The lengths Lewis Pugh goes to save the oceans

who is the UN's Patron of the Oceans. He has completed a long distance swim in each of the world's oceans. He swam between icebergs in the North Pole in minus one point seven degrees celsius water in the Intarctic, and just last month completed a swim across the Red Sea past Charmel Shake, where cop is being held to raise

awareness about the health of coral reefs. We'll hear from Lewis later in the show, but first I spoke with Bloomberg's Salma el Berdani, an energy and commodities reporter based in Cairo, and Zero's producer Oscar Boyd. Salma, Oscar welcome, to the show. Thanks, thank you, Archa. Now this is the first cop for both of you. What was the cop experience like for you? Salma? It was overwhelming. It

was busy all the time. It was a lot of things happening at different places, and there is nowhere centered where you can find everything, or you can find the schedule for everything. It's all over the place, and it's very, very exhausting. And it's not the first time you're covering big meetings. You grab a ROPEC meetings every year. No, it's not the first time I've covered or pick. I've

covered devils, but it's still nothing. Nothing compares to this, And I think it's also because of the large participation of countries and civil society and activists, so it's difficult to articulate everything. And what was it for you, Oscar? I think Salmon's word choice overwhelming. It is definitely one way I'd describe it. The other where I describe it is completely surreal. We're in this isolated beach resort at kind of the end far corner of one part of Egypt.

There's no real town or potentially even real Egyptians to speak of. Here. The closest thing to our hotel is this It's called Soho Square, and the best way I could describe it is it's like Piccadilly Circus on steroids at Christmas. There's just lots of flashing lights. When we went in, a gangm style was playing, so I felt like I gone straight back to twenty ten. Yeah, bizarre, surreal and SMA. It's also one of the largest meetings held in Egypt. Dozens and dozens of world leaders came.

What has it meant for the Egyptian government to host a COP meeting. I mean it's a lot of coverage, a lot of exposure. The renewable projects and the clean energy has been always part of the government plan, but COP I think made the government focus more on this in terms of speaking about it a lot in public speeches and interviews, local media speaking about it all the time. Now.

The other thing is the amount of coverage and exposure that Egypt has is also I think it's the first time you have this since two thousand and eleven revolution. That's meant both good and bad coverage though, because it's also highlighted issues that are very real issues around political prisoners in Egypt, but also the energy transition, which is slow because financing has been difficult. Definitely the good and bad.

There was good criticism in the media in the coverage of Egypt, but also coverage of the economy, the projects, the finance, highlighting the problems not just of Egypt but also of Africa. In the run up to the Cup meeting, you wrote a fantastic story with our colleagues Laura Milan and Mirit Magdi about what a hot future would mean for Egypt. What did you learn? The climate change is a varies and has been a very very serious problem for Egypt. It's a now problem. It's not like a

future threat. It's happening now. Farmers that I interviewed in the story are suffering now in the Delta that was the sort of old agriculture and where ancient Egyptians started agriculture there. Basically, the rise of sea level is affecting the crops in the farms. You can see in the fields, you can see the salt is visible on the surface of the soil, and farmers cannot find good fresh water to arrigate their farms, and so we have to think

about solutions. And in these past two weeks, Oscar, what have been some of the most interesting solutions that you have heard about or experience. I mean they're all over the place. The one that I love spotting every time we drive to the blue zone or what I call aspirational cycle lanes that have been built along the side of the highways. But the most interesting one that I tried this week was lab grown chicken. And we tried

it together. So this is a chicken that's not grown in a chicken buy a chicken with a chicken it's chicken. It's grown in a buy a reactor in a lab actually in Singapore, and this was the first time this had actually been served outside of Singapore, so the company behind it, called Good Meat, actually had to do a deal through the Singapore government with the Egyptian government to serve the meat in Egypt for the first time. And I would describe it as chicken esque chicken ish. I mean,

it's pretty tasty. I'd definitely eat it, but it was ninety percent of the way towards chicken. Very very impressive for something that's grown in a lab. And I think it's mixed into something like a stir fry. You wouldn't even notice that it's not real chicken. On its own. It wasn't quite chicken. How do you have to say it's true? I mean, it's just chicken, right, But the experience of the full dinner was quite something. The experience

of the full dinner was amazing. But just coming back to that point, everything tastes like chickens, so you know, they've definitely started with the easiest meat to try and reproduce. But the dinner was this twelve person kind of dimly lit affair in a private villa in a hotel near the sea, and then they cooked the chicken in three

different ways. So one way it was kind of a grilled skewer type thing, the second way was a deep fried chicken skin, and then the third way was actually just a grilled over charcoal bit of chicken in quote mark's breast, which was their version three. So it's the third round of this technology that they've produced and they're serving and yeah, that was the one that was most

convincingly like chicken. And there has been news since we had that dinner because the US Food and Drug Administration has now allowed cultivated chicken to be sold in the US, so we'll see how that technology progresses. Talking of news, there was some big news with a major world leader making his visit to COP twenty seven. What was that like? So, Lula president elect of Brazil, this COP at least this

COP because I haven't I don't have a reference. This is the biggest reception any leader or any person, any public person have received in this COP. Lots and lots of people waiting, lots of singing, Hundreds of people were waiting. He made two appearances, one in the morning where cameras were stationed for three hours and people and activists and people Brazilian people in traditional clothes were all waiting for him to make his appearance, to make his speech, to

welcome him. That's not just because Boltsonaro has been kicked out, but Lula also made it very promises for climate. Yeah, I think I think his appearances is not just about elections and local issues in Brazil. I think it's also because he is after years of destruction of the Amazon, which was one of the main topics that is talked about in the in the activism community. It's also because he's putting back the Amazon at the center stage of

the climate talks. Not just that he also offered to host COP thirty in twenty twenty five from the Rainforest. He also one of the things that made the crowd really really lively and interrupting and cutting his speech is that he promised to end deferstation of the Amazon by twenty thirty. He also started the one billion dollars Amazon Fund, where countries like Norway and Germany would contribute to the illustration of the Amazon. He chose the slogan of Brazil

is Back, and that made his supporters very happy. They were very proud. Yeah, I mean that kind of rock star reception. I remember Barack Obama got that when COP twenty six happened in Glasgow. He should have gone with make the Amazon great again. Now, talking of the biggest carbon sinks, Amazon of course is a huge carbon sink.

It's also a major source of biodiversity. Now, we are here in Charmel Shaik, which is a desert landscape, but there is some amazing biodiversity around here, right, Oscar, something we got to experience. Yeah. So the middle Sunday of

COP is traditionally the rest day. So yeah, it's the one day of the two weeks where we've actually had a chance to kind of enjoy some of what Charmel Shaik has to offer, and when it's not the host city of COP twenty seven, Charmel shake is much much better known as a very popular scuba and snorkeling resort. So we went about thirty comments south of Charmoschek to the Ras Mohammad National Park and spent about half a day snow cling off the coast there and just so

the most amazing coral reefs. I used to live in Japan, where they've got plenty of plenty of coral, but a lot of that has been bleached. But this coral was just incredibly healthy, looking, incredibly bright, and the number of fish that were clearly thriving and being supported by this coral, there was just such an abundance. You've joined as well, What did you say? It's true? When I learned about the red sea corals, I found out that in fact they are quite unique because they are able to survive

in very warm temperatures. Centers still don't know for sure why that's the case, but one theory is that they migrated from even hotter oceans further south and are now able to survive even as the ocean is warming and it's acidifying. So there is hope for corals. At one point five degrees celsius, scientists say that of the coral will be wiped out. But if you can learn how these amazing red sea corals can survive this temperature, maybe

those are things that we could teach other corals. Right, And this is really important because corals cover about nine point two percent of the marine surface, so a very very small fraction of the oceans, but they host about twenty five percent of ocean life, and from an economic perspective, about half a billion people's livelihoods actually depend on coral and coral reefs, mostly from fishing, but also a little

bit from tourism as well. So protecting these corals, as we're going to hear from our guest station the show, Lewis Pue is husually important. Oscar and Selma, thank you, thanks, accent, thank you. After the break, I speak with Lewis put about his ambition to get thirty percent of the world's ocean protected, a crucial step towards dackling climate change and declining biodiversity. Louis, welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

Now you've been a swimmer for life and you've turned that passion for swimming into the ability to explain the challenges of the oceans to the world. Yeah, where did it start for you? Well, I actually haven't been a simmer for life. So I had my sort of first proper summing lesson when I was seventeen years old. I lived in Cape Town and from my history classroom I could see Robin Island in the distance. One of my

friends had swum from Robin Island to Cape Town. And then one day I thought to myself, I want to do that. Describe what that swim meant to you and why that got you on this journey. It meant everything to me. I was pretty average at sport at school. I was very much a late developer. I was seventeen years old, and so I started training, and then a

month later I was able to get a boat. We went all the way across to Robin Island and now going to swim back, and it's about eight kilometers and the water is icy cold, and there are sharks and the water anyway, for a seventeen year old, no big deal. Anyway, I started the swim and for the first hour everything was fine. By the time I got to the second hour, I was getting really cold. Two and a half hours, I was absolutely frozen. I was really thin in those days.

Eventually I just couldn't carry on anymore with the crawl, and then it was breaststroke, and then everybody in the boat was cheering me on. And then finally, after three hours in that icy cold water, I put my feet down on the sand and there were my parents. It

was my first big swim. And over a period of thirty five years, I've done swims in some of the most incredible places in the world, Mount Everest, the North Pole, down in Antarctic, etc. But nothing, not nothing at all compared to that initial feeling or putting my feet down on that sand and the joy of having made it. Oh, that's wonderful. Tell us about the Arctic swim, then, because that changed everything. This was many many years later. So living in Cape Town, you know, the nearest space is

not the Arctic, the nearest space is Antarctica. And so I always dreamed that one day I would go to the polar regions. One day I would see the great ice shelves of Antarctica. One day I would go up into the Northwest Passage in places like this, And so two thousand and seven, I decided to sail to the North Pole to go and attempt the first ever swim

across the North Pole. So what had happened was that's not something you should be able to do it right, Like the point of the Arctic and the Pole, that's supposed to be that they are frozen landscapes. This is a point. So I've specialized now over the last sort of fifteen years in undertaking swims in the most threatened environments with a very very simple message. Here's a person swimming across the North Pole, swimming across an open pa. See,

it should be frozen over. What is this saying about the health of our planet? And then afterwards trying to get these areas properly protected. And so this was obviously a huge undertaking. You've got to get all the way

to the North Pole, and it's a terrifying place. I remember standing on the ice, I remember looking in at that black water, and then I had this most dreadful thought, and thought was if things go horribly wrong, now, how long will it take for my frozen corpse to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. But I dived in and I went for it. And the doctor on the expedition, his name was Tim Noakes. He said to me, I saw you go into that swim as one person, and I saw

you come out a completely different person. And I think he was right, because I went in there as a swimmer, as an environmental campaigner. I came out the other side there with such a determination to share with the world what is happening there and how we need to fix this, because what I was seeing was how quickly the climate

crisis was taking place. I have not swim in deep oceans before, but I have learned to scuba dive, and the first time I saw corals that changed my life because I've never seen anything like it before, and ever since seeing corals every place that I can go, where I can dive, I try and dive. What is it that brought you to that moment of realizing as a swimmer that the environment is something that you want to campaign about. Yes, I mean I love corals as well,

So I've just done. As swim across the Red Sea, I swim over some of the most wonderful, amazing coral you can ever imagine, and I think of ice and Coral as the two ground zeros of the climate crisis. So I spent the last fifteen years in the polar regions. I'm seeing less and less sea ice, but the big changes were obviously seeing in the coral reefs. But I think the moment when I realized that I had to combine my swimming with a message for the environment I

was done in Antarctica. I was doing a swim in a place called Deception Island. And Deception Island is the most incredible place in Antarctica. It's got a cool name, it's got a very cool name, and it's a horseshoe shaped island because it used to be a volcano and it's still an active volcano, but it's open to the sea, and so you can actually sail into this volcano. And as you sail in, you see the steam coming off the sea. And so I thought to myself, well, I'm

going to do a really big swim here. I'm going to do a long swim. Anyway, I dived into the water and the water was between zero and three degrees, So suddenly a big swim became a really short swim. And as I started swimming, underneath me were literally thousands and thousands of whale bones, jawbones, spine bones, rib bones. This used to be one of the old whaling stations a long time ago, and the whalers would be out

at sea, they would store to the whales. They would drag them into this island and then they would melt them down. And it left a very very big mark on me. I mean sometimes the bones were parted so high that when I took a stroke, my hands were touching these whalebones, and I thought about all the incredible whales I saw as a young boy growing up in South Africa off Cape Town, And you know when you see a humpback whale or you see a big southern right whale there, it just brings joy to the heart.

These are magnificent animals, and we came so close to losing them. I mean, losing them is not the right expression.

It's like killing them, pushing them into extinction. And I like to think that those whale bones are a reminder of our potential for folly, because first we came for the seals and took them all out, and then we came for the whales and took them out, and now we're going for this type of fish down there called Antarctic toothfish, which is a fish which is so popular in restaurants in the European Union and in America, and we're taking them all out. It's like we never learn.

And so you've done this for a while, have you seen progress happened through your work? It's so slow. I mean at last year, I was doing a swimming greenland across the face of a glacier there called a Lula sat and I witnessed something which I've never seen in

all my times in the polar regions. I want you to imagine a long field and at the top of the field is a glacier, and that glacier is ten kilometers wide, and enormous icebergs carving off into the sea, and these icebergs are a kilometer toll at the mouth of the field. Lots of these icebergs get grounded on the seabed, and I witnessed as one of them sort of broke free, and then thousands and thousands and thousands of icebergs poured out of this gap straight out of

the sea. Within a few hours, they were fifty kilometers out to sea. That glacier is now moving at a speed of fourteen meters per day in summer. I mean, think about that for a moment. Forty meters per day in summer. And so every single year we have more floods, more droughts, more storms, and it's almost as if the glaciers now are moving quicker than our political leaders. So you ask me, are things changing, Yes, they are changing.

It's wonderful to go to these big climate summits now and see all the heads of state trying to grapple this issue. But there needs to be a real sense of urgency. Now let's talk through a story of success though, because there is doing the expeditions that you do, highlighting problems in the world in these really vulnerable places. But how does that turn into a policy outcome that protects them? Yep. So the swim is it's not the easy part. The

swimm is a really tough pot. But it gets the media attention, it gets the attention on the issue in that specific part of the world. But afterwards, I've got to go to the head of state, the environment minister, the foreign minister, and I've got to try and get action. Let me give you one example of success, and it was quite extraordinary. There's a place down in Antarctica called the Ross Sea. It is truly one of the most

incredible places in the world. If you go from the bottom of New Zealand and you get on a ship, and if you carry on sailing to about seventy eight degrees south, you will see this wall of ice. It's a Ross ice shelf, and it's like sailing up to the White Cliffs of Dover, but it's not chalk. It's pure ice, and it's cold and it's inhospitable. And on the sea ice you see these beautiful emperor penguins toboggling on the ice, and the sea you see these humpback

whales coming and gorging themselves on krill. But this area was really under threat because the big industrial fishing fleets were going down there and wanting to take antarctics to toothfish. And so there was an American scientist called David Ainley who for I think sixteen or seventeen years, had been calling for this area to be properly protected, to be protected in what we call a marine protected area, which is like a national park, but it is in the sea.

So no industrial fishing in this area, and he had been trying to get this area protected and under international law in the Southern Ocean, twenty five nations govern this area, plus the EU, and they all have to agree to this. So, you know, for year after year after year, the diplomats had gone down to Hobart where they meet every year to discuss this issue, and they could never get it across the line. They could never get all twenty five

to degree it. Eventually, sort of around twenty fifteen, they had all agreed it except Russia and China, and so I decided, I really that if Russia and China, if their political leadership knew how incredible this place was and could see how incredible it was and how important it is because this is a laboratory for scientists. They can see what a healthy ocean looks like. You go to any other ocean in the world and it's been totally overfished.

This was important for science, it's important for nature, it's important for all of us. So I thought to myself, if I can go do aus, swim there and then go to Moscow, then I hope to be able to persuade the Russian administration to be able to agree to this lots of heads of states have tried that. Yes, how did go? It was quite successful. You know, cold world to swimming is a language which the Russians understand.

So I did the swim and my photographer there, Kelvin Troutman, he just captured this image as I did this swim and I got out and I was absolutely frozen. I mean I was so cold. By hands were like claws. The water was so cold that it was hitting up against the side of the boat and coming up and hitting us as slush, hitting the people in the boat as ice mid air. That's what it was. I went to Moscow and I started the discussions, and you know, a negotiation must never be a battle, it must be

an exploration. And I went in there and I said, we have to protect this place. And this place is also important, not just for you know, all these other countries, but it's important for Russia. It's in Russia's national interest to also protect this place. Two years of backwards and forwards between Moscow and Washington, and eventually they agreed. And I'll never ever forget that moment when I got the

message that Russia was going to sign this deal. Now at top twenty seven what do you hope would be the best outcome for oceans. I want to see a commitment to protecting at least thirty scent of the world's oceans now over this decade, so what we call thirty by thirty. That's the first thing. The second thing I'm looking for is a real commitment and action to cut our emissions. The last thing I think is about language.

I'm speaking to you here from the United Kingdom and they're being protesters now, environmental protesters who have been doing protesting around London and other parts of the country, and in some of the media they're being portrayed as eco terrorists, as extremists. We need to be very very careful with this language. We really do. Let me tell you what extremists look like. You go to Pakistan. One third of that country underwater in the latest flood. Over fifty million

people displaced as a result of that flood. That's extreme. The wildfires across Europe. Okay, even outside here in London, wildfires, that's extreme. Some environmental campaigners standing blocking roads that is not extreme. That's inconvenient, but it's not extreme. These are people who are risking their very liberty and their freedom to ensure that this really important message gets across to the public. We need to be very careful about who

are the extremists here. They're the people who are blocking the climate action. And can you explain what do you mean by protecting? If it's thirty by thirty, what does protecting that thirty percent really look like? Yes, we talk about marine protected areas. What does protection look like? Protection is really simple. It's ensuring that there's no extractive activity

taking place. So no drilling for oil, no drilling for gas, no big great industrial fishing feats coming along and they're big nets and dragging them over coral reefs and taking way all the fish. Ensuring that there's no you know that the noise which modern activities emits are reduced considerably. So no big shipping companies sending their ships through these areas, no gunnery exercises by navies, allowing nature to recover. And you are also the United Nations Patron of the Oceans. Yes,

that's a wonderful title. What does it mean? So when the head of the United Nations Environment Program appointed me in this position, they said, Lewis, you know you're a swimmer, You're a maritime lawyer. You're in the oceans. You're talking about protecting the oceans all the time. Please would you be the un patron of the oceans. I obviously said yes. And the executive director he said, Lewis, please just be a voice for the oceans. Be a voice for all

the magnificent wildlife and oceans. The whales, are dolphins, are penguins, the sharks, the odd all of them. It's morphed a little bit over the eight years, and now I need to be a voice for protection of the oceans, but also a voice for protection of the polar regions because this is where we are really seeing the climate crisis

now moving so very very quickly. Now you're described a sweet moment to us when you described your first long swim and what it felt to stand on your two feet on a sandy beach at the end of it. What is a bitter moment in your life? Then I did a swim down in South Georgia, and to swim in South Georgia is to swim in one of the

most incredible places on the planet. I mean, there's a bay down in South Georgia, and just explain with South Georgia is deep down in the South Atlantic near Antarctica, and there's a beach there where you've got two hundred and fifty thousand king penguins. I mean to see king penguins come ashore and with their white chest and the gold boat ties and the black backs, and then they are so agile in the water, darting backwards and force and to swim over them and see them moving under

the water, it's a real treat. And then they come ashore and then they stand up, and then they start waddling up the beach. And on the beach are these enormous great elephant seals and they're fighting on the beach. It's amazing. And I've been trying to get the British

government to commit to properly protecting this area. You know, there's still industrial fishing which takes place in the waters around South Georgia and then nearby South Sandwich Islands, and so I even went to do a swim there and still it's not fully protected. And I think, you know, if there was there's anything which is a bit as a strong word, but we really should be protecting these last great wildernesses left on Earth. And for me, it's

it's a little bitter, but it's also unfinished business. Yeah. I mean, there was a story that came to the

Frozen Planet. I don't know if you've seen the documentary yet, but the last episode they talk about there's a scientists who went there in nineteen seventy four and he is leaving the Antarctic for the last time, you know, he's worked for the last forty five years and the Antarctic learning about the oceans, and he makes one last trip to an island where he says that was the first island I came on which was full of Adelhi penguins,

and I think it was ten years ago. It was the first island to have an extinction event for Adelic penguins. And he just he broke, you know, he like crys on camera, and I'm like, this is this is why we worry about these issues so much. When I did my first swim, so this was from Robin Island to Cape Town, I remember looking at the beach where I started a swim and it was full of these beautiful

African penguins. And African penguins are so noisy and they're just full of life, and they're all going at each other and the whole which was full of them. I went back a few years ago with a TV crew and do you know how many penguins we saw on the island. Two And it's three things which have come together to create the situation. The first is serious overfishing and overfishing right next to these penguin colonies, so the

penguins are competing with a fishermen. The second thing that's happened is because of the climate crisis, the prey species, the food which they eat is much further away. It's moved, and so they've got to swum so much further to get to them and then come back and then give the food to the chicks. But the last thing is the devastating thing, and that is you can have an oil spell, and certainly around the caper could hope. Often oil tankers run aground or you get an oil spell

that can wipe out a penguin colony overnight. And the science now is that the penguins on the west coast of South Africa and Namibia, they're going to go functionally extinct in just fifteen years time. And I go back to my childhood when I was standing there on the beach on Robin Islands, and I looked back and it was full of African penguins, and I weep. Yeah. It's also stunning to me that we know, just as you pointed out the three main factors that affected a species.

We study them, we study their decline, we put scientific resources to understand the very specific thing that caused it. Yes, but we always know what the solutions are. Yes, And yet we know we are really simple forced to learn about the specific problems that caused it, even though the solutions have been the same for the longest time. Stop burning oil, stop digging up co stop hacking the fins of sharks, stop pouring single use plastics into the oceans.

It really is also simple. That was a great conversation. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, Thanks for listening to Zero. If you like the show, please rate a review and subscribe, Tell a friend or tell a swimmer. If you've got a suggestion for a guest or topic or something you just want us to look into, get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Until November eighteenth, the Bloomberg Green paywall is down. Head to Bloomberg dot com slash green to read all our latest

coverage and everything in the archives for Absolutely Free. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine riskoll Our. Theme music is composed by Wonderley Special thanks to Ki up in Grim and Stacy Wong. I'm Akshatrati back with our final episode from COP twenty seven next week