefits and
things like that never mind the carbon you know um never mind the carbon equation but just the carbon equation on its own at 10 gigatons is equal to all of the global transport emissions so i mean it is incredible to think about that and um you know maybe maybe it's something that might be of interest just for another day yeah i think it would be because it also sort of suggests we can carry on doing what we're doing and nature will take care of it which i don't think is really
the right way of looking at it because human activity got us into the situation we're in and human activity should really get us out of it and it'll take a mixture of things for working with nature and also engineering our own technologies to just do things yeah i mean we might have some really high-tech sort of you know carbon sucking technology next to a rain garden and they're both doing a great thing for the carbon challenge but you know they're doing it in different ways and so we're
going to need all of that we're going to need the high-tech innovations we're going to need the stuff that we don't haven't even invented yet and but what we can't do at coffee is we can't rely on the stuff that we haven't even invented yet we can we can't promise actions that aren't practicable so i think that's what it's really going to boil down to yeah so i guess we'll be watching what the outcome of the negotiations is because if they do decide to then go
down the route of technology that isn't there yet i'll be very disappointed i guess but in the meantime in the meantime we need to keep developing that technology so we can't what we're saying is we can't rely on it to get to 2030 or maybe even mid-century but maybe beyond then if we've you know if we've got technology readiness for these new ideas then maybe they can become part of the equation when actually we've done all the stuff that we can do now and we need
other solutions to help us out going forward so yeah we have to do that blue sky thinking horizon scanning new technologies definitely part of the part of the uh the bigger picture yeah yeah oh yeah all those different approaches to how you do science and what science means to you yeah i think that was a really good sort of summing up then as well if what cop 26 can achieve if the negotiations go as well as they could so it sounds like we're sort of saying there are loads of
things that science engineering is doing to help with the climate emergencies and all that modeling that you mentioned gone into space and looked at what the planet is doing you mentioned those nature-based solutions that i think could probably be an episode in their own right because they sound really interesting and probably quite complex to figure out because i'm used to working in the lab where you can control quite a lot of your variables but going out into nature
to do it that's a whole different ballgame so maybe we could pick that up in a future episode um i think cop26 is also a great example of how scientists and engineers influence national policies and so they're decided by various governments right so that's a very practical example of how science and engineering makes a difference to the world yeah of course we we vote in our governments right so if we've got 80 of kids wanting to do something better for the planet i wonder what the voting
pattern's going to look like in a few years time so those governments are you know they're elected by us for the most part around the world not always but um certainly in the uk we have an elected government so they ought to be doing what their constituents um want them to do right so maybe what we want them to do is going to change a bit as well and that's going to influence policy in the future yeah start start influencing your um mps it's another power that we all
have yeah yeah use that science and get out there and influence yeah and yeah we also talked about how science can help predict the future so it could explain what will happen if we don't take action and i think that's really important so again use use those predictions to go out there and influence people and we also mentioned a little bit about how you could develop new technologies um and again how it can help us work with nature so two very different things new tech working with
nature you've mentioned social science so it can also help to change our habits um which i think is probably the greatest challenge because i know i have some very bad habits and i've tried to break them and i'm still doing them not necessarily climate related ones but bad habits do exist and they are difficult to change so on that very weird note to end podcast episode i think i'll leave it there so if you want to have any comments on any of this if you're listening whether it's about
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