We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

Europe and The US benefited from coal and oil based development, and now that is causing massive problems.

Wisdom is a beautiful word, but I noticed that we don't talk about scientific wisdom and indigenous expertise.

This is generation one from University College London, turning climate science and ideas into action.

Welcome back to UCL's generation one podcast.

I'm your host, Mark Maslin, and I'm a professor of earth system science here at UCL, which means I study climate change in the past, the present, and the future.

And I'm Simon Chin-Yee from UCL School of Public Policy, and my work focuses on clean energy sources for transport, shipping, aviation, you name it.

So we're back after a break over the summer, and Mark and I haven't seen each other in a while.

So, Mark, what have you been up to recently?

What topical climate stories have been occupying your time?

Well, I think one of the most important things that happened over this summer was the International Court of Justice delivered a landmark advisory opinion.

And what they said was that countries are obliged to tackle climate change, and there will be consequences if they don't.

This means that the decision can be used by countries for future legislation, litigation, and also purporting the political negotiation by particularly vulnerable states.

It states clean and healthy sustainable environment is a human right.

This is huge.

And you know what?

It happened just on the July 23.

It was a unanimous decision by 15 judges at the ICJ.

That is that is huge.

It concluded that the production and consumption of fossil fuels may constitute an internationally wrongful act attributable to that state.

But I wanna talk about this for a minute, Mark, because it's such a it's such a huge ruling, but it still exists within international law.

So how do you think it's gonna work?

So for me, everybody has assumed that climate change is an ethical and social justice issue.

But now we have a ruling from the top court in the world that says it's a human right.

Even though it's advisory, it is a landmark because it allows countries, individuals, organizations to use this as a basis of any legal action against a country, a company, the fossil fuel companies, who are not following the fastest path to decarbonizing and to actually deal with climate change.

But the problem here is what I'm trying to get my head around is The United States.

Over the past four or five months, they launched the biggest deregulatory action in all of US history, anyway, wide ranging rollback of environmental regulations exceeding even the pace of Trump's first term.

So these accent actions, which began basically immediately after inauguration, hits target areas such as water quality, climate change regulations all across the board.

So what does this mean?

Do you think countries can now take The US to court?

And what will and how will The US even react?

So the biggest problem here is, of course, The USA doesn't sign up to the international court of justice.

Exactly.

It basically avoids many of those international organizations to hold other countries to account.

So it'd be really difficult for a country to take The USA to court.

But this, as a ruling in one of the top courts in the world, will be really useful for individuals, states within The United States to take both the federal government and companies to court with this as an underlying principle, which is if you do not protect the environment, you are undermining the human rights of your citizens.

Now that is a huge underpinning that allows courts to then start to really think about why is there environmental regulation?

Why do we try to protect individuals, and why is this current government in The US trying to remove all of those?

And it's very simple.

It's purely profit.

And I'm gonna be following this really closely because we've seen over the past decade other groups of people, youth people in The Netherlands taking shelter court.

We've seen indigenous populations of The US stopping pipelines happening.

So there is something to be taken away from here.

And as as we both work with vulnerable populations across the board, I think that this ruling really is something that they can kind of glom onto, at least at the beginning, to say, actually, international laws, international norms have been created, and you all, United States, UK, whoever we're talking about, needs to follow it.

For me, I think this landmark decision is really what we all know.

Governance in whatever form it is is there to look after and to protect the population, all of them, from the most vulnerable to the richest in the land.

And, again, all this says is that environment and a safe, healthy environment is a human right, which, of course, all of us would agree with, but now we have it in black and white from the UN.

From the UN and from the highest court, an international court.

So that's really important.

And to bring that on to today's episode, you know what?

A lot of those vulnerable populations are in the global South.

A lot of those vulnerable populations were former colonies of Europe, for example.

So in today's episode, we will discuss whether historic injustices are still to blame for current inequalities.

In a moment, we'll be talking to Raffaella Fryer-Moreira from UCL's Department of Anthropology.

Raffaella works with indigenous communities in Brazil, and

she also cofounded the Multimedia Anthropology Lab here at UCL.

But before we speak to Raffaella, let's hear from lawyer and climate activist Farhana Yamin.

Much of Farhana's work seeks to amplify the voice of racialized minorities globally and in The UK environment movement.

Farhana spoke at the UCL Love Your Planet event on a panel which I hosted and thoroughly enjoyed, and much of what she said is directly relevant to the ICJ discussion.

In 1991, in the run up to what was called the Rio Summit, which was 1992, the developing countries were stressing that the global pollution, whether it was biodiversity loss, whether it was climate change, whether it was the ozone layer, most of these things were caused by the richer countries through the process of industrialization, which they were very, very far behind with at that point in time.

So, you know, following the polluter pays principle, they argued very much for what we call now climate justice, that those who have the most stability, who caused the problems, should really take the lead in in solving them.

And that is the underlying fabric, the fundamental principles of the global bargain that was agreed back in 1992 and is enshrined in the climate convention as well, that the richer industrialized world and those with capacity should take the lead based on that and based on their historic contribution to the problem.

We asked Farhana how historically successful legal roots have been in achieving the goals that developing countries are striving for, such as the recent ICJ decision?

It's been very successful.

I know people think, oh, yeah.

We still have climate chaos happening, that, you know, we're not anywhere near some of the targets that were agreed, in the Paris Agreement.

But at the same time, we now have every country in the world has climate legislation, which wasn't the case thirty years ago.

Every country has usually a ministry or a, you know, minister who's involved.

It has civil society, has NGOs, it has inventories, it reports.

And so there's a vast, infrastructure that has been built to support climate action happening, and that's a result of everyone campaigning to educate, inform, as well as for governments to regulate the polluters through standards, technology standards, through carbon markets, through everything else that is necessary.

And so, you know, that's what the legal approach in the end says.

It doesn't just say do laws.

It also empowers and creates a space for dialogue, discussion, and action.

And that's what the COPs do, and that's what national policy is pegged around.

We then asked Farhana whether legal avenues can make the sort of changes required in the diminishing time available.

We are facing a very big problem, which is the cause of climate change, is emissions from energy, from farming, from fashion.

These are the four big F's fossil fuel finance.

Every aspect of our lives is involved, and saying that, you know, a law can is not like a magic wand that suddenly you enact one and everything will change.

It's about changing all of society and basically reinventing the capitalist system as we know it today.

And that is naive to think we can achieve that in five years or ten years.

That is a long term set of things that need to happen.

And I think in fact, focusing on the COPs year to year and expecting them to overhaul the global economic system is naive and silly, frankly, and that's not what we're trying to do.

Change has to happen through innovation, through markets, through finance, and all of those things take time to take time to respond to the legal signals.

Farhana also explained the intersection of climate and colonialism, including how existing institutional frameworks reinforce those historic inequalities and the reforms needed to amplify those marginalized voices.

So climate change is one more facet of colonialism.

The president of a country that I represented, the Marshall Islands, made that point to me very clearly.

Marshall Islands was one of the main test sites for nuclear weapons testing and the Bikini Atoll is one of the atolls that was decimated as a result.

And so when President Hilda Hynie of the Marshall Islands said to me climate change is just one more problem that we're facing from pollution to nuclear testing to what we're facing now as a result of our coral reefs and our water declining.

That problem is replicated throughout many other developing countries who've contributed very little but who are bearing the brunts of that, and that is really a result of the industrialization process of the last three hundred years, where essentially Europe and The US benefited from coal and oil based development and now that is causing massive problems, land loss, water pollution, ocean acidification, extreme events, and leading to floods, droughts, displacement and migration.

So that, when you look at it from that lens, is predominantly a problem of white imperialism and the colonial powers, and it's continuing because by and large the richest countries in the world are based in the Northern Hemisphere and they are continuing a pattern and not recognizing that two hundred, three hundred years worth of emissions and destruction and extractivism is now taking its toll in the rest of the world.

And the rest of the world is predominantly not white, it's black and brown people the world over.

And if you measure things in terms of per capita emissions and take historical emissions to account, then countries like India and China and Brazil and others who are now seen as big culprits are actually very tiny emitters, much smaller emitters, you know, compared to The UK and The US, for example.

We asked Farhana about how climate justice can offer solutions to these issues, including initiatives such as the climate justice and just transition donor collaborative.

The climate justice and just transition donor collaborative was set up in 2021, as a result very much of philanthropy waking up and answering the calls for more representative, inclusive philanthropy, Philanthropy realised as a result, for example, of the Black Lives Matter movement that most philanthropies were very white in terms of their makeup, the boards of trustees, the pattern of giving.

For example, studies showed that in The US, the vast majority of funding, over 80% went to white male led organisations.

And actually that pattern was replicated, so most philanthropy, climate philanthropy was about 2% and of that a very tiny sliver was going to the global South, to women, to young people, to people of color.

And so this shows the replication of injustices and the way in which systematic injustices can kind of continue inadvertently unless they're challenged.

And so some of the world's largest philanthropies, ClimateWorks, the Oak Foundation, the Bosch Foundation, IKEA, Porticus and a number of others asked me to lead an initiative to help educate them on what we call systematic injustices and looking at how we could do a much more intersectional approach, an approach in philanthropy that would be more grounded and be fairer and put those on the front lines first and those people on the front lines tend to be black and brown people, women, and also young people had not been getting their share of voice and philanthropic resources.

So we came up with a formula which was a mission statement which was to try and make sure that philanthropy was responding to both power imbalances as well as systematic inequalities in funding.

And the power imbalances are really key because in the end if still the same very small, less diverse group of people in charge, it tends to be the case that they will not see the problems that others are seeing and others are asking.

So you need representation.

We launched a set of initiatives called Climate JEDIES, which is champions of action who are fighting for justice, equality, diversity and inclusion -'JEDIS'.

That was climate justice lawyer Farhana Yamin, talking about the use of the courts to challenge countries with the worst track record of environmental pollution and how colonization has contributed to the climate crisis.

You're listening to UCL Generation One, turning science and ideas into climate action.

As promised at the start of this episode, we are going to turn our attention in a little more detail now to what these historical legacies look like on the ground today.

Our UCL colleague, Raffaella Freya Moreira, is an anthropologist who has worked closely with indigenous tribes in Brazil that are suffering the consequences of colonization to this day.

So welcome, Raffaella, to generation one.

We are very grateful that you're here.

So I'm gonna kick off with what seems to be a simple question, but isn't.

So what does decolonizing climate action or climate research mean to you?

Well, thank you so much for having me here today.

It's it's great to it's a pleasure to be here and to to be talking about this this really important topic.

Mean, I think to think through decolonizing climate action or climate research means, we first have to think through the ways in which climate action and climate research are in the first place colonized.

The kinds of human activities that are responsible for what for the moment we find ourselves in is is the plantation as a model, as an ecological model.

Because plantations, monoculture plantations, you know, you don't find them in nature.

So, of course, you can't think through the plantations without thinking through the Transatlantic slave trade and without thinking the through the accumulation of wealth in this precisely on this very small island that's that's resulted from those those plantations that were set up all around the world, from the the largest movement of people that ever in human's history, which was the Transatlantic slave trade, and the, of course, the massacres of indigenous communities across The Americas.

So when we're thinking through who is to blame for our current dietary condition, it's important to think through the the ways in which colonialism has has shaped that.

I think that's really, really interesting and so important, and I like the idea that you started way back and back because we think of colonization up here in Britain, for example, and it started at a particular date, and it ended in a particular day.

Here's the thing.

In my work with the Pacifics, they talk about the sea.

They talk about the land.

They talk about the sun.

They talk about these things that we don't think of as in as animate objects.

I mean, I just I'm trying to figure out how we can how we can move this then forward, how we can use these spaces.

Because with the countries that I work with and the peoples that I work with, I see them ignored so many because the traditional concept of capitalist knowledge is what is moving everything forward.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's interesting because increasingly, you know, there's bit of a paradox that I've been noticing over the re in recent years.

I think I've I remember reading the IPCC report.

I think it was in 02/2012, 02/2014, 02/2012, one of those reports.

Certainly, it was, you know, in the text, in the report, there was this open acknowledgment of the importance of including indigenous knowledge and really the recognition that indigenous communities are the custodians of anywhere between 3675% of what we call special biodiversity zones.

So what I see when I read that IPCC report is an acknowledgment that, in fact, you know, these indigenous communities who have been cultivating actively cultivating these spaces for centuries, they have key ecological knowledge in in a sense that is recognizable from Western conservation science.

Now what I see is when people starts when when people really highlight the importance of including and incorporating and in listening to indigenous ecological knowledge, they mean that kind of knowledge, usually.

Right?

That's it's knowledge that can be makes sense that makes sense from a kind of biodiversity from a conservation science perspective.

Now the Guarani-Kaiowá community I work with, you know, I the reason I mean, there are 305 indigenous ethnic groups in Brazil.

I chose to work with the Guarani and Kaiowá because they are they face the most severe context out of all of them.

They face the most severe context of ecocide.

They've lost all of their Atlantic rainforest.

All of their forest is gone.

It's not as BND forest.

It is gone.

It has been transformed into these plantations.

They have, you know and as a consequence of that, they've, you know, they there's no there's no spaces for them to hunt.

There's no spaces, you know, there's traditional subsistence has broken down.

You know, this isn't recent.

They've had five hundred years of contact.

So, you know, that's this has taken place over over centuries.

And they're now facing what's why what's been multiple times acknowledged as a genocide.

They also have the highest rates of youth suicide out of any indigenous community in in Brazil.

And in fact, in at one point, the rates of youth suicide were the highest in the whole world.

So I went out there to understand what people do at the end of the world.

What people do when their when their world is has is gone.

And what I found was that what they're doing, what the elders are doing, is they're chanting.

They're performing sacred shamanic chants, and they do this day and night.

They're every single day, they wake up and they perform sacred shamanic chants, and they say and they understand these chants you know, they through these chants, they are reconnecting with the Jada, which with the spirit entities that govern the that govern the the the earth, that govern the plants, that govern the animals.

There are dozens, hundreds of different Jada, all in their own hierarchies.

And through the power of sound, which they, you know, wonderfully describe their instruments as Wi Fi, they said this is like our Wi Fi.

It's our Wi Fi to the gods.

It's our phone line to the other world, and we're here urgently making this call.

We're here urgently trying to reestablish a form of harmonious dialogue with the spirit world, which has which is, you know, very unimpressed with the way in which it's been treated.

Can I ask interrupt just to to just for our listeners to understand a bit more about these communities, actual context of who they are and because this is really, really fascinating because you're bringing in all of the these different tools or practices that they use, but who are they?

So the Guarani well, as I said, mean, the Guarani and Kaiowá communities, they they are one of 305 indigenous ethnic groups, but they've been occupying this part of the world for centuries.

One cannot really understand who they are without thinking through the unique challenges they face.

So I'd say about there are about 20,000 people that live in makeshift encampments on the sides of roads, on the tarpaulins, in the spaces between vast plantations.

There's been a you know, and there are eight reservations that were built that were established in the in the nineteen twenties, really, when when the Brazilian colonized when the occupiers started moving moving west and wanted more land, and they occupied the they found this wonderfully fertile land.

But coming back to what, you know, really the kind of the point I I think is an important point to make is that they're, you know, they're they're chanting today in this context where you really you look around, you don't see a single tree in sight.

And, you know, they I mean, they're they're very fierce and defiant, and so they will they are fiercely reclaiming their land from the farmers.

And, you know, they'll put war paint on their faces, and they'll get together in groups of three or 400, and they'll scare the farmers off.

And then they'll be met later at night with you know, by the farmers' gunmen.

I mean, just two months ago when I was there, a family of four, you know, a mother and her three children were burnt alive at night, and the rest of they slept as part of this ongoing land war.

And so in this context, what are they doing?

They're chanting.

And when we ask them why they're chanting, they say, well, yes, they're reestablishing this this connection that has been lost, but they're not doing it just for them.

They say the only reason that the world hasn't ended yet is because we are performing these chants.

We're chanting in order to save the world.

We're we're holding.

We we are the the the front.

We're the front lines.

We are holding the world together.

So when, you know, coming back to the IPCC report and coming back to climate policy, when you talk about spirituality and how and what place does that kind of knowledge have in these discussions, I think when I we dig in kind of to ask more about the to the Guarani Kaiowá community to understand what they're doing and why they're chanting, they say, you know, they brought they introduced a very interesting word.

They said, this is our Mbaikwaa.

And I said, what's that?

And they said, well, like, you've got your cameras and your microphones.

That's your Mbaikwaa.

This is our Mbaikwaa.

And so gradually, you know, I I learned this word about three or four years ago, and it completely re reshaped the ways in which I started thinking about not only their practice, but also the tools and equipment with which I was documenting them.

The the elders that I work with say, you have your and we have ours.

They're different.

They're different kinds of technologies, but they're both technology.

Now that word isn't often used when talking by climate policymakers, by even by allies of indigenous community members.

You know, often this idea that what indigenous communities are doing is a form of technology or a form of technics is in fact is not the usual is not is not the ways in which these discussions are framed and these practices are understood.

You know, I remember last year at COP sixteen, the biodiversity COP, I was watching watching the intro the the opening ceremony where you had I mean, in Colombia, you had a fantastic presence of indigenous communities, and they did the opening performed the opening ceremony.

But as soon as the first political representative stood up, they said, well, thank you very much for that cultural presentation.

Now let's do the politics.

So can I can I so can I ask about COP thirty in Brazil?

Because the problem here is that climate change is science is under attack by almost everybody.

Okay?

So we have governments that are destroying science, destroying, knowledge, destroying, institutions that have been collecting data to understand how we are and who is changing the climate.

So completely under attack from there.

How do you see bringing indigenous people more into the COP process?

How can we bring them more into climate policy discussions to counteract that very, I would say, right wing, very capitalist approach, which is I don't like the climate science, so I'm just going to deny it.

Well, it's a very good question, and I think it's I think it's tricky.

I think in a sense, it does come back to this how do we ultimately position and understand their knowledge?

How do policymakers, even those who are allies, how do they genuinely understand and position the knowledge of indigenous peoples in relation to scientific expertise?

Often, it's called indigenous wisdom because and and and I think it's this wisdom is a beautiful word.

But I noticed that we don't talk about scientific wisdom and indigenous expertise.

You know, I think Prince William has also just recently said we really needed to listen to indigenous community.

We need to listen to their strategies.

But I challenge you.

I think that if if we say if Guarani and Kaiowá elders were to come and say, alright.

Let's stop all of this.

Let's stop the recycling.

Let's stop the net the net zero.

Stop all of that.

Let's let's just chant.

Let's perform these shamanic chants and reconnect with the spirits.

So as much as we want to listen to indigenous knowledge, there's gonna be a lot of western science scientists, a lot of people, a lot of indigenous allies who will, you know, defend to the death, defend the the the in the importance of indigenous knowledge.

But there's a lot of people who are going to be un unhappy with that with that proposal.

Until we start taking indigenous knowledge seriously, I think that's really the term, is taking their knowledge seriously as a genuine possibility of world, not just as a relic of our ancestry, not just as a way in which we can reconnect with the wisdom of forest dwellers or reconnect with the wisdom pre technology, pre where pre this myth of progress.

That's often the discourse that we hear amongst indigenous allies.

Right?

And, actually, I think there's that discourse smuggles in, in fact, some terribly dangerous concepts.

If you unravel what what this, you know, this there's a fascination with indigenous communities and a fascination with with indigenous traditions and knowledge as a form of going back.

Right?

Going back.

They're not they're not our ancestors.

They're our contemporaries.

It reproduces an idea that Western knowledge is somehow not just different in terms of content, but it's different in kind from the, you know, by from from indigenous knowledges.

And I think that in order to start really taking seriously indigenous communities and in order to seriously include indigenous people in climate debates and to in and in serious discussions about what can we do, we have to first, I think, take them seriously as our epistemic equals.

So, Raffaella, you've pioneered multimodal and participatory research methods.

Can you then explain these approaches to our audience and and look at how they challenge traditional academic frameworks?

This is the way in which we have been moving beyond the colonial frameworks that have shaped Western science and knowledge.

We're trying to innovate research.

Yeah.

We're trying to explore how different technologies can offer new ways of producing knowledge and new ways of engaging.

And when I first heard this word, you know, I I did had all the cameras and all the microphones pointed at him.

And suddenly, when he told me that that his sacred chanting was just like my mic was no no different in kind from the cameras and microphones, that led me to a kind of what we call a moment.

A moment of that I thought, well, what if I could reimagine these cameras and microphones, the three sixty cameras that we're using, and later, the VR the, you know, the virtual reality that we've been using?

What if we could reimagine these tools from this perspective of from the perspective of a concept of technology that isn't rooted in the Prometheus myth.

The idea that that technology isn't exclusively human is a is a powerful one.

You know, it might seem simple, but it's actually quite quite an interesting shift in thought.

And so, you know, we've in the work that we've been doing with Guarani and Kaiowá communities, we've been taking you know, we've been making an effort to take seriously their right their proposals that the things that they that they tell us about technology.

Listening to the elders when they tell us what technology does, when they define these are when they define the ways in which technology works, and shaping the ways in which we're using these multimodal methods.

And, certainly, you see the world from somewhere from somewhere else.

And so we've been you know, one of the most interesting projects that we've been developing has been the VR museum.

In fact, this emerged because we were showing the indigenous elders the the three sixty videos we've been recording of their village, and I have to say they were hugely underwhelmed.

And I thought, you know, I was kind of mortified.

So, oh, god.

Have I offended her?

She said, no.

It's just, you know, not that interesting.

So have you got anything else?

And I had you know, thought what's the most exciting thing I've got on this VR headset?

And I had this Hello Mars.

It was an experience which was part VR simulation of being in a spaceship and kind of arriving on Mars and then part three sixty footage from the Mars Rover.

And she when she watches, she sat back in her seat and she held on.

I said, you okay?

She nodded.

And she watched it all the way through.

And at the end, she, you know, she stood up and she called over her her her colleagues who have, you know, with these other shamans, all all elders, and she insisted that they watch it.

And I watched the show it's about 15 different elders.

Then she was the host of a ritual, and all these anthropologists and lawyers starting to turn up and scowl scowling at me for bringing bringing VR to these indigenous communities.

And at the end, I I asked him, I said, well, what why is it so interesting?

She said, well, it takes us so many hours to get there.

We chant we have to chant for so many hours to get there.

We don't understand how you white folks have gotten there with these goggles.

And I said, well, what do you mean?

She said, well, this is Nyondelluroka.

This is one of the planets in our cosmos.

There are dozens of planets in the well, in the Hikaiwa cosmos.

I've been living with them.

We have been working with them for over six years, and I still don't know how many planets there are.

But I've heard a lot about this one.

And they you know, she said, well, you know, this is one of the planets.

And and then another one piped up and said, yes, but it's all wrong because where's the the ceremonial houses?

Where are the trees?

Where's all the fried fish?

Where are the spirits?

And that gave me the idea.

I thought, well, wouldn't it be wouldn't it be great if we could sit and work with them to design what the world should look like?

So then we thought so so that's what inspired the Guanayinkawa VR Museum, and we invited the elders to design bit by bit a world which and to essentially to use this tool to preserve their you know, to to for what they wanted it for for whatever they wanted.

And what they wanted to do was to preserve the knowledge, their ancestral knowledge, which they're very worried about losing.

And so we went to the indigenous this indigenous gathering to present the latest version of this VR museum and to really explore how, you know, what role these what role contemporary indigenous community members from the youth to the elders, what role they understand technology to have in their struggle, in their fight for self determination, in their fight for self for autonomous narrative building, and also in their in their struggle to monitor climate, to to monitor biodiversity, and to to to communicate, you know, what they find.

I mean, as we look towards Belem and COP thirty, this was really, really in important to understand, for example, how these this knowledge, both the research and the science, Western or otherwise, indigenous identity, cultural, spiritual, all of these things can be used to forward actually what will happen in in Belem because Brazil, you have an the very first ever minister of indigenous affairs, Sônia Guajajara .

Sônia Guajajara .

Thank you very much.

Sônia Guajajara .

Oh my goodness.

I love the length.

I'm just incapable of pronouncing it.

And can that be used?

Do you see moving forward to COP thirty, which is now very just a few months away, how can this be incorporated and used?

I mean, I think it's a very good question.

I think it's you know, I think this COP, you know, they're heralding it there were a lot of people saying it's the COP that has the most indigenous presence.

And I think because of Sonia Guajajara and because of Louisa Loy and the fund and Celia Shakadjaba and the fantastic team that they've got to that they've assembled in the ministry of the the ministry of indigenous peoples, they really are making a difference.

And they really are determined to make sure that indigenous community members, indigenous peoples, indigenous leaders are present.

This is what I was out in Brazil to do is to kind of gauge the, you know, gauge the the vibe, gauge the feeling.

How are people feeling about COP?

Can they participate?

And the more I heard it, a lot of people are very excited.

But, you know, one young girl said, well, it depends how many how many followers you've got, doesn't it?

So the, you know, there is a sense as well that the indigenous community members that will be invited are those who have more influence.

And so, you know, so I started thinking with my colleagues, with my friends, and and we started thinking through, well, how could we how could we change that?

So we are so UCL MAL is going to be cohosting with our indigenous collaborators with with certainly with the Guarani and Kaiowa communities and with some other partners I can't reveal reveal yet.

But we're gonna be cohosting this multi cop, which is an open and online space for dialogue where we aim to you know, we're in because of the work we do, we're in touch with leaders from more than from, I wouldn't say, all 305 indigenous ethnic groups in Brazil.

That really would be my dream, but certainly over 200.

And we are going to be actively inviting groups of young people, elders, and leaders, you know, whoever whoever wants to as an open call, an open invitation for indigenous leaders, but also kind of go wider than that too to host panels, to host events, to host whatever they they would they would like in their own languages, if they like, and to platform that on a single digital space.

In parallel to COP?

Yes.

At the same time as COP.

Because I'm worried that COP will be much smaller than it's it's it's predicted to be much smaller than a regular COP.

Abs well, it it there isn't the name is tiny.

It's beautiful, but it's tiny.

But most of us can't afford to go.

Oh, absolutely.

But it will take place to in parallel with COP.

It was going to be an official part of COP.

It's going to bear the COP logo, and all the events that are hosted as part of it will have the COP stamp of approval.

But it will allow COP thirty to extend well beyond, you know, the important symbolic, right, of space that, you know, billing has.

It will you know, the space of billing, and it will allow it to extend around the world and to include indigenous leaders from across the globe in this important global conversation about what about climate action.

Well, Raffaella, that's amazing.

Let's us us between us academics here at UCL also bring in that dialogue as we as we go forward to come.

Yeah.

That's it for this episode of generation one from UCL, turning climate science and ideas into action.

But stay tuned for the rest of the series or listen on catch up to all our episodes on your favorite platform.

If you'd like

to ask a question or suggest a guest that you'd like to hear on generation one, you can email us at podcasts@ucl.ac.uk

Otherwise, for more information about UCL's work in the climate space and what our brilliant staff and students as well as our researchers are doing to make a more sustainable future, head to UCL Generation one website or follow us on social media UCL Generation one.