In a world where money rules and qualitative arguments are easily dismissed, how does the environmental movement build momentum? Our fifth climate expert interview is with Miriam Kugele, Global Senior Manager, Environment and Sustainability at the Aga Khan University (AKU). She shares how she communicates about environmental action to accelerate action and increase ambition.

After a childhood of climbing trees and playing outdoors in mountainous areas of the world, Miriam moved to Hong Kong on a UWC scholarship at 17. “Since then, I've mostly lived in ginormous cities, including many coastal cities in Asia. And there the environment takes on a whole new dimension where the ocean, the wind and other elements affect cities and people directly. But at the same time it’s easy to stay in a building and not see changes.

“We did social service at school and every weekend my group went out diving to monitor the conditions in a newly-designated marine protected area. There’s a whole ecosystem that few ever get to see. Our job was to make it visible, to gather data that became part of policy advice and education. Seeing the changes in the two years that I was involved was transformative.”

After a career in international development, the Aga Khan Development Network appealed to her as a nexus between development, academia and policy work. Based in Karachi, she is helping AKU to reduce waste, energy use and carbon emissions, invest in cleaner energy and assist suppliers and the global community to improve their environmental sustainability.

How do you make the case for sustainability?

Miriam notes that this again starts with bringing hidden realities into view. AKU and the Aga Khan Health Services began their journey to net zero by 2030 by developing a carbon emissions management tool. AKU used the resulting data to start decarbonisation planning. They discovered that it is technologically and financially feasible to reduce emissions, with an average payback time of under four years for the required investments and adaptations.

“Once you have the data in place, many teams can use it to prioritise their actions. Data not only makes things visible to many stakeholders, it empowers them to make decisions.”

A second factor is the type of arguments used. “Money makes the world go round, and people don’t necessarily trust qualitative arguments, so I sometimes package my arguments more in terms of quantitative data, such as cost and saving.

“In a city like Karachi, our air is barely breathable. But during COVID, when people weren’t driving and the air improved, we just started to walk in the afternoons. Neighbours got to know each other instead of living behind walls. What does that mean for the climate message? We want to make our city more livable in terms of social justice, community building, supportive networks. But building networks sounds all fluffy. Instead we can use data on air quality and heat exposure to make a case for reducing health problems. Given how energy-intensive health care is, keeping people healthy is the best service to the planet.”

Miriam sees many such opportunities for social justice in environmental work. Rooftop solar panels, for example, enable users to own their means of energy production and save money. “And when we do that at large scale to have distributed energy systems, it becomes a really transformative thing for society.”

Who can lead change?

“We need people who act as role models to become a critical mass, which can then be accelerated through policy. I’m a big believer in policy. It showcases ways for people to take the right action when on a personal level they might find it difficult.

“AKU’s Graduate School for Media and Communication in Kenya had produced a documentary series called Giving Nature a Voice. And one of the videos documented plastic bags in the ocean. There was a policy discussion underway in Kenya that utilised this video and its message, and Kenya became one of the first countries in the world to ban plastic bags.”

How else is AKU acting as a role model?

“Around 70 percent of our emissions are from the supply chain. We provide training and capacity building around carbon accounting, focusing on high-emission areas such as pharmaceutical and medical equipment suppliers, and on our local manufacturers, who know they need to become more sustainable, but don’t know how. So building that network and getting them in one room and saying ‘we're all in this together’ has been really powerful.

“But we can only really talk about this to others if we do our own homework, right? The French Medical Institute for Children in Afghanistan installed the first set of solar panels in 2019, and are just getting a solar geyser to heat water. We now have solar panels on our campuses in Kenya, Uganda and Pakistan with many more to come soon, and have just inaugurated a biomass boiler in our hospital in Nairobi, using field waste like straw and sawdust.

“Three buildings in AKU have been certified as EDGE Advanced [using much less energy and water]. That's really exciting, not just for that certification and for the energy and water reduction that it entails, but as a living space. When students and staff see the things around them, the space can be a means of encouragement and communication. We have 4,000 acres in Arusha, Tanzania dedicated to environmental research. We’ve just hosted the first field school there and I’ve started taking the new Faculty of Arts and Science students to a plot of land outside Karachi to experience environmental research and action in a holistic way, from counting trees to calling on their artistic skills with leaf line drawings. And we design an annual challenge for AKU students to develop their own climate action projects.

“I picked up the phone last week and it was a woman who said, ‘My kid’s friend goes to AKU and he says you guys don't have plastic water bottles anymore. Now I want to do that in my son’s school. Tell me, how can we do it?’ And that to me is the most wonderful feedback.”

Learn more:

The Aga Khan University

Achieving net zero

AKU President’s Challenge for Climate Solutions

Read the rest of the series:

“Change requires collective action”: Onno Rühl discusses climate challenges

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

At the frontiers of climate change: Interview with Harpalsinh Chudasama and Mohammad Zaman

Can tourism help the planet? Shenin Virji makes the case