“A future full of climate champions”: A conversation with Hristo Dikanski, AKDN Climate Change Coordinator

In March 2022, AKDN agencies jointly published an ambitious plan for the Network’s environment and climate work. It included achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2030, preventing AKDN operations from contributing to environmental degradation, fostering green development and enabling others to practise environmental stewardship. Hristo Dikanski, AKDN Climate Change Coordinator, outlines some of the subsequent progress.

"Agreeing to this commitment was a historic moment. This was one of the first times when the whole Network – social, cultural and economic development agencies – united to make a clear, definitive, ambitious statement to the world. I think we came closer together.

“But it was only the beginning of a big transition. The commitment is about what we will do by 2030. A business or a company may consider this a long-term strategy, but for AKDN it is only a few moments. Agencies have started creating their own pathways to align to a net zero vision by 2030: creating plans, budgeting actions, assigning responsibilities and also building capacities in the teams across the chain of involvement.”

Hristo experienced his own green transition after his childhood in Bulgaria, where protecting the environment was not a common topic. “It was only when I studied engineering in the UK that I started to understand how much our lives impacted nature and the environment, and how much we can do to aggravate the situation, but also how very much we can do to reverse it and resolve it.”

Nurturing climate champions

“There has been an awakening of the power of education for the environmental transition in empowering the next generation of climate champions. We work through 200 Aga Khan Schools, two universities and our relationships with hundreds of state-run schools in many countries. The Aga Khan Foundation-led Schools2030 initiative has an increasing focus on environment and climate. If we inspire a student to act on climate change, we're not only empowering an individual, but their family, their community.

“We are participating in the upcoming UN Climate Conference, COP28, showing how our education work can be leveraged to help the environmental transition much more broadly.

Thriving in the face of natural hazards

“AKAH works to help communities thrive in the context of climate change and to be safe in really vulnerable settings such as high mountains of Central Asia. In these mountains, where communities are already vulnerable and less able to adapt, climate change is happening up to three times faster than the global average. To help understand these evolving risks and develop action plans, the Agency is leading a future climate risk study. It builds on decades of work to understand current risks and overlays the latest climate models to see how risks might evolve over the rest of the century, and what we can do.

Reducing emissions from buildings

“In the finance sector, we're seeing green loans and branchless banking. If you can provide access to financial services through technology and partnering with local vendors, you don't need to build all these buildings and to run them and to cool them or heat them.

“We have over 4,000 buildings in the Network and running them is responsible for over 80 percent of our direct greenhouse gas emissions. When we take construction of the building into account, the cement, the steel, this increases dramatically.

“To accommodate the building requirements we expect by 2060, the world needs to add the equivalent of a new city the size of New York every month for 40 years. If we keep doing this the way we always have, we will have a really tough time achieving the aggressive carbon reduction and energy reduction targets that we've set ourselves as a world and as a Network. So we need to reduce the emissions of current buildings but also think about alternatives to creating new ones. Can we repurpose an existing building? Can we extend its lifespan to delay or avoid the need for new construction?

“How do we utilise what we already have? There have been some technology-related, almost revolutionary ideas in the past decade or so. Companies like Airbnb use underutilised buildings and avoid potential new construction. We see the same with transport.

“In many places where we work, there is a big need for new infrastructure. There we can build something multipurpose and flexible, trying to anticipate how our needs may change in the coming decades. Could an office work as a school or a factory, a community space or a concert hall? The more open spaces, with partitions rather than unmoveable concrete walls, the more flexible.

“In places like Western Europe or North America, we have to retrofit what we already have, which is much more expensive and much more difficult than to do it all over again from scratch. But where we work, we have a really big opportunity to leapfrog carbon-intensive development and to go straight into the development of the future. And this is the opportunity that we need to enable in Asia and Africa.

The future

“The growing global population adds to the demand on resources. But it also means we have more and more young people with lots of energy and ideas. Children today have grown up completely fluent in technology. I think something similar is happening with climate. If you have so many millions of climate champions, they will come up with ideas and solutions that we can't even think of today. But we need all hands at the pump to give ourselves and the next generation the chance to do something about this before it's too late.”