Building a future where humanity will thrive, with Achim Steiner

including my own family in India. One of the things that concerns me most about climate change is that it may erode those markers of development, undoing decades of hard work, and by some measures, it's already happening. The Human Development Index has followed a steady upward trend since it was introduced in the nineteen nineties. Now it has been done

to fall. But really what excites me about the coming decades is that many of the solutions to our climate problem, clean energy, a more just inclusive financial system, inevitable international collaboration, all have the potential to radically transform people's lives. Build this future, and humanity will continue to thrive. This view is one of the driving forces behind the work of

my guest today, Achim Steiner. He's the head of the United Nations Development Program, which works in one hundred and seventy countries to promote sustainable development, democracy, peace and resilience. We are a development institution that believes in the future, the notion of living in the age of the anthroposcene. It is very much about understanding that we are failing to respond as a human family to the magnitude of the challenges of our time. But behind that is a

second story. We live in an age of extraordinary possibility. The UNDP is one of the oldest institutions in the United Nations and uses it's roughly four billion dollars annual budget to work with twenty two thousand people around the globe, combating issues as wide ranging as access to HIV and AIDS, medication, poverty, eradication,

and digital inclusion. I sat down with Akim at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year to talk about the opportunities and threats climate change poses to global development, how countries can plan for more climate refugees, and what a rising inequality means for a world facing multiple crises. Akim, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here, Thank you now. Climate change threatens to reverse progress on many of the

development indicators like poverty, prosperity, education. Is climate change the biggest threat to human development over the next century? You know, it has already emerged as one of the biggest threats, and I would say there's not even over the next century. I think it is probably over the next few decades.

One of the things that I think we're all beginning to realize right now is that we have arrived in the age of climate change, not just as a scientific proposition, not as some would still perhaps want to portray the science fiction. You know, just a few days ago we hosted in Geneva a meeting to bring the world together to support Pakistan and trying to recover from these catastrophic floods last year, where one third of the country was inundated.

Climate change is beginning to impact literally hundreds of millions of people. So yes, I think it is genuinely the

greatest threat to the future of development. But and here in lines also in a sense, the other half of the coin, it is also the greatest opportunity to transform development in the twenty first century from being essentially an extractive, polluting, and often depreciating pathway to how we have grown our economy as our GDP at great expense to people, health impacts from pollution, loss, biodiversity, ecosystems, and now climate change, which is literally taking us to a tipping point in

terms of many of the fundamental life support systems on the planet. So a very dark scenario if we don't act,

and actually a potentially transformative scenario if we do act. Indeed, the inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change, which puts out these massive, thousands of pages reports every six to seven years, those reports aren't read widely, but if you do get a chance to read one of those reports, what you see is it paints a picture first off, devastation that's coming, that has come, what we need to do to address it.

And then it goes into this direction which has become a new direction for it, which is, if you do implement those solutions, the world becomes a better place, not just better in terms of where we are headed now if we could use the technologies we do have now, but just better in all the metrics that humans would

consider as progress metrics. Indeed, and I think this has been in a sense the extraordinary story of the late twenties century the early twenty first century, that here is humanity with seven eight billion people seeing red lines flashing

on all major radar screens. In terms of the future, where it is on pollution, where it is on the prospit of far greater frequency of natural disasters, extreme weather events, many of the things that actually threaten hundreds of years of progressive development, in terms of our infrastructure, in terms of our ability to survive in for example, small island developing states that may simply disappear with C level rise. And you are right in some ways these are very

scientific and complex documents. They also are a reflection of a journey of discovery that humanity has gone through. And thankfully because the UN was able to establish an inter governmental panel on climate change independent of national interests of industry lobbing. It is really a documentation of the state of knowledge about climate change. Now none of us have to read it, because we also go to a doctor and you allow them to operate on us without having

studied the manual for a surgery. And I think this is the same. The scientists of the world are giving us both an understanding of the threat of inaction, what climate change means if it simply continues, and what we have seen increasingly is across the world, a twenty first century economy being invented, reinvented, the green economy, the clean economy,

the decarbonization pathway. And I think from where I sit today as head of our United Nations Development program, my focus is exclusively on how to actually think about the future of development as an opportunity decarbonization today, the prospect of having renewable energy, infrastructure and electricity supplies available in ways that perhaps would have been unimaginable ten years ago addresses so many of the risks to our society's energy security, pollution,

their affordability. For example, of connecting hundreds of millions or citizens on the African continent while still developing national grid infrastructure, mini grade off greate, solar renewable these are all shortcuts to access to electricity. And you know, one thing that we have learned in the last few hundred years is that energy and particular electricity, our fundamental drivers of development.

So even for addressing poverty, eradication, addressing the inequality that exists across the planet today, these kinds of technologies are in fact the accelerators for development, including addressing energy poverty. Right now, we shall come to how the UNDP is addressing some of those concerns that feed both the development agenda and the climate agenda. But let's just take a step back in history. We talked about the inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change. It's only about thirty years old.

The unf tripl C, which is the unbody behind the climate activities that are held every year, the copy events that are held, is also only a little bit more than thirty years old. The UNDB was created at nineteen sixty five, much before we thought of climate as a threat. So just walk us through the brief history of why the UNDB was created and what briefly you think it

has achieved over the past fifty years. Well, first of all, I think one always has to look at an organization such as the United Nations Development Prize being embedded in the United Nations system. The United Nations since its establishment, has had multiple mandates. Keeping the peace or avoiding conflict certainly is at the center of it, but so is the humanitarian work that we do, you know, when disaster strikes,

when conflicts occur. But increasingly throughout the fifties and sixties, the development mandate began to become much more central because as developing countries were becoming independent nations as also, the acceleration of industrialization led to essentially a divergent pathway where wealthy, industrialized nations were growing very fast, and yet developing countries were lacking the technologies, the skills, the institutional capacities, and

also the capital to invest in the accelerated development that we will seeing across the planet. There was an increasing realization that a few nations developing fast and billions of people being left behind is not a very viable proposition. So UNDP initially was set up as a funding mechanism to bring more resources to accelerating development support to countries. Now,

obviously development is not something that is static. We sometimes look at development as if it's a matter of helping a country to get to a certain level of capital or GDP per capital, and that puts countries into least developed countries, middle income countries, other middle income countries, let's say, in a sense, anachronism, because really development is the continuous pursuit of choices and options that societies have to make about their future. Initially, early on, it was about access

to education, healthcare, basic infrastructure, electricity. Then decided addressing also new threats such as the advent of AIDS, non communicable diseases. Today they live in an age where, for example, digitalization is fundamentally changing the trajectory of development. How do we achieve digital inclusion? How do we also address phenomena that have to do, for example, with discrimination. Today we have the twenty thirty Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, a smarter,

a also more contemporary view. The development is not solved by silver bullets, not by solving one problem alone. We are talking about economic transitions, ecological transitions, addressing issues of social justice and inequality that you are really beginning to tear societies apart. Inequality, the obvious inaction on climate change and environmental destruction, getting more and more people to the point where they lose faith in the institutions of government,

maybe in the economy, in businesses. And that's the point at which we today work with governments addressing this complex, this sense of uncertainty about the future now that can suddenly start to film very overwhelming. So one way in which when I was thinking about speaking to you was just the story of my life. I come from India, I grew up there. My grandfather completed high school and then got onto a factory floor and was able to raise three sons who each went on to eventually start

a business. And that's why they could make some wealth and allow the next generation children like me to be able to study abroad and get to sit here in Davos and talk to the world's elite. But it was a process of prosperity that was backed by fundamentally development

happening in India. My grandfather lived through a period where India would have had the chance of having severe famine in the seventies and that didn't happen, partly because of development programs like the Green Revolution that brought higher productivity

to Indian farms. There were other development programs that involved money being transferred to India for progress on things like rollout of more efficient lighting which saves energy, allowed for more people to get access to light at night, which improves productivity, which improves outcomes, for women's safety, for education among children. These are things that I have seen in my lifetime play out. But if we get to the specific, can you point to programs that UNDP did in specific

places that you hold as proud achievements. I think in many countries and as I travel today as the head of UNDP, the feedback that I receive most often is that UNDP has been a partner and companion to developing countries for decades. We are not an institution that in a sense comes in, lends you some money, or maybe implements one project. We are an expression first of all of the United Nations commitment to developing countries to be a partner to them for the long run, but also

through sometimes tough times. Increasingly we have also been an

institution that is associated with good governance. Good governance means transparency, it means having no corruption, but it also means how citizens can participate, how people don't decide for others what is good for them, and also to sure that no one is left behind very often, whether we're talking about issues of gender, the exclusion of youth, or by ethnicity or by age, and perhaps even understanding how indigenous peoples, both through their autonomy but also belonging to nation states,

need to be understood and engage in the development process in different ways. So governance also has to with fundamental human rights, but above all, it also has to do with the role of government and the state in regulating and providing in a society for the kinds of judiciary and legislative processes that make citizens believe that they're actually represented in their country and their views shape the national

development choices. More recently, we have the way that we think about the role of UANDP focused more and more on the future of development. We have often focused in the past on solving problems that are legacy problems, lack of access to education, lack of access to electricity, and in the least developed countries that still very often is our folks, but for many countries middle income countries also who often turned to UNDP for our advice, for our input,

for our support. It's more the issues of the future. How do we deal with inequality growing in most countries, how do we deal with industrialization in a decarbonization age, how do we deal with essentially transforming our energy systems from a fossil fuel hydrocarbon based system to clean energy, and how do we deal with digitalization? And also how do we deal with the private sector that is not

only large corporations. Every small scale farmer is a private sector actor, every social entrepreneur, every startup is a private sector operator. But if we think about it from the

historical lens. One thing that we didn't touch upon in my story is India was a colony of Britain, and a lot of the lack of progress and development is tied to colonialism, to a period of extraction that happened, that took wealth away, that took resources away, that took the very fabric of soci the instructure and governance away during a period of hundreds of years. Is the UNDP

in some way an apology from the rich countries. Reparations might be allotted term to help those countries that they colonize, which are now run by people who are aware of the abuses that happened, as a way to ensure that those colonies can get back to speed to where they were before colonialism. Look, it's an interesting question, and if

I were to comment on is it an apology? I would say, well, given the volume of extraction that happened through the colonial period, and if you take the discourse about the economic center and the periphery, then UNDPS work over the last few decades is a pretty small apologies. So I would not necessarily see that as the principal

rationale for UNDPS existence. I think on the country. It's more the growing realization, just like in many societies, that if inequality, if the sense of injustice and of exclusion grows continuously, it ultimately undermines the fabric and the viability of societies. We live today in the twenty first century in a globalized economy, but it's not only about trade. People try to reduce globalization to trade and essentially you know how countries can export and input from one another.

We also live in an age where we are connected to each other by news, by for example, the pollution of one country determining the very fate of another country five thousand miles away in the Pacific. We need to have a mature reflection on what is it that has gone wrong with globalization, which essentially was a sort of unleashing of economic forces in a very unequal world. So

it also created extraordinary progress. Let's not deny that China would not have been able to reduce the number of people living in poverty and extreme poverty by seven hundred million over the last twenty five thirty years. India, just in the last few years, again through economic growth and job creation, has helped one hundred million people escape poverty. But you know, at the same time, people are not only per capita income creatures. We're not robots. We also

look at injustice. We know so much more about what is possible, and when we, for example, discuss an issue such as migration today, migration is very often also an expression of hopelessness. It's sometimes the product of conflict, of extreme disasters, but more often than all that it is young people looking at what their life would look like if they stayed at home, or seeing every day what

life could be like if you were somewhere else. This translates into terrible debates about migration that I find very often offensive, because, particularly in societies that actually have benefited from migration themselves have been the product of migration, sometimes take the harshest view of migrants today. The very fact is we have always been a world that has moved around, but inequality has created such amplification of these pressure points that we are no longer managing it in a way

that is actually a positive. It is dividing as it is polarizing us. And so going back to your example of India, you know, India just in the last few years has again demonstrated that there is always a historical narrative and also a reason for where things in a sense emanated from. But we've also seen in the story of India is that it is reinventing itself in the

twenty first century. Who would have thought ten years ago that India would today be the largest investor in a short period of just ten years of building four hundred and fifty thousand megawats of clean energy infrastructure in India. Yeah, these are the kinds of revolutions that also have increasingly to do with how governments and how economies make choices. Let's try and put some numbers to how much money

is spent from the UNDP relative to other organizations. So the unf Triple c has a budget of tens of millions of euros. It's based in bond in Germany. That's why the budget is in euros. The UNDP, the last numbers we checked was that you raise about six and a half billion dollars and you give out about four and a half billion dollars. There's some surplus that's orders of magnitude more than what a climate change committee is

able to pull off. What specifically happens with that money, and that may be large money relative to what we're talking in climate world, but it's very small money relative to any large economies government budget. So what do you do with it? And how do you ensure that with that much money you're able to achieve these really important goals. I mean, first of all, just put a little bit of perspective on the We receive six now billion, but we only spend four now a billion might make some

people say, well, we have two billion gns. So in part this has to do that during COVID in the crisis, we receive multi year financing agreements. Therefore, in one year our income may be six now billion, but is actually

to them be spent over two or three years. So on average, UNDP at the moment has roughly four and a half billion dollars at Many different countries, including many developing countries, invest in order to have UNDP as a partner at their side, and these four and a half billion dollars enable us first of all, to be the backbone to the United Nations development system. Because UNDP has

this remarkable presence across the globe. We operate in one hundred and seventy countries, virtually unmatched by any other development organization. We are part if you want, in many respects of the national development ecosystem, and in that sense a partner that countries turned to sometimes to think about very taxing issues, short term crisis, but also to think about yes, energy transition,

addressing social injustice, eradication of poverty. So do you have a number that says for every dollar that UNDB spends, there is x amount of dollars that come from other places, that other governments, from private sector to support the goals that you're pursuing. It's very difficult to do that because I mean we receive four and a half billion dollars in new made a contrast, for example, the UNF Triple C,

the Framework Convention Secretary of the Climate Change Convention. Now the mandate of the Convention and the Secretary is essentially to convene the conference of the parties to support and

monitor the implementation of that agreement. We are actually the largest implementer of climate change support projects across the world, so we actually work very much in tandem in complementarity with UNF Triple C. A Paris Agreement triggers financing through the Green Climate Funds, through the Global Environment Facility countries then turned to UNDP and say will you work with us in order to access this funding, help us invested.

So we are today the implementer of the largest portfolio of climate projects on mitigation, on adaptation in the whole UN system. And can we talk about some of those specific projects. Yes, let me give you one of the latest ones that's starting just now. Renewable energy, particularly in the African continent, is still in a sense finding its feed both between national regular three frameworks and the opportunity in terms of actually a shortcut to access to electricity.

So on the one hand, we help many countries review their energy sector regulatory framework because very often it prevents independent power producers. If I have a solar panel, I cannot sell my electricity to the national grid. How do

you change that environment? It's called de risking. At the other end is we have with GF funding, launched a program in twenty one countries on the African continent now on mini grids, essentially helping countries would in place the legislation, secure the financing, look at the targeting of where these are most effectively deployed, and potentially helping one hundred million people to gain access to electricity affordable and clean electricity

in a few years time. We are also helping, as I mentioned at the beginning, countries such as Pakistan to raise in the international community and understanding that what happened last year with those extreme floods has a great deal to the climate change. In EVA, the Secret Journal of the UN and the Prime Minister of Pakistan managed to bring together an international community to pledge nine billion dollars

towards a climate resilient reconstruction rehabilitation effort. This is what we do every day across the world and across many different sectors, depending on where a country sees the greatest priority. After the break, why has the human Development index gone into decline? And how can we avoid increasing inequality as

we take climate action? In terms of migration, which is something you've touched upon, what we do know is that climate migration has begun and it's expected to accelerate because emissions haven't fallen to zero, and until they don't, temperatures will rise and climate impacts will And so what is it that the UNDB is doing now to start dealing with what's likely to be an even larger migration event happening it's first of all to understand migration is not

an isolated phenomenon in its own You want to address migration, you have to address development. You address development in a sense of creating opportunities. You actually first will remove one factor, which is the pull factor. I know something on the other side of the Atlantic, of the Mediterranean, of the border to my neighboring country is so much more promising. In fact, the promise needs to be my own country.

So that is one of the greatest weapons we have in terms of avoiding people feeling forced to leave the country they call home in order to look for economic opportunity elsewhere. That's what when people also say, look development, a development corporation, and these things that we did in the sixties and seventies, and here I always look the era of development at has long passed. What we do

today is is to have development corporation. We need to invest in one another in order to be able to tackle the challenges that might have to with climate change on the one then, but may also have to do with technology, infrastructure and energy on the other. And so from my perspective, we need to understand migration first of all as something that should be a choice that is not forced on you, but that you make because you

actually believe this is where you want to be. The un is doing a lot of work to first of all, deal with the pressures around migration. But UNDP in particular is an institution that is in the front lines of addressing the very factors that push people out of their homes, and that has to do, for examples, with climate change responses adaptation. How do you help people not lose everything

when an extreme weather event occurs. How do we invest, for example, in rural economies in order to not have this phenomenon where more and more people feel they can only migrate to the city if they want to survive here. Again,

digital becomes very interesting. Fiber optic cables that reach provincial capitals begin to connect people in the rural areas, means that suddenly not only do you have access to a new universe or services of markets, you also have young people not having to live in a slum in the capital city in order to try and make it in

this new economy. But you can actually go back, live with your family and work in that digital economy of today where you are physically far less bound to be in places where traditionally they were the only point of access. It's a way of thinking about development as opportunities abounding, but we need good public policy. A key area of our work is to help governments quickly learn from each

other and then help governments to experiment. Because every country has its own reality, you have to then adapt to national circumstances. Something that the UNDP tracks is the Human Development Index. Indeed, and since nineteen ninety the Human Development Index was steadily increasing, which meant more people were able to live a fuller potential of life. And then in twenty nineteen that trend reversed. This is a global average, but it has reversed on average, and that was pre COVID.

In part, pre COVID, we already saw some of the economic challenges being phased, but particularly the number that we published in the twenty twenty one Human Development Report took COVID into account. And the remarkable thing is that for the first time in over thirty years of the Human Development Report being produced and the Human Development Index being calculated, we have seen two consecutive years in which the Human Development Index has gone backwards. But you know, not just

as an average. In fact, almost ninety percent of the countries have seen reversals, including places like the US. Exactly, I was just going to mention life expectances in the US. It's not just incomes, it's the quality of life, the number of people living in extreme poverty again, food and hunger crisis that are re emerging. So we are living through a period of a major setback in development, which

is explainable by a pandemic. Now the ripple effects of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine on world food markets, world

energy markets, world financial markets. One of the greatest burdens that developing countries are bearing right now as a result of what is happening across the world is that we are seeing a response to inflation going hand in hand with the rise in interest rates, and so the debt burden has now reached a point where UNDP's latest estimates are that there are fifty one developing economies that are literally under dead distress and one step away from that default.

And you know, to the world's financial system. It may not be a significant part of the global GDP, but it's actually twelve percent of the world's population, and it's thirty percent of the poorest people on the planet that live in those fifty one countries. Just imagine what this means. Because we often talk about statistics per capita GDP interest rates. This is men and women, girls and boys whose lives are being fundamentally disrupted. Maybe cannot attend school, my father

cannot take his daughter to a local health clinic. Families cannot feed their children with you know, sufficient food every day. This is how our global discussions, including here and DA has often become far too abstract. Talk about global recession, we talked about markets. This is millions of people's lives being fundamentally disrupted, absolutely and without them having to be blamed for it. You know, this is the flip situation.

My life got better because of some work that my parents did, but largely because being in a country at the time of development that helped them live to their full potential. And that's being taken away from millions of people. But actually, this is also why I'm such a passionate believer in development cooperation, in the idea that development is about choices, and these choices that are first of all well informed and certainly are made with social justice and

sustainability in mind, actually are the key to progress. And you know, the story of development over the last two hundred years is in many respects a phenomenal success story. You and I are products of it. You coming out of India. I was born the son of farmers. They lived in Brazil. I got a good education, I found opportunities in which to follow my own passion. As a

development economists, we can all tell stories. And the tragedy of development is when the possibility is not available to people. This is why we talk about access to education, about

access to energy and electricity, access to finance. That's the great divider in our societies, and that's why inequality has become such a poisoned chalice, so to speak, in our modern world, because in our fixation to grow economies, to create wealth, we simply lost sight of the fact that you know, wealth in aggregate and average terms means nothing to somebody who has now access to the internet today.

A report came out by Oxfam in January that's a two thirds of the new wealth generated since twenty twenty has been captured by the richest one percent, while only a third has gone to the remainder. Can human development and climate goals be achieved in such a system. The simple answer is no for two reasons. One because societies will ultimately not tolerate this kind of inequality, and frankly speaking,

first of all, it's not essential. I often wonder whether you know the Jeff Basis or the Elon Musco this world would have somehow stayed in bed if they had only earned one one hundredth of what they have earned. And we all know the answer. No, their entrepreneurs, they're innovators. It's just in the way that our economy or financial

system operates today. And the un Sacred Journal has repeatedly now called out the global financial system also as essentially reflecting a moral bankruptcy that is making it impossible to address some of the issues that we could tackle in The second answer to the wonderful work that Oxen does in showing all policy options taxation of some fiscal policy options, is that was just taxing five percent of that global wealth, the billionaires wealth, as it is referred to, will generate

one point seven trillion dollars. That's one thillion and another seven hundred billion dollars. Yeah. Can I just remind the world that we can't even get it together right now in the rich world to coinvest one hundred billion dollars on climate change with developing countries. This is what's wrong in our world, And I think Oxfan's lends on the wealthy and opportunities to leverage that wealth in a way that could solve so many problems, on education, on access

to energy. I think it's just a reminder that we need to rethink the way we run our lives, our economies, but also in the way we want to live together. With eight billion people on this planet. We saw a massive inequality in the distribution of COVID vaccines and resources during the pandemic. How do we reduce this inequality with a more persistent but slower burning problem like climate change?

And just to put here, as of July, seventy two percent of people in high income countries were vaccinated, in low income countries only twenty one percent. Well, you may raise an eyeber action, and so well some of your listeners, but I would argue very strongly multilateralism is fundamental to this. If we live in a kind of geopolitical Darwinist world where the strongest, the wealthiest will simply set the rules for the twenty first century and beyond, I think we

will produce problems that will be insurmountable and unmanageable. So multilateralism as an expression of nations coming around the table essentially with very unequal realities, very unequal means. But in the symbolism of the UN General Assembly, every nation, however small or large, has one vote there. They have a seat in that hall. We need to evolve that model that was built after the Second World War into a twenty first century platform for cooperation on the fundamental challenges

that no country individually consolves. So therein lies one answer, I think to what you have outlined, And the second part is just the ability to think of solutions as not being beyond our reach. And I think there we need to learn to work more with the scientific community, with the private sector and not always think of the private sector also as multinationals. The greatest percentage of renovations around the world generally emanate from around kitchen tables and garages.

You know, it's individual so solve problems, but then sometimes don't find the attention to support to make them available to the world at large. So these are the transformations I think that we will hopefully see happen much faster and as a climate change reporter, I've thought about what climate is going to do to the world for years now. The threat that many see, especially in Western countries, is that their lives are going to be disrupted and their

quality of life is going to be poorer. That certainly is a possibility. But the fear that I have, which is the greatest fear, is of development metrics reversing and then never we're getting to the golden age that many many countries lived through in the last thirty years of allowing for human potential to flourish, and that on the

aggregate feels a much larger loss. And so coming back to climate, then we started with the understanding that climate change presents the greatest threat to development, but then we ended up talking about most of the issues that are very current. So how do you make the case for acting on climate change while these other crises, which are very urgent, very important, continue to play. Look, at the end of the day, climate change is not a parallel

universe to everything else that happens in development. In fact, climate change is a consequence of millions of decisions being made in the kinds of energy infrastructure we rely on, in the kinds of transport systems, we have the sort of buildings we build. And I think that is why I so much appreciate the opportuned to now lead the United Nations development problem, because in many ways it is the institution that tries to bring together the threads that

allow us to imagine the future. That Mary Robinson, in fact, when we launched this year or the twenty twenty two UNDP Human Development Report said said there's a great deal of various sobering statistics coming out of it, but built within that report is also a narrative that says that the greatest of times may still lie ahead of us. And I think this is crucial because we often look at climate change as if it's sort of a dragon

that we have to slay that is over here. The reason why, for example, you INDP and its current strategic plan set itself an almost unimaginable goal and then me to help five hundred million people gain access to cleaning affordable energy was a way of saying, look, we will make climate change as a threat converted into an opportunity part of everything we do. We don't yet quite know how to do this, but we think it is perfectly feasible.

And that is why you see UNDP today being a major player in many countries in helping to rethink energy systems, looking at the way in which access to electricity is not just a fundamental enabler of development. It's the access to affordable and clean electricity that will allow a continent

such as Africa to pivot forward. We are a development institution that believes in the future and the notion of living in the age of the Anthropocene, which has become a theme that we have also explored in our human development ports. It is very much about understanding that we are failing to respond as a human family to the magnitude of the challenges of our time. But behind that is a second story. We live in an age of extraordinary possibility of being able to leverage technology and finance

and human ingenuity to actually make very different choices. And you know what, last year, eighty one percent of all new electricity, generally infrastructure that came on to the greater or into people's houses, will actually renewable. This is proof that revolutions even in the energy sector, so locked down in hydrocarmons, so in a sense locked into political economy. In nineteen seventy seven exomobile scientists essentially wrote the true first chapter of the IPCC reports that were to follow.

It's the age of your responsibility that we live in. It's not a fatalist moment in which we simply sit back and give up. And that's the promise of development. That's the future of development that U INDP very much sees itself part of. Well. I enjoyed this a lot. We talked on very wide ranging subjects, and I could keep going in many directions for a very long time. But thank you for making the time. Thank you for

the opposite in the action. One of the things Arkim and I touched upon was Oxfam's recently published report on inequality, which shows two thirds of new wealth generated since the pandemic has been captured by the top one percent. While I was endeavors, I also spoke with Gabriella Buscher, the executive director of OXFAM, to ask her about how inequality contributes to climate change and why it is so hard

to untangle the two. Well, these are very complex and intertwined issues, and they really question the way society as a whole has been organized. So what we're saying is what can we do, What policies can we put in place to address it. And we link very much this

growing inequality with the effects on climate. So we talk about the carbon billionaires, how billionaires are in fact consuming so many times more than is compatible with a one point five degree warming, but also that they have doubled the amount of investment and fosil fuel industries than the average investor. So these things are very connected at that level. And of course the worst effects of the climate crisis are experienced in the most vulnerable places in the world.

So when I since Somalia last year, I could see the effects of these protracted droughts, which has continued and so it's the worst drought in living memory. And pastoralists who are very, very resilient people and have put up with all sorts of harsh conditions over centuries, are really no longer able to cope with these much more extreme weather events. We've linked the OXFAM report on inequality in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening to Zero.

If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, Send it to a friend, or send it to the richest person you know. Get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine

driscoll Our. Theme music is composed by Wonderlely Special thanks to Kira Bindrim Summersadi and Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum for letting us use the podcast studio by Today's conversation was order I'm Akshatrati back next week.