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

What aspects of climate change and other environmental problems are getting overlooked?

Nothing gets overlooked, it just gets denied. But I think very few people are pure climate change deniers now.

There's 300 to 500 million people in the world today who live in a habitat that is actively threatened by climate change. And if you ask any farmer anywhere whether there's climate change, they will tell you that there is, because farmers know this stuff. If you ask anybody who lives in a city in South Asia whether it's hotter than before, they will say yes. If they live close to the sea, you don't need to explain it to them. The frontiers are coastal areas in developing countries, island nations and the high mountains. But if you live in a developed country, if you don't understand the urgency, then obviously the funding to address that urgency won't come through.

Is there a tension between development and causing environmental damage?

We try to create growth in developing countries, in many cases where the levels of current wealth are still quite modest. I think it's a fallacy to say that fighting climate change means you can't generate growth – it means you can't generate irresponsible growth.

If you pursued economic growth without thinking about climate change, you would create an unsustainable pattern of growth and consumption in those countries, because fossil fuels will not be what they are today, even 10 years from now. Ask any portfolio investor whether they put their long term money in fossil fuels and they'll tell you no.

But for developing countries, it's easier because much of the growth still has to happen. In terms of energy, you don't need to build a coal-fired power plant, you can just promote solar and wind energy, or like AKDN does, small hydro plants in the mountains, where we produce some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity that is available anywhere in the world.

What prompts change?

Doomsday thinking doesn't motivate people. If you're on the Titanic and it sinks, then you are just going to wait until you die, maybe drink the champagne on the boat. So that narrative doesn't work.

AKDN instead tries to show that both mitigation and adaptation are possible anywhere. The first office AKAH solarised in our net-zero commitment was in Kabul. Not Mumbai – that would have been too easy. You can say to anybody who doesn’t think we can do something about climate change, we're actually doing this in Kabul, Chitral, Syria. In our Network-wide green building guidelines, we’re moving away from concrete construction, one of the largest sources of emissions in the world, and are designing cooler urban buildings using traditional techniques rather than air conditioning.

Perfection is an unachievable goal, but if you tell people please pick something that is impactful, and you have a toolkit that shows how, I think most people would do it. If everybody did something meaningful, we would actually get a long way.

Change requires collective action across all nations. That’s difficult to achieve in a multipolar world, which is right now in a very bad space in terms of collaboration between the US, China, India and Europe. You have to have those four poles, and also Africa, which will soon have a billion people with legitimate energy needs.

Organisations can be focused on their short-term goals because of shareholder value, and humanitarian organisations just want to save lives. And given the reality of climate change, we cannot afford to take that view.

But as AKDN, as both private and civil society, we can do things just to show people that they can be done. And this is really important because we're going to die as a species if we believe we can't do anything about climate change, but we actually can. It's not high-level engineering. None of it is very difficult. Most of it is not even unpleasant.