- I'm Mary Robinson.
I was elected the first female president of Ireland in 1990.
I want people to stop caring about climate change.
I really want us to stop thinking of climate change
as a scientific issue, as something about nature,
as something about conservation,
and think about people who are affected
so deeply and disproportionately.
The least responsible are more affected.
The image of climate change
not to be the polar bear on an ice flow
but to be a woman in a developing country with a worn face
because she's got to go further for the water in drought.
Well, I certainly came to the issue of climate change
through the lens of human rights
and what I saw first of all was the injustice.
And over time, I've refined that to being
at least five layers of injustice which make it so important
that we have a climate justice approach.
And the first layer was the one that I began with
when I had finished my five years
as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
and was working in African countries on the rights
that really matter if you don't have them.
Rights to food and water and health and education.
You know, in Europe and in the United States,
we weren't seeing the impacts
of climate change particularly,
but absolutely in African countries.
It was changing for the worst.
They kept saying to me, "We don't know when to sow.
"When we sow we get flooding that destroys our harvest,
"or we get lost periods of drought
"followed by flash flooding."
Climate change affects disproportionately
the poorest countries, the poorest communities,
and the small island developing states
who are least responsible for the problem.
The second layer is within that
the impact disproportionately on women
because women still have to put food on the table.
They have to go further in drought for the water
and the firewood.
The third injustice is the one
the children have been striking about,
the intergenerational injustice,
that we're not providing a safe world for them
and their children and grandchildren.
And I'm so glad that they're so clear about it,
that they're so angry.
I've been lucky enough to have six grandchildren
and we're expecting a seventh,
and I think about their world,.
How will they have a good life?
How will they have enough to eat, enough water
unless we change from our current wasteful pattern?
The fourth layer is the injustice of the pathways
to development of different parts of the world.
Ireland and the United States
and the industrialized countries,
we built our economies on fossil fuel.
And now we have to wean ourselves off fossil fuel
in order to have a safe world.
Developing countries, before the Paris Agreement,
promised in their nationally-determined contributions
that they wanted to go as green as possible,
but they said we will need the investment.
We will need the technology.
We'll need the skills.
We'll need the solidarity of the rich world
to help us do this.
And actually we haven't stepped up.
And the fifth layer is the one I came to probably latest,
but now I think possibly is the most important of all.
And that is the injustice to nature herself,
the way in which we have totally abused and wasted
the biodiversity or not protecting the ecosystems
that we depend on for our own life,
and we're not connecting ourselves
with all the other species and nature,
the land, the rivers, the oceans.
Each of us has a responsibility.
Climate change is not going to be affected
just by the actions of individual people,
but they are important.
So I'm asking everyone to do three things.
First of all, to make climate change and the climate crisis
personal in your own life.
Do something that you wouldn't have done before.
We can change our habits about what we consume,
how we control waste, et cetera.
There's lots of things we can do.
The second step is to get angry about those
with more responsibility who should be doing more,
and that is governments.
Everyone can affect that by voting,
by using their voice to urge
that those with responsibility do more.
And the third thing,
and actually I think this is the most important,
we need to imagine this world that we're hurrying towards
because we've got to be hurrying towards it.
It's very urgent that we make this change
to stay at a world that doesn't go above
1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's interesting to talk about hope,
but I have to say in January of this year
I was struggling with the idea of hope
because I didn't see that governments were prepared
to step up and do responsibly what they had to do
in order to ensure that we would reduce the emissions.
And then COVID-19 happened on top of the climate crisis.
But I have more hope because it has caused us
to pause and rethink.
Apart from the high offices that I've had the honor to hold,
I also have written a book of stories about climate justice,
because stories, I think, bring empathy.
It's called "Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience,
"and the Fight for a Sustainable Future."
And I've also done something that I hadn't expected to do.
I've become involved in a podcast and we interview women
from different parts of the world with great diversity,
women of color, young women, Indigenous women.
We get their voices out so that they will be heard.
I am more hopeful that we will be more thoughtful
and actually take the responsibility
that we need to take going forward.
(upbeat instrumental music)