The Carbon Brief Interview: UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte – Carbon Brief

Rachel Kyte CMG was appointed the UK’s special representative for climate in October 2024.

She is professor of practice in climate policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, as well as dean emerita at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Previously, Kyte was the UN secretary-general’s special representative for sustainable energy, the CEO of Sustainable Energy for All and a vice president and special envoy for climate change at the World Bank.

Listen to this interview:

Carbon Brief: You were appointed the UK special representative for climate last October, a role that’s been held by the likes of John Ashton, David King and Nick Bridge over the last 15 years or so, and was left unfilled towards the tailend of the last government. Please, can you just explain what the role is and what your priorities are for it?

Rachel Kyte: So, it’s good to talk to you, nice to be here. So, the Labour government decided to appoint two envoys. They are politically appointed, so that does distinguish it a little bit from the past and so we are not civil servants; we occupy this space in support of ministers and in support of the civil service. So I’m the climate envoy and Ruth Davis is the nature envoy. I report to the foreign secretary [David Lammy] and the secretary of state for net-zero [Ed Miliband], and Ruth reports to the foreign secretary and to the secretary for Defra [Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs] [Steven Reed]. 

And our role is to help ministers project British climate and nature priorities in our engagements in the world. So we are externally focused, outside of the UK, and I think that Ruth and I coming in, and in discussion with ministers in the first weeks that we were here, focused in on the energy transition internationally, which is the extension of the energy mission domestically. Really progress around forest protection [and] tropical forest protection, because this is obviously on the critical path to getting to net-zero and, with COP30 coming up, and, having COP in the forest, this seemed to be an urgent policy. And then, for me, finance. And, of course, there’s climate finance, which is what gets negotiated in the COPs. And then there’s the financing of climate, which engages in a wider cross-Whitehall conversation around how we are building [the City of] London as the green financial centre [and] how we are exploiting the fact that the green economy is growing faster than the economy [overall]. 

So, inward trade investment, but outward trade investment. How we are mobilising private-sector finance. So, it’s really finance, forests and the energy transition externally. 

You can imagine that the foreign secretary has a world that has got an awful lot more complicated in recent years. We’ve got more wars than we’ve had. We’ve got more grade-four famines. It’s a very, very complicated world. 

So I think the envoys are there to try to support the prioritisation of climate and nature at the heart of foreign policy, which is what [the foreign secretary] said in his Kew speech. But then helping the service of the [Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office] deliver that externally. 

CB: Thanks, Rachel. You nicely segued into our next question. We can definitely all agree that geopolitics is pretty fraught at the moment, perhaps more so than any time for decades. Multilateralism is under extreme pressure. We’ve seen that through recent UN summits, not just the COP. How does international climate policymaking – and, in particular, the Paris Agreement – survive this period of turbulence in your view? And, from some actors, there’s obviously outright hostility coming from some angles.

RK: So, it’s a great question. At the core of all of that is the fact that the Paris Agreement has worked; it just hasn’t worked well enough. And so how do we keep the conceit of the Paris Agreement? Which is that countries would have their nationally determined contributions, and that that ambition would filter up, and then when you put a wrap around it, you’ve got something that is on a line to net-zero by the middle of the century. 

If countries start to slow down, or if countries start to walk away from that, how does the Paris Agreement still live? And we’re in that moment now. 

But I think we have to hold two truths in our minds at the same time [within] a lot of climate, energy, nature policy. So, on the one hand, there is a direct attack; the United States has decided to leave the Paris Agreement. And I think there are many other countries looking for clarity from the United States about whether it will leave the underlying convention [the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] as well. We don’t know. 

But when I travel around the world, not withstanding that and notwithstanding some of the transactional interactions of the United States with other countries on a whole range of issues, the rest of the world is like, “well, we need to grow, we need to grow fast, we need fast energy, in particular”, right? Because I think countries really are worried that if they can’t get the energy security that they need that it becomes difficult for them to manage their economies and meet their people’s needs, but they’re also very worried about missing out on the AI [artificial intelligence] revolution. 

So everybody wants a data centre, everybody wants to have enough energy for AI. But I think many emerging markets and developing economies are really worried that if they miss this next S-curve this would be defining for them for the next step. So the rest of the world is like, “we’re growing, we need to grow green, the fastest energy is renewable, how do we get our hands on it?” 

At the same time, obviously, we still haven’t peaked emissions from fossil fuels. There’s a short-term economy, which is alive and well and funding into gas, etc. And we have two world views about what the future of the energy transition is. We have a US view, which is that climate change…what seems to be being articulated now is “climate change is real, but it’s just not a priority for us right now and we’re doubling down on the fossil-fuel economy”. 

And then kind of the rest of the world, which is, like, “yeah, we are in transition, maybe we need to slow the transition, because the world is insecure and unstable”, but, at the end of the day, they can only meet their goals with access to more clean energy. 

So I’ve reduced it down to energy, but you can have that conversation on a number of other aspects. So, yes, we have to keep the Paris Agreement as the place where we move forward from. It’s better than anything else we could negotiate today. And I think that it, therefore, does need to transform itself a little bit into a way of moving implementation forward and to move outside of the confines. 

So, for example, we discuss resilience in the global economy, we discuss resilience in conflict, and we discuss resilience in development and, in climate, we talk about adaptation finance. Those two things have different origins, but they are, at the end of the day, going to come together in the same sets of decisions that countries make. So, how do we move forward in that debate?

And then, in particular, for those countries that come to COPs every year and don’t get what they want and face the existential crisis, how does this continue to be meaningful for them? And I think we have to answer that question over the next couple of years.

CB: You mentioned the Paris Agreement. We’re almost 10 years on from that landmark moment. One of the central calls at that moment 10 years ago [was] “1.5C to stay alive”. Is 1.5C alive still?

RK: 1.5C is still alive. 1.5C is not in good health. And so there is an important moment that, between now and COP30 [in Brazil this November], and then coming out of COP30, we will receive the synthesis report from the UN based on all of the NDCs [nationally determined contributions]. And we will get a sense of what kind of critical condition 1.5C is in. 

And then I think we have to, as an international community, work out how to address that, but also how to communicate that to the world’s publics. Because, obviously, the whole concept of net-zero is under attack from different political factions in a number of different countries. It is not isolated to one or two countries. 

So, I think the question of how we communicate where we are in the transition, it has to be addressed once we see the synthesis report. But that also goes to what’s really important for the next few weeks for me and the British government, which is to still encourage those countries that have to file their NDCs to have NDCs which are stretch targets; realistic, but ambitious. 

We’ve still got the EU to come in. Still got China to come in. There are a number of key economies that haven’t filed their NDCs yet, so we can sort of get very doom-laden about where we are, but there is an opportunity for a number of key blocs to still maintain the ability to be ambitious.

CB: What are you particularly looking for from, say, the EU or China, some of these key NDCs? 

RK: Well, to not walk away from ambition. There are all kinds of factors that go into a country’s NDCs; the capability, the rates of economic growth, the politics and the different political cultures have a different approach to under-promising and over-delivering, versus over-promising and under-delivering. 

And, while you can respect under-promising and over-delivering, the delivery is important at this particular moment with [the] Paris [Agreement] fragile. I would say that this is the moment to promise realistically, right? And I think that’s where British diplomacy is focused at the moment. Let’s not make a fetish out of under-promising.

CB: Do you think that message is landing?

RK: Yeah, I think people are…So, my impression is that no country in the world is not living in the world, right? So people are watching the tariff wars, but…this is complicated. What does this mean for us?

I was in Southeast Asia a few weeks ago. Every country is trying to get a deal with the US and understand whether things are stable, or whether they’re going to change. It has direct impacts on the flow of finance into the clean-energy infrastructure that needs to be built. It has a direct impact on the cost of capital, etc. 

Every country is watching the broader geopolitics. Everybody’s watching people become distracted by other wars and conflicts. And, in the middle of that, you’ve got to plot your way through to growth, right? And then that growth has to be greener, because [of] the cost of clean air or the benefit of clean air, the benefit of jobs, etc. This is understood, but this is a particularly difficult environment in which to navigate. 

And, in the middle of that, we’re asking countries to plot out how they’re going to get to where they are committed to being. And for countries that produce conditional NDCs – ie if the finance is there, then we can do this – both trade and finance and international cooperation have been disrupted over the last year. 

So, NDCs are complicated things to produce at the moment, just like any other growth plan. And so the conversations that I am engaged in, the further east and south you go, are like: “There’s no question about the direction of travel. The question is about the pace at which it can be executed.” 

CB: Looking ahead to COP30 in Brazil later this year, realistically, you’ve already talked about a lot of different tensions that we’re facing, So what kind of outcomes are you expecting? And what are you pushing for?

RK: The UK is engaged extensively with Brazil on a couple of things. One is, I would describe it as a potential large nature finance package, right? Carbon markets, we agreed Article 6. There’s technical work that’s going on. There’s a lot of Article 6.2 activity. We are leading the coalition with Singapore and Kenya on demand for voluntary carbon markets. The Brazilians are very interested in the interoperability of compliance markets. So a piece around really driving carbon markets forward, because that would be a new stream of revenue, much needed, right? And answers part of the climate-finance problems. 

Secondly, is the TFFF, the tropical forest – I always get it wrong –Tropical Forest Forever Facility. This is a flagship initiative of the Brazilian government and, if we have a COP in the forest, then we should be able to make breakthroughs in how we address the need to have a flow of finance into tropical-forest countries.

So, we’re working extensively with the Brazilians and we’re waiting for them to come forward with the prospectus. And then the question is our contribution [to the TFFF], if we make one with others, and also our ability to help the Brazilians go, basically, on a road show, right? And get other private-asset owners and asset managers and others into this fund. 

And then maybe other nature finance things to do. Remember that biodiversity COPs always talk about climate, climate COPs never talk about nature, so we can correct for that. So that would be one bucket.

Then there’s going to be, this will not be negotiated, but the Brazilians will produce, together with the Azerbaijanis, a Baku-to-Belém roadmap. This, hopefully, will demystify how we get from $300bn to $1.3tn, or whatever the number is, and start to talk about how we scale; the leverage of public money for private money. So this is issues of standardisation of different asset classes, new asset classes [and] new ways of issuing bonds. So all of the mechanics of international finance that can be mobilised. And I think this is not well understood in a COP. It might be well understood in the City [of London] or in Frankfurt or Wall Street, but maybe this roadmap can demystify it. 

And then I think we’ve got to deal with issues of adaptation, because it’s happening right now, right here, right everywhere, and the questions of adaptation finance, which isn’t just about the “quantum”. It’s also about what kind of financing: the grants, the need for concessional [financing], where the private sector is really able to mobilise and also quality [finance], and it’s also the accessibility of that finance. 

We’re seeing huge improvement in the performance of the Green Climate Fund. The multilateral climate funds are just emerging now into an era where they can start to really deliver at scale. And then we’ve got the reform of the MDBs [multilateral development banks], where we, I think, have to be a much more activist shareholder. 

So, finance, forests, bigger package on nature. I mean, there’s a lot more that needs to be negotiated, but I think those would be things that we can do, not withstanding the geopolitics.

CB: I’m quite struck that almost all of those things that you talked about are outside of the formal [COP30] negotiations. What do you think is going to happen on something like carrying forward the fossil-fuel transition outcome from Dubai?

RK: So I think there’s two things going on, right? One is what can we negotiate in the current environment, with the current postures of different groupings and different countries, and getting moving on the action around tripling renewables, doubling efficiency and transitioning away [from fossil fuels] is very important.

So, what could  that look like? I think there are lots of informal discussions at the moment between different groups and with the Brazilians around [whether] there [is] something [that] can be done on fossil-fuel subsidies? Can we set targets within that that would allow us to measure progress? What can we usefully agree on that, this year? 

And, then, I think there [are] conversations around where does the stuff that’s happening outside of COP land in a negotiated text? Or how does it get referenced? 

I think we’re waiting for clarity from the Brazilians about their approach to a “cover text” and things like this. And I think this is still in the air. But these things that could happen outside of the negotiated text, referenced appropriately, give life and meaning to some of the paragraphs that need to be negotiated.

CB: With many major donors, including the UK, cutting their own budgets, even as countries made this collective pledge to scale up climate finance that you referenced, there’s a lot of expectation now on institutions like the World Bank and the multilateral development banks. Are these institutions capable of filling this climate-finance gap? Or where else should developing countries be looking? You mentioned maybe some of the carbon-market kind of revenue-raising, potentially? But, just on the wider pressures they are now facing, as we already alluded to, the kind of pressure on those multilateral institutions…

RK: Yes. So, we’re now basically – across the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] – with a lot of countries hovering at like 0.3% GDP for ODA [official development assistance]. So, first of all, the war on nature and the climate crisis are one and the same thing, [they] are the context within which all growth and development happens, right? So the pressure on our public resources is to make sure that that is targeted at where it can have the most impact, where it’s needed most, and targeted at where it can be, where it can leverage itself, right? 

So, we can talk about how we use ODA to sort of reduce emissions. There are certain geographies where emissions need to be curbed in order for us to get to 1.5C and then how do we use the public money to leverage other resources to crowd in and end the destruction of tropical rainforest or the protection of mangroves. So you take your climate-critical path, and you look at your ODA and you say: “How do we apply this the most effectively?” 

For a country like the UK, which is such a significant shareholder across the multilateral development bank system, then we have to be an activist shareholder. And, yes, the answer is that the MDBs could do more. First of all, they’re doing more now than they were a few years ago. And they could do even more. 

If we look at the leverage rates of the MDBs, those could go up. And I think in the conversations around the $300bn at COP29 it was very clear, especially from the regional development banks, that they thought that they could do more. And I think that in some instruments and in some ways in which they work, they could do a lot more. So I think those leverage rates should be over $1 for certain facilities, etc. 

We know a lot more about how to use guarantees. We know a lot more about how to leverage the private sector using MDBs. The classic example for us was taking the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), putting a bond structure around their performing portfolio, and then listing it in London [on the stock exchange] and raising $7bn [$500m, following clarification after the interview], which then goes back to the CIF to be reinvested. I think there’s just been recent stories about the Inter-American Development Bank [IADB], which has a set of performing assets in its portfolio of renewable energy that can be turned into an instrument that can be listed, that generates money, that goes back into IADB. 

So I think this is learnt now and, because of the ODA cuts, this becomes very, very important. So I am confident that there is a “to-do list” and that to-do list has come out of MDB reform work. It’s come out of the G20, TF-CLIMA, it’s come out of the Brazilians last year. It’s come out of other work that other thinktanks and others have been doing. London just listed…the government just announced a sustainable debt work here in the UK. So, that to-do list is a kind of “known known”. Right now the question is implementing it and that will require political leadership, for sure. And the Brazilians have created a circle of climate ministers, sort of 30 climate ministers to lead that. And there is a coalition of finance ministers convened by the World Bank. 

We know what we need to do and now we need to start working out how to do it. The other thing is that we have an investor taskforce that the Treasury and the Foreign Office and leaders from the private sector have set up. And that’s sort of crunching its way through the mechanics of some of these things. But I think, as they start to go to market, we should be able to invest. 

And there are a couple of things where we haven’t really faced up to yet. So, first of all, the private sector is investing in resilience, a) because it’s losing money, so it’s backstopping. And, secondly, because it can see how the world is being impacted by climate change, they are investing in their resilience in changed circumstances. That is captured as a cost in most countries in their accounts. That is not seen as an investment. 

And also, I think in most countries – and certainly in the UN – we have no way to capture that. So we don’t really capture how much the private sector is already investing in its ability to just continue to operate under current climate conditions. 

CB: It’s been really interesting over this year so far to see the Brazilian presidency of COP30 and also conversations at the Bonn talks in June explicitly referencing this idea of COP reform. What reforms would you propose or support?

RK: So, there’s no fixed British position on this yet, right? But I think what’s being discussed is there’s a utility to walking up to a mountain and putting a flag on the mountain every year, right? But, actually, we’re sort of in a more undulating landscape of implementation, where we need to be working throughout the year, right?

So, should there be Rio Trio summits every two years? People are talking about that. I think you could argue backwards and forwards, right or wrong, on that. What happens between the COPs? How do you bring the external world into the COPs? How do you let subnational actors and voices be heard at the COPs? These are all live topics and I think we need to move forward on most of them. 

And then are we getting to the point where only certain countries can host them because they’re so big? I don’t know. Do you have thematic meetings throughout the year? How do we better keep real-time track of progress? So the next time we do a stocktake, in the world of AI and other things, is there a better and easier way? And can we still make that more transparent? 

It would be great if the public could look at a sort of traffic-light spreadsheet and [say], “OK, we’re on track and not on track”. So I think all of those [questions are being asked] and it poses real challenges to the UN, which itself is in a process of reform now, in part, as a response to the US’s sort of questioning of the efficacy of parts of the UN, but also, I think, because the world is significantly changing.

CB: In your role, you’ve been in meetings over recent months with counterparts in Indonesia, China, South Africa, etc. What have been, particularly for some of those key countries, what have been the specific points of conversation you’ve had with them? Is it all about finance, or other important ingredients to those discussions? 

RK: No, I think the starting point is, well, a lot of it is about finance, but, it’s about investment. It’s about growth and investment, right? It’s green growth and investment. And then finance fits into that. 

So it’s not the finer points of the way finance is described in the COP. It is huge demand for the technical capacity of the UK, whether it is sophisticated demand-side management in grids, or how we regulate and how we oversee our grids in this country. Or how we exited from coal. Or what we are planning on some other dimension of the energy transition, our technical capacity and civil nuclear management. The desire for UK Inc’s knowledge about how we do things on things that we have actually been successful in – and also lessons of failure as well, honestly. So, everybody is figuring out how to do this. 

There’s a strong desire for a pragmatic UK that is capable of convening across traditional blocs. I think we are seen as having a relationship with Brussels, a relationship with the US, a dialogue with China, a new free-trade agreement with India and a dialogue with India, [as well as] relationships through the Commonwealth and directly with small island states and least developed countries. We are seen as someone that already has bridges in place [and] could help strengthen those bridges. 

So, what’s really been striking to me is it isn’t a conversation about, “oh woe is us, what we’re going to do?” It’s a conversation like: “I have a 10% growth rate. I need to do this. I would like you to be investing more.” It’s that kind of conversation – and that’s whether I’m meeting the minister of energy, finance, mines, environment, whoever I’m meeting with, that’s kind of the focus. 

So I’m not Pollyanna about this, but people have got really big problems in front of them and it’s about their economic growth and development. And it’s, how can we help? I think the other thing that’s really coming through is just the cost of the impacts already, every flood, every failed harvest, every pressure on a city. I mean, this is really, really, really now…you can’t escape it, every country’s in the middle of it, we’re in the middle of it, domestically. And how this gets addressed, I think it is a question for this COP and the next COP.

CB: Other than the prime minister [Keir Starmer] and also your bosses, Ed Miliband and David Lammy, you’re kind of one of the key “faces” on the international stage representing just how invested the current UK government is in this issue of climate change. How do you think the UK’s role in this is perceived by other countries, ranging from China and other climate vulnerables, to the likes of the EU and the US?

RK: So, I think my perception of the external view of us is that – and what we’ve been trying to project as well – is “don’t do as we say, do as we do”. That means that we need to do a lot of things building on [the progress we’ve already made]. And I think that the beginning of the inward investment, just in the last year, into the clean-energy economy here [in the UK], that’s upwards of £50bn. So we’re open for business.

There’s one thing to talk about the City as a green financial centre, which has happened because of the leadership of City leaders, but now there’s this dialogue between government and the City about how to make that even broader. And, of course, that would mean becoming the western world’s heart of the carbon markets, if Singapore is the heart of the sort of eastern world’s carbon markets. It would mean that London helps define what a good biodiversity credit looks like, what a standardised swap looks like. There’s so much more that could be done there and I think that that’s what people want from us, but it’s also what we are trying to be able to build ourselves up to offer. 

I think people want us engaged in the dialogue. So there’s a strategic dialogue with China. You could say that the strategic dialogue between China, the UK and the EU is the sort of triangular underpinning, actually, of the strength of the Paris Agreement. And, of course, we’re just about to see the EU-China summit, which will be important. 

Our dialogue with India is interesting, right? So India found itself in a very difficult position at the end of COP29. In our free-trade agreement and in our strategic partnership with India climate and energy is a big part of that conversation. That’s all about technical lessons, learning and investment in both directions.

And then with the EU, the EU/UK reset is in the rearview mirror now. So now we need to get into the negotiations around the proximity, or the alignment between the ETSs [emissions trading schemes] shared stances on other issues and then how we show up as the sort of “liberal west” in the COPs. 

So, the world is changing. It’s flatter. The BRICS are more and more important. We have, I think, powerful relationships with a number of key countries within the BRICS and that is an object of foreign policy, as well. And so how do we as the UK build up our agility, our global sense of the world and our place in it, so that we can help everybody stay on track for the kind of results we need by the middle of the century.

But what I think we’re very forceful about is that you can’t take two to three years out of climate conferences just because the world’s really difficult. And that has to be argued domestically and it has to be argued with [our] international partners. We don’t have time to just sort of say, “Oh, well, we’ll come back to that”. We have to build it in now. 

CB: Specifically around the damage that’s been caused by the current trade tensions caused by the US, how do you think that is directly impacting the kind of wider climate negotiations, but also just the push towards the transition? Is this a key stumbling block now? 

RK: Investment flows when everybody feels confident, right? And it just begs a whole bunch of questions and I think that’s slowing down investment decision-making. 

So, I don’t think it’s specifically anti-climate, or whatever. I think it’s, generically, like if I don’t know if the tariff is 10%, 20%, 25%, 56%, whatever, well, let me put it off till the next quarter to make that investment decision. And I think that that’s what we’re beginning to see. So that, for me, is the main [thing]…It’s the hesitancy that it puts in the mind of government, but also in the mind of investors and the private sector. 

I mean, it’s a little bit too early to tell in terms of investment not going into the US and going elsewhere, or individual supply chains for individual pieces of the clean transition, but I think the main problem globally is just this hesitation. 

I would have to say that other things, including, perhaps, the ability of NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and the National Weather Service to continue to provide services to the Caribbean and Central America, that the impact of the cuts to USAid [US Agency for International Development] in certain geographies are profound. But, generally, the sort of tariff era we’re in, the risk is that it slows down the investment in the clean-energy transition at a time when it needs to speed up.

CB: With the US in retreat, is China now the most important country in the world when it comes to climate action? Can you give a sense of your recent conversations with your Chinese counterparts, both recently, but also how they might have changed over recent years?

RK: So China’s posture before…there is obviously a China-US dynamic, but aside from that dynamic, China’s posture has been that “we are multilateralists, we want multilateralism to thrive and we’re all in”, right? And they’ve repeated that in every possible forum and they’ve repeated that at the highest level, including in [Chinese president] Xi Jinping’s statements at the leaders summit hosted by the UN secretary-general [António Guterres] and [Brazil’s] President Lula. So they are in. 

Are they taking up space that would have been occupied by the US before? Nature abhors a vacuum, so all kinds of people are coming in. And the world moves towards China because of the fact that, over the last 25 years, it’s emerged as dominant in the solar-energy supply chain, with all of the problems that that has brought as well. 

And then, financially, because of the way in which the [UNFCCC] convention is framed, they are a developing country, so they quite rightly only want their contributions to be made voluntarily, but they are a major player, right? 

They already were a major player. The world had already shifted in that direction. Our conversation with them is technical and collegial and, I think, really frank. And we hosted the ministry of environment [Huang Runqiu] here recently [and] met with both the secretary of state for energy and the secretary of state for environment, and I was just really struck at how wide-ranging the issues that they would like to discuss is, and just how sort of practical, pragmatic and how sort of sleeves rolled up it was. And I think that’s also what is observed in their relationship with the conversations they’re having at a technical level in Brussels. 

So it’s a complicated, nuanced relationship across all issues of trade, security, investment and climate. But they’re living in a world where climate is going to disrupt their own economy, if they don’t build their resilience. And of course, China has its tentacles everywhere. So maintaining our ability to talk to China about these issues, notwithstanding all of the other tensions and difficulties and opportunities, is “sine qua non”, I think. So let’s see how they show up in Belém.

CB: Just the final question, which is a bit more of a personal question, which we like to ask this of our interviewees, what is your first moment of epiphany on climate change? Can you remember? Was it a book, a lecture, a documentary, a conversation, or a trip you went on? Can you remember where that penny really dropped and you thought, I need to work on this, professionally and hard?

RK: There were two. One was very early on in my career. I was working on international youth politics in Europe. And, at that time, the Iron Curtain was up – I’m that old [smiles] – and sulfuric acid would go up from power plants in the east and it would land in the west and destroy the forest in Norway. And the conversation was: “Well, do you have ever-higher limits on the Norwegian industry?” Or do you go to Poland and say: “Look, can we put scrubbers on your [power plants]?” And it was the interconnected [nature of all this]. 

And, of course, at that time, young people in both east and western Europe wanted to build a more benign presence of Europe in the world and we wanted to be united, right? Or wanted the wall to come down. And that was a question of peace and environment. And it was the environment movement that was at the heart of the peace movement. So that was [a moment of thinking], “so I want to work on this”. 

And I remember some very, very, strange meeting somewhere in eastern Europe and watching a really badly made movie about migration and the idea that, if we didn’t cope with this [climate change], people would come in boats across, presumably the Mediterranean. And I was, like, this is a global problem. 

The second thing was just before Paris [in 2015]. There were these sort of famous rumours about all these women that got together and worked together to try to help the Paris Agreement happen. And so I was in a meeting with a bunch of women and two leaders from emerging markets, developing economies – it was very juxtaposed, because I was, at that point, the vice president of the World Bank – and we were having a discussion about 1.5C and whether, did it make sense as a strategy. And I was like: “2C is going to be difficult enough, you want to negotiate 1.5C?” And then we sort of broke. And then the next morning, we reconvened and we were just reflecting on the day before’s conversations and they both said to me: “You can’t just throw these numbers around as if they’re points of negotiation, because, for my culture, the difference between 2C and 1.5C is existence or non-existence”. And that was important.

CB: OK, thank you very much, Rachel.

RK: Thank you.