Our Broken Planet: The Podcast

Tori Herridge: Most of us agree our planet is broken. But what we struggle to agree on is how we should fix it.

Khalil Thirlaway: Should we recycle more?

Tori: Stop eating meat?

Khalil: Write to our MPs?

Tori: Boycott certain products?

Khalil: Join demonstrations?

Tori: Glue ourselves to buildings? So, in this episode of Our Broken Planet, we are going to be exploring the link between science and activism.

Khalil: We’re revealing the role of research, meeting the campaigners fighting to create change and diving into the psychology of winning hearts and minds.

Guest speaker 1: There’s an important role for scientists, activists, and political leaders to play in communicating that it is still possible to address climate change.

Guest speaker 2: The most important part was my people. Without them, I couldn’t do it.

Guest speaker 3: If even one person doesn’t buy an SUV because of what we’re doing. Then we’ve won.

Guest speaker 4: It is, with a David and Goliath situation, the only way that we can get the attention of the world.

Khalil: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we’ve been finding out how we created some of the problems of our modern world and searching for solutions from nature and science. I’m Khalil Thirlaway.

Tori: And I’m Tori Herridge. Across this series, we’ve explored the interconnected issues facing our Earth and asked the question, what can we do about it?

Khalil: And in the final episode of this series of Our Broken Planet, we’re taking to the streets to find out about the role that direct action plays in challenging the climate crisis.

Tori: The first evidence that human activity was contributing to global warming came more than a hundred years ago, but we’re still playing catch up.

Khalil: So, what’s the deal? We’re a society that claims to champion science, technology, progress. Why have scientists been ignored?

Tori: And what should scientists do about the fact they’ve been ignored?

Dr Erica McAllister: My whole reason of living is to look after this planet, is to leave something better behind, is to study. I’m curious, I want to know what’s going on.

Khalil: Dr Erica McAllister is a Senior Curator for Diptera and Siphonaptera – that’s flies and fleas – at the Natural History Museum.

Erica: It’s really, really upsetting when you can see, with direct evidence, that the insect populations are being hurt, are being changed, are being damaged by climate change.

Khalil: How has your research been impacted by the climate crisis?

Erica: Well, I guess my whole life has been impacted by the climate crisis. But my research… I’m seeing huge changes going on. I’m seeing changes in population numbers. I’m seeing changes in population distributions. I’m seeing changes in emergence patterns. A lot of this would have initially been because of us and introduced species and things like that, but we’re definitely now seeing the impact of climate change in all of this.

Khalil: Have you had any trouble sharing your research or, you know, been challenged or contradicted or ignored when trying to share information about what’s happening to life on Earth?

Erica: Well, as scientists, we’re very, very concerned with data. We like lots of data. So, we are mindful when we use expressions like climate change and I will have many a discussion. But thankfully now I have lots of evidence, lots of smaller papers, lots of work done globally all looking into this to actually back up my feelings and my own findings.

Khalil: You mentioned scientists being data driven people. Does that mean that they have a duty to always be impartial, or do they conversely have a duty to agitate for action if their message isn’t being heard?

Erica: I don’t think scientists are impartial. They like to be factual, but they very much believe in their research and they have a passion for it. I will get very heated and very upset if I’m presenting evidence that says something that’s horrible or has gone wrong or anything like that.

Tori: I’d say that Erica’s sentiments expressed there would be shared by scientists all over the world. Yeah, anecdotally at least, that feels like sentiments I’ve heard expressed many times in many places from many different fields of research.

Khalil: Do you remember a moment when you realised that your research was being impacted by the climate crisis?

Tori: But my research is entirely about climate change, pretty much. Ooh!

Khalil: Um, no, yeah. Where are all these new mammoths coming from?

Tori: Yeah, yeah. But that is really interesting, actually. But actually, if you roll back the clock to when I first basically decided to kind of become a scientist, if you want to call it like that, that moment at school was because of a realisation that the climate was changing.

I remember it really vividly because it was that point where we were doing global warming in just before GCSE – like year nine or something like that – and it happened to coincide exactly with a time period in chemistry we were doing about how you can remove carbon dioxide from like, you know, from experiments by putting solar lime in like a little test tube and you bubbled it all over.

Yeah. Those two things were going side by side, in each place. I was like, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Oh, soda lime. And then I wrote a story in English about a future, like a futuristic story where like scientists tried to stop the world from getting too warm by spraying soda lime into the atmosphere, but they put too much in and they started a new ice age.

And then I got obsessed with the Ice Age from that point onwards. And then I’ve ended up doing Ice Age Science and Ice Age Science is all about climate change.

Khalil: I love that there’s an alternate timeline where Tori Herridge is a sci fi author writing environmental, like, speculative science fiction about all these different possible futures, good and bad, hot and cold.

Tori: It could still happen.

Khalil: I mean, I’d read it.

Tori: Never say never. I… No, no. It was a bit of a rubbish story. But it was actually that moment when I realised that scientists didn’t have the answer. And that’s when science became interesting. How about you?

Khalil: Well, my research was looking in Malaysian rainforest plants for new molecules that could be turned into medicines for certain bits of your immune system. And so, as part of my discussion, part of my thesis, there was a section where I wrote primarily about the concerns that I had about the consequences of the research and what would be important in our approaches to continuing this research that would make it environmentally sustainable and socially sustainable as well. That is where the data interfaces with the real world.

Tori: Yeah, exactly. So here, I think, is where it gets interesting. You know, for so long, discussion’s been about getting people to accept that climate change is happening, that global warming is real, right? For so long. In some ways, people, I think, have got that message, you know, broadly. The problem is, the next step, right, is like, now we’ve moved on to potentially, like, what to do about it. And that’s when it gets really interesting, because you can’t separate out the science from the politics.

Khalil: Direct action is when a group takes part in an activity that disrupts business as usual, with the aim of achieving a particular political goal. There are lots of different kinds of direct action. It’s sort of an umbrella term.

Tori: Some types of direct action are legal. Like taking part in a strike or a boycott. Other types are illegal, sometimes called civil disobedience, which is the non-violent and conscientious breach of the law. Think of civil rights activists in the US who challenged racial segregation by staging sit-ins in white-only spaces.

Khalil: There’s also uncivil disobedience, which, you might have guessed from the name, can involve more aggressive tactics like attacks on property or infrastructure. And, at an extreme level, direct action can also include attacks on people.

Tori: Basically, direct action exists on a sliding scale, from things that are peaceful, to things that are not. And along that spectrum, you’ll find that different kinds of action have had different levels of success at different times throughout history.

Professor Tristram Wyatt: I think scientists always had the idea that we would write our reports and governments would listen.

Tori: Professor Tristram Wyatt is a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. In 2018, he sat down to start work on a new edition of his book, Pheromones and Animal Behaviour.

Tristram: What I realised was that so many animals were going to be going extinct in the lifetime of my students. And that was a wake-up call. And it made a lot of sense to actually go out and try to do something about it.

Tori: So, Tristram joined Scientists for Extinction Rebellion.

Tristram: I’d seen these scientists in their white lab coats at a non-direct action event, so taking over Trafalgar Square. I mean, in a way that was a direct action. We stopped the traffic. But that was by agreement. And it was a big teach in. So, lots of people were coming up and asking the scientists questions.

Tori: Scientists for Extinction Rebellion are a group made up of representatives from across the spectrum of scientific disciplines, from zoologists like Tristram, to biochemists, physicists, ecologists and engineers. They believe they have a moral duty to not only document the natural world, but also to take action to protect it.

Tristram: The first action I was directly involved with was our action against the Business and Energy Strategy Department, and the action was pasting blown-up enlarged pictures of scientific papers, big enough for a minister to read, onto the glass walls of the Ministry of the Department.

Tori: How big were they?

Tristram: They were about six foot square, and the letters of these scientific papers, the titles, were at least a foot high.

Tori: How tall are you, just to get some idea?

Tristram: So, I’m five foot eight.

Tori: So, these papers are bigger than you. I love that. So yeah, you’re sort of dwarfed by the science.

Tristram: I’d gone to the launch of Extinction Rebellion in October 2018, and I’d seen the first direct action, where people were sitting in the road. And a friend of mine – who was one of the founders – had actually got very annoyed with people getting up at the request of the police and said, “We’re meant to get arrested”. And then when Extinction Rebellion in 2019 took over Oxford Street and the bridges, and I went along to a lot of the talks, I heard Greta speaking and I was starting to get more involved. But I was also kind of holding back.

We have gathered today because we have chosen which path we want to take and now we are waiting for the others to follow our example.

Tristram: Looking back, I wish I had sat down on the street a lot more.

Tori: What changed?

Tristram: I think gradually just things getting worse. I’d always had this idea that climate change was something that was fractions of a degree. It was all about average temperatures. And I think what has gradually changed is a realisation that things can go wrong in unexpected ways that are not about the average, they’re about sudden new extremes. And something that would have been a once-in-a-thousand-year event is now two years in a row, perhaps three or four times in a decade. And that’s new. And at the same time, realising the governments were doing the opposite of what they should be doing.

Tori: Despite targets to limit the warming of our planet to only 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, governments around the world have not yet taken the necessary steps to achieve this target. Extinction Rebellion, or XR as they are also known, believe more should be done. In April and October 2019, XR brought central London to a standstill over days of protests. Thousands of people were arrested, costing the Metropolitan Police an estimated 37 million pounds.

Tristram: They were testing a model, which was could we get enough people arrested to get the government’s attention? And with the way that the police were interacting with Extinction Rebellion at the time, there were more than a thousand arrests. We were, perhaps surprisingly, allowed to take over the city in an extraordinary way. It was – to the extent that we had, I think it would have been Theresa May’s government declaring a climate emergency, for that moment, it did look as though we had – a moment of change.

Tori: What do you think about, you know, people who say that they find things like the disruptive activism of people like Justin Boyle, you know, Insulate Britain, kind of annoying and basically unhelpful?

Tristram: It is designed to be annoying and that’s what’s always been the case with non-violent civil disobedience, whether we’re talking about the campaigns in the American South for integration. I think when it’s directed at the general public, with the slow marches in the street, it has been attracting attention from the news media. And the reason I think the non-violent civil disobedience in those very focused ways that disrupt cultural and sporting events, although it’s hugely annoying, it’s over very quickly, it’s designed to be an interruption, I think it’s probably the way to go. And it is, with a David and Goliath situation, the only way that we can get the attention of the world.

Tori: I thought it was really interesting about Tristram focusing so much on the media aspect of it all, and I think that tells you very much about, you know, one of the key aspects of direct action, maybe it isn’t the action itself, but keeping it in the conversation.

Khalil: And it’s interesting to think about how things are perceived now and how things will be perceived in the future. So, for example, if you take the suffragette movement – at the time, there was a hostile media environment and they were portrayed as uppity and inconvenient and unladylike and a nuisance, but in retrospect, we see them as important mediators of positive social change.

Tori: Yeah, that idea that, you know, you’re being disrupted is kind of the point. That’s kind of the key point, right? And Christian’s point in some ways. Like, you know, any publicity is good publicity. Yeah, it’s like keeping it front and centre, I think, is, you know, it’s kind of interesting there, isn’t it?

Khalil: Is all publicity good publicity? Because there have been recent surveys of, for example, the British public, that say that more than half, 57% of people think that slow walking as a form of protest should be against the law. And 64% of Britons have an unfavourable opinion of the group Just Stop Oil, who’ve been disrupting cultural events like Wimbledon and snooker and things like that. And only 17% of Brits have a favourable opinion.

Tori: Yeah, but it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because you also get, if we’re going to shout statistics at each other, we also know that three out of four Britons think that climate change is a serious global threat, right? So, you’ve got, that worry is still there. And I think that’s an interesting, like, it is an interesting sort of counterpoint to each other. You’ve got that, like, one in four people saying it’s out of control, but then people think, just over half, 52% think there is still time to deal with it.

Khalil: So, we know there’s a problem. We know there’s still time to deal with it. But we don’t want to be inconvenienced in the doing something about it. Or maybe is it that people don’t feel like they are the ones responsible and so they feel unjustly targeted?

Tori: I got this amazing chance to go and talk to people for this podcast and sort of vox pop them on the streets. And that, what you’ve just paraphrased there, is effectively the thought process of almost every single person that we talked to.

Tori: How do you feel about the state of our planet?

I think it’s very scary.

It’s not great.

It’s clear to see that it is changing. Like, the summer’s getting hotter and all that, and like, it’s always like, lashing down with rain in the middle of July, it’s like, obviously something’s not right.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?

Tori: What do you feel about activists that take part in disruptive activism?

I honestly think that takes it a bit far.

Going about it in that fashion, in that manner, is more disruptive than it is helpful.

No one’s going to listen in any other way, so how do you do it? You’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, aren’t you?

Tori: So, they’re worried about the planet. They don’t like direct action. They think people at Just Stop Oil are targeting the wrong people. But they think something should be done. The thing I took most about it was actually how much people had thought about it, which is really interesting. It wasn’t sort of like a knee jerk reaction that, you know, that’s just annoying. They were like, yeah, it is actually really annoying, and it’s making me feel uncomfortable. But also to then go to the next issue and think about it, because most people then would come to the point, well, you know, well, what do we do? And then there was usually a big pause. And that’s, I think, the space that most people are operating in. Like, what do we do?

Khalil: And I guess getting people to think about something that is as scary as the environmental crises is part of what the movement is aiming for. It’s a step along the way.

Tori: Now, let’s turn to the idea of uncivil disobedience. A frequent criticism levelled against activists who slow march in the streets is that they’re targeting the wrong people. Working people who are just trying to go about their lives aren’t the ones contributing the most to the climate crisis. But what about those individuals in society who do contribute more than their fair share?

Think people flying about in private jets or taking business trips when a Zoom call might have sufficed. What about people who live in cities, but own large, particularly polluting cars?

In 2019, the International Energy Agency found that SUVs are the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade. More than shipping, aviation and heavy industry. What’s more, the increasing number of SUVs being bought are actually cancelling out the carbon being saved by people who’ve switched to electric cars.

The Tyre Extinguishers: We’re people from all walks of life and we have one aim: to make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4x4 in the world’s urban areas.

For the environmental campaigning group The Tyre Extinguishers, this is unacceptable. So, what have they been doing about it? The clue’s in the name. We sent them some questions over email to ask them what the purpose of their activism is. Their answers are voiced by one of our producers.

The Tyre Extinguishers: Deflating tires repeatedly and encouraging others to do the same. It turns a minor inconvenience of a flat tire into a giant obstacle for driving these massive vehicles around our streets. Politely asking and protesting for these things has failed, so it’s time for action.

Tori: The Tyre Extinguishers told us they had deflated the tyres on around 20,000 SUVs worldwide. They also pointed us in the direction of an article in the Telegraph from last year covering their campaign. The article suggested that, if you are worried about having your tyres let down, why not try a traditional estate car?

The Tyre Extinguishers: If even one person doesn’t buy an SUV because of what we’re doing, then we’ve won.

Tori: Sabotaging property isn’t just controversial, it’s criminal. And some people feel that attacking individuals only deepens the divisions between us on the climate crisis.

The Tyre Extinguishers: In general, we believe that individuals shouldn’t be targeted. However, there does come a point when the consumption of an individual is so massive, so egregious, so unnecessary, that they do become a target. SUVs are luxury emissions done by the world’s richest people, so they have to be targeted.

Tori: The Tyre Extinguishers argue that people should be willing to break the law to fight climate change.

The Tyre Extinguishers: We all have to be brave and take this action, even if we find it scary. We find it scary, and we’re still out doing it, because climate death is far scarier.

Khalil: Now, whatever you think of the Tyre Extinguisher’s intentions, what they do is obviously illegal and we can’t condone their actions.

Tori: One of the inspirations behind the Tyre Extinguishers as a group was a campaign that was run in Sweden, where activists went around one of the wealthy neighbourhoods in one of the cities and they deflated the tyres of SUVs and put little like, you know, notes on the windscreen saying, you know, “Hey, I realise this is really inconvenient, but you know what else is convenient? Have a lovely day on the public transport facilities that are so beautifully provided for you.”

Now, it’s one thing to like deflate a tyre, but it’s, you know, the beginnings, if you like, of a process which can escalate higher. One of the people behind that was a person called Andreas Malm and he has recently written a book which is definitely more controversial, maybe incendiary, than deflating tyres because it’s called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Khalil: Yeah, I’ve heard of it.

Tori: Yeah, yeah. Oh, hang on. I got my handbag. Hey, look, it’s here. Look, it’s got a good front cover.

Khalil: Ooh, yeah, very eye catching.

Tori: And you’ll like the back.

Khalil: Property will cost us the Earth.

Tori: That’s quite you, Khalil.

Khalil: Yeah, I can’t say I disagree.

Tori: I don’t want to stereotype you or anything. It’s like, I feel like I know you quite well by now. And I thought ooh, I think Khalil will like that one. But yeah, it is quite interesting. I’m reading it at the moment and it’s fascinating.

But, I mean, it’s the critical, I guess, the critical point in it, about this is like, if you want to up the ante from peaceful direct action to violent or non-peaceful direct action, then, you know, we all know what terrorism is and it can harm lives. But another way to do is to take your action to where you think it will have the most impact.

And, and Malm has a very, if you like, distinctly left wing, anti-capitalism, political ethos. And he is very much focused on the climate crisis. So, he says that activists need to start thinking about hitting oil production where it hurts. You need to start hitting their business where it hurts. And so, it’s not about, you know, hearts and minds or blowing up a pipeline to get attention in the same way maybe Tristram was talking about Extinction Rebellion. It’s the direct impact of making it impossible for those oil companies to do business.

Khalil: That’s really putting the direct in direct action.

Tori: Yes.

Khalil: And also, when we talk about violence, I think it’s important to note that violence doesn’t always mean violence against another person or people. You know, violence against property, violence against power structures. Those can all be forms of violence.

Tori: Yeah, regardless, it’s really raising the stakes, isn’t it? I mean, I think that’s the critical thing. It’s like, it’s once you go from sort of sit-ins and slow walking to actual damage, that is a definite escalation and a raising of stakes for the people committing it. And also then, of course, you get a kind of a raising of stakes from the other side, the government. And it is interesting that we’re seeing that governments across the board, actually, with a kind of an increased amount of legislation against protest.

Khalil: Well, we spoke to someone who knows exactly what it’s like to take on a massive corporation under a hostile government and win.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the Amazon is it’s so big, and I mean both the river and the forest. They’re parts of the same superorganism. It’s dense and busy with all sorts of life, big and small. But at the same time, it’s extraordinarily peaceful.

Brazil is a country that’s been through a lot. Colonial rule by Portugal as a slavery based economy was followed by a hundred years of political instability, including more than one military coup. Throughout all of this, Indigenous Peoples have consistently borne the brunt of violence, dispossession and marginalisation.

They’ve had their land stolen by loggers, miners, ranchers and other destructive industries that have made a few people very rich. It’s been a long struggle to get official recognition and enforcement of indigenous land rights, and the fight continues.

Alessandra Korap Munduruku is a member of the Munduruku group of Sawré Muybu, an indigenous territory in northern Brazil.

She’s also the President of the Pariri Indigenous Association. She’s speaking to me in Portuguese via video call.

Alessandra Korap Munduruku: In 2019, when Bolsonaro became President, there were several bills that he was creating, making it easier for companies to enter indigenous land. He started working on a bill intended to legalise gold digging, mining, oil, natural gas, agriculture and land leasing. And that’s when we started to realise that this bill was very bad for our people.

We had several demonstrations in Brasilia and then during these trips we were informed that Anglo American was also interested in the Munduruku lands and not just ours, the territories of other indigenous communities too.

Khalil: Alessandra became aware of a slew of applications made by British mining company Anglo American to mine the Sawré Muybu indigenous territory.

Alessandra: So, the big international mining companies were wanting to enter the territory without asking the Indigenous People, without informing us, nothing. There was no consultation.

Khalil: If you’ve listened to our previous episode on mining, you’ll know about the damage it does to the environment. It can poison local water, contribute to deforestation and devastate biodiversity, leaving an area scarred or at worst uninhabitable for animals and people.

Alessandra: As I’m very curious, I asked what was it? What were they doing? And it also came out in a news report. I saw the map and that was the most worrying thing. So I went back to the territory, talked to the leaders, the chiefs, the women, and we made a protest banner against Anglo American. And we also wrote a letter saying that even though the territory wasn’t demarcated, it was ours, that we weren’t going to leave. We were going to fight back because we were going to defend our territory.

Khalil: Alessandra leapt into action. Her campaign was efficient, impassioned and unrelenting. Unable to rely on the government for help and facing a seemingly insurmountable opponent in Anglo American, Alessandra and the Munduruku knew it was up to them to protect the Amazon.

She travelled deep into the rainforest to meet with 45 other indigenous leaders and alert their communities to Anglo American’s plans. She worked with organisations like Amazon Watch and Greenpeace, held assemblies and led fundraising efforts. All the while, the Munduruku carried out patrols of the most remote parts of their territory, monitoring deforestation and looking out for illegal activity.

Alessandra launched a campaign across social media, demonstrating indigenous resistance to the developments, which quickly built momentum. She filmed videos of locals holding protests and spoken statements by community members.

Alessandra: And our letter, our protest banner, was very important. And another thing was the non-indigenous weapons – the phone cameras inside the village, because today we have pictures and videos. That part was crucial.

Khalil: Battle lines were drawn and Alessandra found herself under immense pressure, which intensified when her home was broken into and the memory card from her camera was stolen.

Alessandra: The first time they came, I thought it was just a robbery. But then I realised that the documents in my bag, which I had brought from Brasilia, had been stolen.

On the camera that we were filming on, they only took the memory card. They didn’t take the camera, just the memory card. It was really strange that it wasn’t just a robbery and that there was more to it than that. That was the moment I almost gave up. My son hugged me and said, Mom, I don’t want you to die.

I was desperate. I felt alone at the time, but then my friends and partners came to comfort me. I went to my territory. I talked to the women. And then the Chief said that he was worried about all the invasions that were happening and he didn’t know what to do. And that was the moment I realised if someone was listening to me, that I’m getting in the way of something.

And then I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to be afraid. That I wasn’t going to run away. That I was going to stand up to them.

Khalil: Despite the danger Alessandra endured, through her resilience and the solidarity of the communities she coordinated, in May 2021, Anglo American backed down.

They not only withdrew the 13 approved copper mining research permits located in the Sawré Muybu territory that Alessandra lives in, but also another 14 applications for mining in other indigenous territories in the Amazon. It was a huge victory.

When you learned that Anglo American had withdrawn their research requests, how did you feel? How did you celebrate your victory?

Alessandra: When I found out, it was 2021. I was in the capital of Brasilia, in the middle of the march against Bolsonaro’s persecution of Indigenous Peoples, and the people I was with said, “Alessandra, did you see the news?” Then they showed it to me and I was like, wow, Anglo American, really?

So, at that moment we were jumping for joy with the people who were there. But we had to tell our people that Anglo American were no longer going to mine our lands.

Khalil: How beautiful. So, in your opinion, what were the most important factors that led to the success of the campaign?

Alessandra: The most important part was my people. Without them, I couldn’t do it. I can’t decide for my people. Alessandra can’t. It’s always up to the people.

Khalil: In Brazil, we have a saying, trabalho de formiguinha, which means the work of little ants. Meaning that together, we can accomplish extraordinary things. Things we could never achieve on our own.

Tori: I like the ant thing.

Khalil: Right? It’s a really beautiful, like, image.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: And it’s exemplified in what Alessandra was talking about. Because, you know, Indigenous Peoples, not just in Brazil, but around the world, can often be, you know, ignored and invisibilised and side-lined.

And so, coming together and making sure that you can’t be ignored is really powerful as a tool.

Tori: Yeah, and it’s also that kind of, you know, for better or for worse, and it can really, really be for better in these situations, is that power of social media for that exact reason. So, you know, all the people who thought they were a lone voice suddenly have a place where they can all howl into the void together and suddenly that lone voice becomes a, you know, a movement. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Khalil: Yeah, and Alessandra has been pretty clear that, you know, it was a collective effort and she credits everyone involved. But also, it’s important to acknowledge that she really was a pivotal figure and took a real pivotal role in that collectivising, in uniting all of these, you know, different indigenous groups that might not always have a lot of contact with each other, because they, you know, the Amazon is huge.

Tori: I guess that is what made Alessandra’s campaign so powerful. Her leadership, the unity of those indigenous communities that she coordinated, and then that solidarity between international organisations and Alessandra and her campaign. All of them really interesting psychological factors that actually are known to influence the strength and success of direct action.

And that psychology, I think, is, you know, a really interesting way of getting in to like the kind of nitty gritty of direct action. Because psychology can also tell us that hearing stories like Alessandra’s, it does more than just give us that warm, fuzzy feeling inside of like, wow, you know, someone did some good here. It’s actually an incredibly useful tool for then inspiring us to go on and take action ourselves, to make change happen ourselves.

So, that makes it really interesting to hear a bit about that kind of science and psychology of activism and what the research says about creating change.

Dr Reem Saab: I think that there’s an important role for scientists, activists and political leaders to play in showing and communicating that it is still possible to address climate change through collective action.

Tori: Dr Reem Saab is a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Sussex, who specialises in the psychology of political action. She’s telling me about a recent study she carried out on Extinction Rebellion members and supporters.

Reem: And we found that collective efficacy was strongly linked to the perceived efficacy of collective action in general at achieving social change. And what this shows is that it’s really important, if we want to make people feel less powerless, to emphasise how collective action across multiple instances in history has been important for pushing to achieve social change. It doesn’t just have to be through the environment, but even, you know, talking about the successes of collective action in general.

Tori: Psychologists have identified several important indicators that drive people towards direct action. First of all, you have to believe there’s injustice happening and feel emotionally invested in it.

Reem: In the case of climate change, for example, we can talk about the perceived threat of climate change itself as a collective grievance that motivates collective action engagement.

We can also talk about climate change as an environmental injustice that afflicts everyone, but we also see that environmentalists, for example, have been shown to be motivated by altruistic concerns like the impact of climate change on other people. For example, having a shared feeling of anger or moral outrage in response to a situation can be a really powerful motivating factor.

But also the research has found that positive emotions can also induce participation in collective action. So, for example, having hope for mitigating climate change or feeling pride because you have been part of a previous collective action that has helped to do something positive, that has succeeded at some level. These positive emotions can also help spur more activism.

Tori: Then, there’s the belief that taking action will work.

Reem: What also seems to be really important is not only for you to feel that your group has a capacity to achieve change, but also for you as an individual to feel that your own personal participation will make a difference.

Tori: Next, there’s the extent to which you identify with the other activists and feel like you’re part of a like-minded group.

Reem: One of the most powerful types of identities that spur collective action is what is known as politicised identification. So, in the case of climate change, for example, this would mean identifying as an environmental activist or identifying as a member of an activist environmental organisation, as opposed to simply identifying as a member of a group that is aggrieved.

Tori: And finally, there’s a sense of moral conviction that you have about the cause.

Reem: So, in a sense, we are not perceiving our position, for example, towards climate change as a mere opinion that we hold and that we seek to express, but we come to see it as an issue of morality about what is right and what is wrong.

And another related factor here is this notion of moral obligation, where those who participate in collective action feel an inner obligation to participate in order to defend their cause, and sometimes regardless of the consequences that they are going to face.

Tori: Reem had so much interesting stuff to say about, you know, basically why direct action happens, which in a nutshell is it happens when other things aren’t working, right?

But also at the much more personal level, which I think is really relevant to this feeling of being frozen or feeling hopeless that you can’t do something. And she mentioned a study which broadly showed anxiety across the board. But sometimes that anxiety sort of stemmed into depression and other times it didn’t. And the difference between the groups, depressed versus non depressed, was the ones that weren’t depressed were the ones that were doing something about it or felt they were doing something about it, were taking part in some kind of activism.

Khalil: I can definitely vouch for the fact that taking action and being part of something greater than yourself can really help with that feeling of helplessness.

And the changes that we need to make as a world of people are going to be difficult because we’ve been in these habits of consumption and these ways of life for so long. And so there’s going to be, for all of us, a certain amount of discomfort in not just the changes, but the self-examination that we need to make those changes, both as individuals, but also all the way up the scale to societal changes. Societies are going to have to make some uncomfortable introspections and learn lessons from that and change how we operate.

Tori: And in some ways, I think that that kind of one of the paralysing aspects that we see maybe in these debates is that either people can’t imagine what the future will be like, what could that different future look like, and they can’t imagine themselves in it.

But also because sometimes it feels like you’ve got to choose a side, which isn’t helpful. And that kind of binary attitude, like, you know, whose side are you on? Like, are you on Just Stop Oil’s side or are you on big oil’s side? Most people aren’t on either. They just want a happy future. They want a good, great, wonderful planet. And that binary attitude is just problematic.

Khalil: I think what you said earlier about envisaging the future that you want and doing what it takes to make the world go in that direction, that’s really important.

We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize because it’s not about, you know, this idea that everything’s going to be fine, we don’t need to do anything, and it’s not about the world is absolutely going to end and there’s nothing we can do to help it. It is, we need to decide collectively what future we want and channel our emotions that we feel at the unfairness and the distance between what we have now and what we want and use that to power the change that we need to make.

Tori: Yeah, and that is, again, something that brings it back to local, because, yes, you have these big global ideas of what the other world should look like, but ultimately, you get to make your own little future, and you get to shape your own world and your own community, and that can be the building block from which things can work from.

So, you can go right back down from that big picture into the small and local, where you are the expert, where you know your neighbourhood, you know the most pressing needs locally, and maybe sort of start from there. And bit by bit, those small changes, which don’t feel so hard to make, will hopefully build up into something bigger and better for everybody.

Khalil: Trabalho de formiguinha.

Tori: The work of little ants. What a lovely note to end on.

Khalil: Thanks for listening to our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way, and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world, and it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode and across the series. If you found it helpful, why not share this with friends and family?

Tori: That’s the end of this series of Our Broken Planet. Thanks for listening, and we hope to be back in your feed soon. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback and what you thought of the series. And you can access the latest nature news, stories and how to take action on our website.

Our Broken Planet is presented by Khalil Thirlaway and me, Tori Herridge. The Producer was Artemis Irvin, the Series Producer is James Tindale, and the Executive Producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Khalil Thirlaway: Have you ever wondered what goes into the technology that we use to generate renewable energy? Of course, you need to start with the research and engineering. But when it comes time to roll out, for example, a wind turbine, what materials does it take? Well, first, you’re going to need concrete and a lot of it.

According to the World Bank, a three-megawatt wind turbine needs 1,200 tons of the stuff. But then, there’s the metals. Inside this three-megawatt wind turbine, there’s 335 tons of steel, 4.7 tons of copper, three tons of aluminium and another two tons of rare earth elements. So, that’s one wind turbine. And to replace a 500-megawatt coal power plant, you’ll need about 167 of them before you consider the fact that wind isn’t always blowing. Or before we consider that another key part of the green energy revolution is decentralised energy storage. Batteries for our cars, homes and other devices.

So, to not even completely replace a single coal power plant, we’d need to dig up around 258,000 tons of materials from our Earth and humour me here, if we were to replace the world’s entire current energy generation, about 18 trillion watts, with an army of these wind turbines, we’d need over 9.2 billion tons.

Now, of course, the energy generation of the future isn’t just going to be made up of wind turbines. It’ll be a mix of solar, wind, hydropower and likely supplemented with other non-renewable technology, like nuclear or whatever comes next in technology’s march forward.

But the fundamental challenge remains. We need materials to create renewable energy supplies and decarbonise our world to fight back against the climate crisis.

Guest speaker 1: We’ve got lots of evidence of where mining has left terrible legacies.

Guest speaker 2: We don’t want to alter the environment too much, but we also need to know what lives there in order to be able to protect it and preserve it.

Guest speaker 3: Our oceans are facing more pressures now than at any other time in human history.

Khalil: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Khalil Thirlaway.

In this episode, I’m going to be taking you through some of the challenges of resourcing the green economy and asking the question, how can we supply the materials required for a renewable energy future without creating excess harm to our planet?

We’ll be hearing about how science is working to fix the mistakes of mining past and exploring the alien depths of the ocean, which some see as an exciting new opportunity for resources, while others see it as a continuation of the unsustainable plundering of nature’s bounty.

Richard Herrington: We think we’re going to stop using coal and oil and gas. But actually, the irony is we’re going to need something else to replace that.

Khalil: Richard Herrington is the Natural History Museum’s research lead on resourcing the green economy. He’s telling me all about what we need to build the green energy revolution.

Richard: We need new wind turbines. We need solar panels. We need hydroelectric schemes. All of these are resource hungry. We need to electrify our vehicle fleet. We need to revolutionise the way we use our transportation systems in general. And all of that needs a new type of infrastructure, which needs new materials.

Khalil: So, what are some of the materials that we’ll need to make this green revolution happen?

Richard: You’ve probably heard of some of them. Rare earth metals, which we use in wind turbines. They’re very specific because they’re used in magnets for electric motors. We’re going to need more copper. We’re going to need more iron.

But then there’s a range of some of the elements that we’ve not really thought much about in the past, like lithium and cobalt and graphite, which is a form of carbon. And all of these are needed in the new technologies that are part of the energy revolution.

Khalil: We’ve been throwing away electronics for a while now. Could we not source those metals from the stuff that we’ve been throwing away?

Richard: We can, and we should be. The problem is, there’s a growth in the market. That’s the inherent problem that we’ve got. Our demands for those metals is growing, just simply because we don’t have enough to recycle for everybody to use now. At some point in time, we probably will have enough, but we don’t at the moment.

Khalil: And these metals, they come from the Earth, and so we get them by mining. Mining has, for a long time, been a massive problem and had a lot of impact on both biodiversity and human lives. What have we been doing wrong in this process?

Richard: We’ve got lots of evidence of where mining has left terrible legacies. We’ve not really thought about mining in the right way. Is it actually being a temporary intervention on the earth to get some things of real use? We’ve never really systematically planned what does a post mining landscape look like? And there’s been less attention paid on what happens when we close a mine and a lot more attention paid on what happens when we open it. And that’s because, you know, mines have very long lives. And when they started, very often, the last thing people thought about was what’s gonna happen when you close them?

Khalil: When mines are abandoned or closed without a plan for the area’s rehabilitation you get what’s called a legacy mine, which can have hugely damaging ongoing impacts on the local area.

The Santo Niño mine in Tublay, situated in the north of the Philippines, is one such legacy mine. The mine, which closed in 1982, extracted copper, one of those critical metals in our transition to the green economy. The Natural History Museum is one of several organisations working on the BioPlus mine project, which hopes to assess and counteract some of this particular location’s problems.

Manolo Vigliano: Most of my relatives who are residing above Santo Niño mines, they migrated to other provinces because their livelihood were affected.

Khalil: Manolo Vigliano is a project ambassador. He grew up in the area before the Santo Niño mine was built.

Manolo: The water source were affected. It dried. Because most of our water sources here are the springs. And some of the communities above Santo Niño, during the mining operation, most of their springs declined or even dried out.

Khalil: Mining uses a lot of water. Dust suppression, fire control, flotation, grinding, screening, dust scrubbing, wash water, pump glands, seal water, the list goes on. These are all mining processes that require water. And in Santo Niño’s case, it’s left indigenous local communities struggling at times. Sources of water appeared to dry up when the mine was built back in 1972.

Sabado Beka Junior: The biggest problem now is the water.

Khalil: This is Sabado Beka Junior. He represents the local indigenous community.

Sabado: Before the farmers couldn’t irrigate their own land. Well, when the Santorini was opened and until it was shut down, the level of water went down. So, the farmers were evicted and now they rely on the weather.

Khalil: Water quality is another critical issue around mining sites. Here’s the Natural History Museum’s Richard Herrington again.

Richard: When you mine, you’re basically going underground to search for minerals that are really of great value. What you’re doing then is you’re bringing to surface rocks that have been buried deep in the Earth. And unfortunately, those rocks are often very reactive when they come into contact with water in the atmosphere. And in the case of this mine, these minerals, which are iron and copper sulphides, start to decay and break down.

They produce acid, the metals dissolve and they go into the groundwater – in the streams and so on. And so... this site has particular issues with copper and zinc… and so, what we’re looking is, you know, are there some interventions there that will help us to remove that from the water and at the same time actually recover those metals, because they do have a value.

So, using microbiology, one of our research teams is looking at how we can use bacteria to bring the metals out of the water and recover those and turn the water back into something that’s a quality for use for farming and even drinking.

Khalil: Working with the community, the scientists on the BioPlus mine project are aiming to help rehabilitate the land for its people to prosper again.

Dennis Alonso: It’s all about the basic needs that they need. Water security, water use, food security, livelihood, economic and safety. And how we can meet those basic needs before moving to the next level of their needs.

Khalil: Dennis Alonso from the University of New South Wales leads the social component of the BioPlus mine project.

Dennis: It’s trying to look at the knowledge in terms of rehabilitation. They’ve got local knowledge, but to operationalise it into a more concrete action. Because it’s really hard to go to the community and impose what we believe to be the solution of the problem, if you’re not going to look at their aspirations, their basic needs and address those things.

Khalil: Legacy mines are something of an epidemic worldwide, as companies extract resources and leave locals to deal with the fallout. It’s estimated that there are 600,000 of them in the US alone. And while every case will have its own individual circumstances, this project could be a template for assessing and dealing with environmental hazards in other locations.

Richard Herrington says we should be striving for a cradle-to-cradle approach to terrestrial mine sites.

Richard: This linear economy where we’d make things, we’d use them and then we’d throw them away. And that is, if you like, cradle to grave as a concept. And the cradle-to-cradle concept is very much this idea that we start with something and we should take that product back to where it began and make it useful for reuse. Where the actual site, the mining site, should be returned back to something that has equal value to what was there when we started.

Khalil: Now, this is just one example of how mining projects have negatively impacted landscapes and communities. Mining of lithium, one of the critical components of lithium-ion batteries – you know, like we see in our phones, computers and electric vehicles – can be hugely damaging for the natural world.

It’ s extraction, like the Santo Niño mine, has been linked with declining water quality and damage to biodiversity. Cobalt, another critical ingredient of the lithium-ion battery, has a supply chain that has been proven to include child labour, something that doesn’t get talked about enough when we’re singing the praises of the green energy revolution. And it might not be the only resource with a connection to child labour.

All of these arguments against traditional mining has fed an appetite for opportunities that are less damaging to people and the environment. So, some might say, where better to go than where we know there’s absolutely no human life?

The deep sea isn’t necessarily the first place you’d expect to find a mine. But to be fair, you’d be forgiven for not really expecting anything down there.

So much of the depths of our oceans are alien, weird and undiscovered. We estimate that we’ve only recorded around 10% of the species that live in the deep ocean and we’ve barely mapped a quarter of the ocean floor. There isn’t currently any commercial mining activity on the seabed, but as of 2023, there have been 31 exploration licences granted to explore the potential viability of mining in the deep sea.

Seventeen of these licences focus on a part of the ocean situated between Mexico and Hawaii, the Clarion Clipperton Zone – an abyssal plain, a vast, flat area of ocean floor, roughly 4.5 million square kilometres. Earlier this year, the Natural History Museum’s Adrian Glover was floating nearly five kilometres above it.

Adrian Glover: So, I’m standing up on the bridge of the Royal Research Ship James Cook. In front of me are all kinds of dials and twinkling lights and buttons that control the entirety of this 80-metre-long research vessel, state of the art research boat.

It’s just becoming dawn here. We’re out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I can see, on the map here, we’re over 2,000 miles from, really, land in any direction. And there’s…the moon is setting on one side and just slowly, the first hints of dawn coming up over from the east there.

We’re stationary over a single spot where we’re diving with our remotely operated vehicle, our mini robot submersible, down on the seafloor, 4,700 metres beneath us. And I’m gonna go down now, and...

ROV team: Uh, can we increase the shoot speed to 0.2, please?

Increase to 0.2, okay. Thank you.

Adrian: So, that was the ROV team downstairs just calling up to Phil here to move the ship along a little bit faster, just to keep up with us on the seabed. It’s really quite remarkable how we manage to coordinate two vehicles – one small, the size of a car, driving around effectively on the seabed using thrusters – and up here an 80-metre-long research ship.

And I’m going to go down now, and we’ll see what we can see in the remotely operated vehicle, the ROV Control Van.

So, I’ve just walked into the control van of the remotely operated vehicle, our mini submersible. There’s a hum of the instruments and around me are an amazing number of screens. I think there’s over 20 screens, all with different video feeds of the seafloor around us.

I can see Brian, Eric and Beth here, the scientists on watch, watching everything. They’re looking at the seabed now. So, 4,700 metres of umbilical cable connects us all the way down to the seafloor. It sends data and images and live video in full high definition to the surface here. We can actually control the ROV and the robot sub and go in any direction.

Brian, have you seen anything interesting?

Brian: There’s some nice xenophyophores and a large crinoid.

Adrian: So, xenophyophores are one of the most remarkable and weird animals that live on the seabed in the abyssal plain.

What exactly is a foraminifera? What’s a xenophyophore?

Brian: So, a foraminifera is a single cell, basically amoeba, that can create its own shell. Basically, an armoured amoeba is how I like to think of them. A xenophyophore is essentially a giant one, because usually they’re very tiny.

Adrian: I always think that xenophyophores would be sort of like a candidate for what kind of alien life form you’d find on another planet.

Beth is here, she’s studying the deep sea animals that live on the seabed. She’s been recording images of some of the remarkable sea life. Have you seen anything exciting recently, Beth?

Beth: We had a very nice crinoid earlier, yeah.

Adrian: Crinoids are amazing, aren’t they? They sort of, almost don’t look like animals. They look like, sort of, feather dusters. Or they sort of like...

Beth: Yeah. Or like, I don’t know, they always remind me of flowers, like lilies or something.

Adrian: Some of the museum scientists like myself are desperate to collect one so we can see what species it is. So, we have this, always this sort of paradox whether we collect something to find out what it is exactly and we can study its genetics and its biology in more detail or just to take a picture of it and move on. Do you think we should collect a crinoid, Beth?

Beth: Well, we’ve only seen two of these so far, so I’m more, I’m more verging leaving it, but I don’t know.

Adrian: This is a quandary. So obviously we don’t want to alter the environment too much, but we also need to know what lives there in order to be able to protect it and preserve it.

And we’re looking now at the seafloor, the muddy abyssal plains. In this area they’re very cold, very dark, characterised by the accumulation of these strange, mysterious mineral accretions – what we call polymetallic nodules.

Khalil: Polymetallic nodules. These are the rocks that are so appealing to mining companies. Formed over millions of years and about the size of a large potato, they contain many of the essential metals for renewable energy infrastructure – cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese. Here’s Richard Herrington again.

Richard: These are found on the deep ocean floor in a number of places on the planet, but very particularly on the Pacific Ocean. And they’ve been a lot of attention on these in the last few years because they have enormous resources of some of the metals like cobalt, nickel and copper that we need for the energy transition.

Khalil: Why are people so excited about the prospect of getting their hands on these nodules?

Richard: Because there’s an enormous amount of metal there. So, the Clarion Clipperton Zone, which is just one of these areas, it’s got a phenomenal amount of metal there. So, within those nodules is probably 10 years of the world’s copper needs, 100 years of the world’s nickel needs, 300 years of the world’s manganese needs and probably up to 450 years of the world’s cobalt needs.

So, you can see that if we could get our hands on that metal, it would mean that we wouldn’t have to mine quite so much on the terrestrial land.

There’s obviously large areas that have to be mined for this because they’re quite thin, the zones of nodules. Talking of quite large areas that need to be effectively harvested because these things sit on the ocean floor.

Khalil: These nodules are something of a wonder rock for would be deep sea mining companies and many await the opportunity to start, quite literally, vacuuming them up off the sea floor. But this is controversial. Environmental groups and many scientists argue that removing these rocks will damage these previously untouched regions and that there’s enough resources already on land without disturbing new locations. And it’s this potential impact that makes research like Adrian’s so important.

Adrian: We’re here studying this old mining track of a collector vehicle that was put down here in the late 1970’s and Dan Jones is a chief scientist on the expedition, was able to go through the literature and pinpoint exactly the position of where this was on the sea floor. So, we’ve come to study. and see what the long term, over decades, impact is of disturbance in an otherwise normally undisturbed environment.

Khali: The researchers aboard the James Cook study this environment not only virtually via a remote-control submarine, but also through a process called box coring. It’s essentially scooping a box of mud off the ocean floor and sifting through it.

Adrian: Every time I do this, I’m amazed at just the incredible effort it takes just to get a little cube of sediment from the sea floor and study a region of our planet that’s ever really been studied at all.

Khalil: And a box core has just been delivered to deck.

Adrian: Lift up the box core with the crane and then we’ll see what’s inside.

It’s quite a big heavy device. It weighs about half a ton and it’s one of the bits of sampling equipment that occasionally you have to bang it with the hammer. It’s gonna have a look. Yeah, we’ve definitely got a sample. I can see mud and nodules. That’s great.

Linda has got a hand in a...

Linda: Hello

Adrian: ...bucket of mud.

Linda: Yeah, it is. It really makes you want chocolate mousse. Or hot chocolate. Looks very edible.

Adrian: It allows us to pass it through the sieve and collect some of those animals that are very small, millimetres size or just a little bit even less than a millimetre in some cases.

Khalil: Sometimes you might find a polymetallic nodule amongst these boxes of sea sludge. But what Adrian really wants to document is the life in this area.

Adrian: One of the amazing things about the Abyssal Plain is that actually on first appearance looks rather barren. So, when people first started to explore the abyss, particularly in the Pacific they saw the muddy abyssal plains, the little accretions and people generally thought that there was just nothing there.

It wasn’t really until the 1970s when the first samples were brought up, when people started to look at the little animals in the mud and then started to get the first images, pictures of the seafloor, they realised that although the numbers of animals are very low, the, the number of different types of animals, the biodiversity, is actually remarkably high.

And we’ve realised just by looking through the sediments and looking at the animals living on the rocks and on the nodules themselves that there’s many, many undescribed species. In fact, we estimate over 80% of the animals that we bring up are actually species that are new to science that are undescribed.

Khalil: And some of these species have made it up from the sea floor into the lab of the James Cook.

Adrian: Brian is our, what we call our slime expert. He called himself a slime expert, so now he has become a slime expert.

Oh wow, so that beautiful photo. Describe what you can see there, Brian, on the screen. You just took a brilliant photo.

Brian: So basically, it looks like a little fan shaped fungus, but in reality, it’s actually a single celled organism that is heterotrophic, meaning that it eats, it consumes rather than creates energy from sunlight. And it makes its own, it makes its shell, its own body out of other dead bodies or shells that are in the sediment.

Adrian: They smell a bit like mushrooms, don’t they? Sometimes.

Brian: Yeah. That’s kind of one thing that we’re further investigating.

Adrian: Have you ever eaten one? That’s an important question.

Brian: No comment.

Adrian: There is a professor of foraminifera who’s a friend of both mine and Brian’s, and we understand he has eaten one on one deep sea voyage. There does seem to be a rule at one, at some point during one’s career, you need to have eaten your study organism. I think Charles Darwin started that in the 19th century.

Brian: I heard he had a lot of tummy aches.

Khalil: Adrian has been on the James Cook for 34 days now. In that time, they’ve hauled up 39 boxes, observed hundreds of species and taken thousands of photographs. It’s this data that will help scientists work out the long-term impact of deep sea mining.

Adrian: Here is an opportunity to understand before those decisions are made what the impacts would be, and that’s the critical thing. It’s about collecting that data, collecting that information, informing everybody in the debate. Everybody has a say in it.

It’s a societal decision and we want to really encourage that, that decision making process to be informed really well, to have the information it needs and for everyone to come together in a way which humanity hasn’t done before, in areas beyond national jurisdiction, areas of the high seas where it doesn’t belong to any nation state, to think about how the resources are there can be used in a way which is environmentally fair, economically fair, legally fair, helps at the same time to, to create development, to bring people out of poverty, to give people the resources and the food and the minerals and what they need to develop at the same time to do that in a way where we understand what those impacts are when we minimise those impacts and we work towards making it a sustainable operation as you possibly can.

Khalil: But there’s immense opposition to deep sea mining.

We will be conducting safe and peaceful protest today against your vessel because you are enabling the industry before deep sea mining has even been approved by governments.

On the way back from this expedition, the James Cook encountered a protest.

Louisa Kasson: Greenpeace took peaceful protest and took peaceful action against this expedition as it was returning to port because we are very concerned that the deep sea mining industry is really trying to use and co-opt deep sea science to pave a way for this destructive industry.

Khalil: This is Greenpeace’s Louisa Kasson, the leader of their campaign to stop deep sea mining.

Louisa: Our oceans are facing more pressures now than at any other time in human history. And so, the idea of sending giant bulldozers and tank like machines kilometres down below the surface of the waves into the incredible, mysterious, magical ecosystems of the deep sea feels like a really terrible idea, particularly at this point in history.

While deep sea mining hasn’t started anywhere yet. We’re already seeing incredibly concerning warnings from scientists that mining the deep sea would lead to irreversible and unavoidable biodiversity loss. These are not the words we want to be hearing when we’re already in a nature and a climate crisis.

I think the risks of pollution, from stirring up sediment down in the deep ocean, to releasing it back into the water column, having impacts on, you know, not just deep sea creatures, but other amazing marine life. The noise, the light in an area that’s one of the very last few relatively untouched wildernesses on our planet really needs to give us cause for concern.

Khalil: The International Seabed Authority, established in 1994 and made up of 167 members, is the governing body of the International Deep Sea. Created as part of the UN Convention on the lore of the sea, the ISA’s job is to protect the seabed and to control resource extraction in the deep sea.

Louisa: This is made up of governments all across the world. It’s based in Kingston in Jamaica and governments meet there to talk about what should happen in the international seabed. And pretty uniquely the international seabed has the legal status of the common heritage of humankind. I mean, it’s technically written as the common heritage of mankind, but we’re going to call it the common heritage of humankind. Let’s modernise it a little bit.

Khalil: We could be the change in language we want to see.

Louisa: Exactly, exactly. You know, that means that governments have some pretty strong obligations that, you know, while they are talking at this regulator about should they allow deep sea mining to start or not. They need to consider are they able to effectively protect the oceans and are they able to really serve the interests of, not just humanity right now, but future generations.

Khalil: And the meeting of the ISA in July 2023 was one like no other.

Louisa: This year is a really pivotal year for the deep sea mining industry because deep sea mining companies thought this was the year that they were going to get to start the firing gun for this industry. Two years ago, a front runner in the industry, a Canadian registered company called The Metals Company, working with the state of Nauru, triggered this two-year loophole. And this essentially set a commercial ultimatum for governments that expired in July 2023, and said, you know, by that point, either governments need to agree a mining code, which would formally open up the International Seabed Authority to allow deep sea mining to start, or they would plan to put in a mining application themselves, even with absolutely no rules or regulations in place.

Khalil: The two-year loophole that Louisa is describing here is a regulation set out in the 1994 founding agreement of the International Seabed Authority. It allows member states to push the ISA to adopt a set of regulations for governing the exploitation, or in other words, mining, of the international seabed.

This was an unexpected development for ISA members, coming from a much smaller player compared to some of the other countries on the ISA council.

Louisa: The industry were being very bullish, you know, they were making a lot of statements to their investors and to the media saying, we’re going to get the go ahead. We’re going to have mining machines entering the ocean in 2024 2025. This is the start of deep sea mining.

Khalil: But two years have now come and gone and the ISA has agreed on a new target for finalising the rules. July 2025.

Louisa: The industry does not have a green light to go ahead, there are no rules or no mining code in place that would allow them to start. While the legal loophole is still open, so technically they could still put in an application to start mining, it’s become very clear that it’s incredibly politically controversial and we now actually have over 20 governments from the Pacific, from Latin America, from Europe, who are saying they want to see a pause or a moratorium or even a ban on this industry.

So, I think actually what we’re seeing is it’s really ignited a wave of resistance to the very idea of deep sea mining.

Khalil: And so, you mentioned that this, this loophole is still open. What was the conclusion of the meeting? What came from it?

Louisa: So, governments agreed a couple of decisions. They, you know, were very clear that they do not want to see mining start without a mining code, but you know, industry was still pushing very hard for governments to keep on negotiating.

We have, you know, this coalition with governments saying, wow, we need to put the brakes on this industry. But we also do have on the other side a handful of governments who are supporting the industry, really pushing for, you know, a stronger language that commits to allow deep sea mining to start.

Khalil: Politics aside, the data is still under review, but the mining companies are keen to point out the potential of this new area of exploration. The metals company’s CEO has described these nodules as a battery in a rock and made claims that deep sea mining is potentially a more environmentally friendly way of approaching the challenges of resourcing the green economy.

It’s an evocative message, but one that pressure groups like Greenpeace don’t buy.

Louisa: The deep sea mining industry is really asking us to take a leap of faith and believe a lot of their hype. So, at the moment, all we see is a long list of risks, whether that is environmental risks to the ocean, to ocean health ecosystem, both in the deep sea and throughout the water column, or social risks to communities, to governments that could be held liable if things go wrong.

And so, the idea of governments signing off on a mining code in an ecosystem we’re still understanding, we’re discovering more about how wonderful it is with practically every expedition that goes down there. It, you know, it’s incredibly irresponsible to be giving a green light to deep sea mining at this stage, particularly when it’s very, very uncertain. Would there be any benefits or would we simply be digging ourselves a deeper hole?

Khalil: One of the arguments being made by those in favour of deep sea mining is that terrestrial land-based mining is famously hugely problematic in terms of its negative effects on not just the environment but the lives and livelihoods of people living in those areas and downriver of them.

So maybe deep sea mining could be the lesser of two evils, the shinier of two turds. What would you say to that?

Louisa: So, I think, you know, within that argument, again, we can see the deep sea mining industry admitting that it will be hugely destructive. I think if we’re going to learn any lessons from the huge destruction of mining on land, it’s not that we should deepen and expand that destructive activity is that we need to find alternatives that actually reduce harm and don’t create these sort of sacrifice zones, which are totally unacceptable.

Richard: There’s no doubt if you go mine nodules off the ocean floor, you will kill organisms and then you’ll devastate the site.

Khalil: Here’s Richard Harrington again.

Richard: Rather like when we build a supermarket or housing estate on a piece of land. We kill organisms, we destroy ecosystems. What we have to be really careful about is that in the scale of things, what we’re not doing is destroying whole ecosystems that are irreplaceable.

Khalil: So how do we calculate those risks and balance them?

Richard: Well, exactly. As a scientist, we can provide the data, but society needs to make that decision. Obviously, we’ve got a climate emergency, we’ve got a planetary emergency. We need to solve that. So, I’m absolutely committed to the fact that we need an energy revolution, so we need the metals, so I think we can’t get away from that fact.

The next stage is, where are they going to come from and so we need to decide. Let’s put the ocean floor as a possibility against the terrestrial sites and see whether we can make a rational choice between the two. But what that does mean is we need the same information in both those scenarios and at the moment, I don’t think we have the same information on the deep ocean that we do have on a terrestrial mine site.

Khalil: Well, the deep ocean is one of the places that we know the least about of anywhere.

Richard: Sure. So, you know, my feeling is, we need that information, then we can start to say, well, what if we take the metals from the deep ocean versus what if we take it from the Brazilian rainforest? Because we’re going to have to make that kind of decision, unfortunately.

Khalil: But let’s return now to the blockade of the James Cook Research Vessel where scientists like the Natural History Museum’s Adrian Glover were working to find out what’s down in the deep sea. Why target a research vessel?

Louisa: You know, we looked at what the UK Deep Sea Mining Company, who were involved in this project, how they were talking about this expedition and they were very clear that this was part of their industrial exploration program. This for them was part of their development. This was gathering information, which they want to use to put into a mining application to press ahead with deep sea mining.

So, we’re very concerned that they were a key project partner. But also, you know, this expedition that took place, it returned to port at the time when governments were actually talking about whether to allow deep sea mining or not.

Khalil: Another of Greenpeace’s concerns with the research mission stems from perceptions of neo-colonialism in mining. One of the activists, a Māori person, swam in front of the vessel with a flag reading ‘Don’t mine the Moana’. For Māori, the Moana, the ocean, has huge cultural significance. And even the name of the vessel, the James Cook, can read as an insult to many indigenous peoples in the Pacific whose lives were forever changed by the British colonial project.

James Cook was the captain of the HMS Endeavour, a research ship which, in the voyage of discovery between 1768 and 1771 explored much of the Pacific and revealed incredible biological discoveries. Officially, the expedition was undertaken in the pursuit of science to observe a celestial phenomenon, the transit of Venus.

However, Cook had a secret mission, to search for and claim the continent now known as Australia and to take the opportunity to claim any South Pacific land before Britain’s rival European powers. Cook’s mission was a success for the British. But led to the deaths of countless indigenous peoples and a struggle to preserve their cultures that persists into the modern age.

Louisa: I think having a deep sea mining research expedition that is on a ship named after the most notorious colonizer of the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Peoples James Cook is really a cruel insult. And I think that is why indigenous activists on board working with Greenpeace felt so compelled to literally put their bodies in the waters of the Moana, the waters of the Pacific, to defend it because they are seeing that for far too long, indigenous communities in the Pacific have been pushed aside and totally excluded from decision making in their territories, on their lands, in their waters. And they’re seeing that happen again with deep sea mining.

Khalil: Now, while the idea of deep sea mining is contentious politically, socially and environmentally, we’re still left with the central problem. We need to find a way to resource the green economy and we need to do it in a way that minimises the harm to our planet. Prominent voices around the world have called for deep sea mining as a way to minimise harm to people including Avatar and Titanic director, James Cameron.

Richard: Now obviously the difference with the ocean floor is that we don’t have people living down there. And you probably saw the article by James Cameron where he actually appears to be coming out in favour of going to the deep ocean rather than going on to land because, as he points out, some of the terrestrial mines are in areas where it’s infecting the lives of indigenous people. So, there’s another dimension to it that we need to think about the social side. And when you put that into the mix, it makes the, it makes the discussions even more complex.

Khalil: The expedition aboard the RSS James Cook was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, a British research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences. Research partners included independent organisations, such as the Natural History Museum, with project partners including UK Seabed Resources, a deep sea mining company whose exploratory licence in the Clarion Clipperton zone was sponsored by the United Kingdom.

Each of the organisations on the vessel conducted their own independent research and the NHM’s findings will be published openly.

A lot of the funding for this research into the potential implications of deep sea mining, um, is coming from the mining industry itself. This might undermine people’s trust in the independence of the work. What do you think about this and is there another way that we could fund this research?

Richard: Yeah, that is an interesting question. You know, obviously people have compared it to the tobacco industry funding research into, into cigarettes. But actually, what we’ve got here is that there is independent money coming in.

So, Britain’s own research council have funded money to, to work on the deep ocean. But one of the big issues is that in order to study the deep ocean floor, you need to get down to the ocean floor with the right kind of technologies. And unfortunately, the only way in some of these areas is to work directly with the mining companies.

So, in the absence of that type of equipment available in another way, the mining companies have to be involved. And so, it’s unfortunate. The work is being done totally independently that’s going on at the Natural History Museum. There’s no control by the companies as to what data might get published.

But I also do think that this is such a sufficiently important subject that we should be looking to get independent funding to do this research and do it rapidly. I think the world should be funding this work to actually see what is down on the deep ocean floor. I mean, we’re talking of billions and billions of pounds here of the value of these metals.

So to come up with, you know, something like a hundred million pounds to do the right research on that deep ocean floor to look at the biodiversity and its impacts would surely be worthwhile to enable us to make these judgment calls based on scientific evidence then we can start to make the decision because actually it may come down to that, it may come down to having to make the choice between a terrestrial site that we think is problematic and a deep ocean site that seems to be problematic.

Khalil: Throughout this episode we’ve explored the challenges of resourcing the green economy and it’s clear there’s no agreement when it comes to deep sea mining. But there’s also no easy answers when it comes to extracting resources as we have done in the past. There’s a cost to everything.

Something I find difficult to grapple with, personally, is the apparent necessity of continuing to find resources in a system that enriches some and hurts others around the world. But it’s a reality that we may need to accept in order to take steps to minimise long term harm. The data is crucial. If we’re to even consider mining the deep sea, then we need to be absolutely sure that we don’t upset the delicate balance of our oceans, which is already under threat, or lose the precious biodiversity of species, of which we hardly know anything about and we’re yet to see a convincing plan of how to do that.

The mining industry is asking us to take a ‘trust me bro’ approach. But history is littered with the unintended and unforeseen consequences of our hubris and greed. It’s critical that we listen to activists like Greenpeace, but it’s also crucial that we don’t let ideology completely squeeze out pragmatism.

Whether we like it or not, those of us on the side of environmental justice will sometimes need proximity to mining companies, whether on land or in the deep ocean, to ensure that we can minimise impacts and not leave more scars on our world and our communities. It’s always important to scrutinize anything with a profit motive.

Mining companies have broken our trust over and over again in the past. So, they’re gonna have to work pretty hard to rebuild that trust if we’re gonna work together to find a way towards a greener future. But together, maybe we can find a way through if we listen to the science. We need long term planning, we need unbiased research and we need to always keep in mind the goal of a sustainable future for all. Together, we can do it.

Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world. And it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode. As many as possible. If you found it helpful, why not share this episode with your friends and family?

Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag ourbrokenplanet or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast.

Over the last nine episodes we’ve explored how nature is faring as a result of human activity across the globe. From the deepest depths of the Pacific Ocean to the ice sheets at the top of our world. And it’s clear to see why scientists have declared a planetary emergency. In next week’s series finale, we’ll be looking at what we can actually do about it.

This episode of Our Broken Planet was presented by me, Khalil Thirlaway. The producer was James Tindale and the executive producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Tori Herridge: Picture this. You’re driving home from work, the sky’s clear, the air sweet, but then you make a turn.

Khalil Thirlaway: A column of thick, black, billowing smoke spews from the earth like a serpent consuming the sun. You quickly roll up your windows, but it’s impossible to escape the harsh chemical stench.

Tori: Traffic has slowed to a crawl in both directions, you’re stuck, and the serpentine pool is slinking towards you.

Khalil: That air quality disaster erupted from a fire in one of the world’s largest waste dump sites, set in the heart of one of the most popular cities in the world, Lagos, Nigeria.

Tori: Five years on from the Olusosun dumpsite fire, the event remains emblematic of Lagos air quality problem. Devastating and inescapable. Today, on Our Broken Planet, we’re exploring how the people of Nigeria are working to transform their atmosphere.

From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Tori Herridge.

Khalil: And I’m Khalil Thirlaway. In this episode, we’ll be looking at air pollution in one of the world’s most populous countries, Nigeria, and its largest city, Lagos.

Tori, what do we mean when we talk about air pollution?

Tori: Yeah, I mean, it can be many, many different things, right? The air you breathe is always a cocktail of different gases. And sometimes the gases that we breathe are things we put into it that are not particularly nice, right?

So, we’re talking about harmful stuff – things you might have heard of, like carbon monoxide, ozone, nitrogen oxide. Gases that, on their own, they are naturally occurring, but we produce more of them in, particularly in urban settings and when we breathe those things in, it can make us sick. And one of the other things, of course, that makes up a big part of the problem with air pollution, is the particulate matter. That’s just basically the dust.

It’s especially that very fine particulate matter, which is often known as PM 2.5, just referring to particles that are smaller than 2.5 microns. And that stuff is particularly problematic, because if that gets inside your lungs, it can cause real health problems.

Khalil: And the smaller the particles, the deeper they can get in your body. The really small ones can actually pass through your lungs and into your blood and start influencing and affecting other systems and organs in the body.

Tori: Yeah, I mean quite often people think about it as linked to asthma it is, you know, breathing problems obviously make sense cause you’re breathing this stuff in, but there’s also links to heart disease, risk of stroke, lung cancer and all these aspects increase as the air quality declines.

Khalil: That term, PM 2.5, is going to come up a few times in this episode. So just remember, we’re talking about tiny, toxic particles that can both get into your lungs and further deeper into your body.

Tori: Because of course, air pollution, this particulate matter, is something that is really an urban phenomenon, to a greater extent. And that’s a problem for the world, because over half the world now lives in cities and our cities are continuing to grow. That means more buildings, more transport options, more construction work to build the cities themselves and then, of course, the energy that’s needed to do all this stuff, to support all this infrastructure and with all the people living there, of course, more waste. And all of this affects air quality.

Khalil: Now a star of today’s show, Lagos in Nigeria, is a city on the Atlantic coast in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s Nigeria’s most populous city with some 20 million people and that’s expected to double by 2050. And if we look beyond that, it’s also on track to become the world’s most populous city by 2100, with a projected 88 million inhabitants and this growth at this pace is coming with a multitude of air quality problems.

Dr Rose Alani: Lagos air quality, it’s a bit complex because of the complex sources.

Khalil: This is Dr Rose Alani, head of the Air Quality Monitoring Research Group at the University of Lagos.

Rose: You know, Lagos is a small area that is carrying a very big load. I normally like describing Lagos like Nigeria being a coconut and Lagos being like a peanut, just a dot there. And the population is so high.

Khalil: Lagos used to be Nigeria’s capital until the early 1990s. When the capital was moved to Abuja, investment in Lagos infrastructure stalled, but it still remains Nigeria’s biggest economy.

Rose: It’s the central place for industrial and all the commercial activities. So, a lot is happening here.

Khalil: A lot of activities that need a lot of power. And because of poor electricity supply, Lagotians have to generate electricity themselves.

Rose: The problem of electricity is that every home must have a generating plant, even if it is small, sometimes more than one or two and factories also must have generating plants. And it’s every day that it runs.

Khalil: Lagos is also notorious for its traffic, or as the locals call it, go-slow.

Rose: Within one kilometre of road in Lagos, we have 227 vehicles. Most of the vehicles are using fuel that is not up to the standard and having a lot of sulphur and so it’s that bad.

Khalil: So, Tori, Lagos has recorded levels of air pollution that are up to six times more than the recommended World Health Organisation air quality levels.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, that’s a horrible number, but it’s not unusual for megacities that puts it in the same kind of category as megacities like Beijing, Cairo, Mumbai so it’s a big city problem. If you’ve got these megacities without the infrastructure to keep the energy production and the fuel types on the clean side. A lot of people make a lot of mess.

Khalil: And air pollution isn’t generally evenly distributed across a city, you know, you’ll get it concentrated around industry and roads, things like that and here’s another fact for you – apparently, Lagotians spend, on average, around 30 hours a week in traffic. That’s almost a working week in traffic on the way to work.

Tori: Like, if you’re only going to work five days, that’s like, if you only do a five-day working week, that means you’re spending, what, six hours a day in a car, in traffic.

Khalil: And something that makes it worse is that often, the cars that are sitting in this traffic are imported second hand vehicles from other parts of the world. In 2014, 74% of cars imported to Nigeria were used cars from overseas and almost two thirds of those were older than 11 years.

Tori: Yeah and that basically means the older your car, the more likely it is to be one that produces a lot of particulate matter.

Khalil: And that’s partly due to, you know, wear and tear and it’s also partly due to the fact that technology has advanced and standards have been tightened as time has gone on and we’ve realised what a problem air pollution from road traffic is.

Tori: Yeah and it is a problem. It is a problem. In Lagos, 30% of that tiny particulate matter pollution, that PM 2.5 pollution, comes from road transportation. So, if you are an average Lagotian spending your 30 hours a week in traffic, then you are most likely breathing in an awful lot of that PM 2.5. It feels like a massive problem, right?

But even so, that’s only 30% of the story, right? 30% of that PM 2.5 particulates are coming from traffic. Where’s the other 70% coming from? Well, one of the biggest the biggest issues for Lagotians as well is the fact that their power grid, like their infrastructure, isn’t up to the job for supporting one of the biggest economies in west Africa.

Khalil: Now, Lagos gets some power from the national grid but far from enough and inconsistently. So, power is only live for about 12 hours a day. But this unreliable supply has led Lagotians to find an alternative source of power.

Tori: Many people across the world might only hear the hum of a generator when passing by a construction site, or whilst partying in a festival, or when a once in a lifetime natural disaster knocks out the electricity. But for hundreds of Nigerians, it’s a fact of daily life.

Oludayo Yusuf: In fact, I cannot remember living without a generator as far back as I was five or four years old, over 42 years ago.

Tori: This is Oludayo Yusuf, or Dayo. Dayo is an embryologist and co-owns an IVF clinic in Lagos, Nigeria.

Oludayo: Sometimes it’s like, what you would say, like white noise. Sometimes it feels like that. But you never really understand the impact until when everywhere is silent. And then you are like, wow, that generator was actually loud.

Tori: Lagos roars day in and day out in a cacophony of generators. With erratic electricity supply, generators power around half of the city. Ask some Lagotians to live without a generator, or gen, and they may well look at you as if you have lost your mind.

Oludayo: Who, who does that? How can you not have a gen? Like, it is not a luxury, it’s a necessity, in Nigeria, in Lagos.

Tori: An 86% of businesses in Nigeria rely on generators, like Dayo’s IVF clinic.

Oludayo: We don’t get power 24/7 from Eko Distribution, which is the electricity distribution board in Lagos State. So, we need our equipment, particularly the incubators, on 24 hours. Not only do we have generators, we also have inverters, you know and we do not want any downtime. We don’t even want five minutes downtime. That’s how important generator is.

Tori: But these generators come with a lethal cost.

Khalil: These generators, or gens as they’re known locally, account for a fifth of PM 2.5 air pollution, that tiny particular matter we were talking about. In 2019, nearly 24,000 legations died prematurely because of the air quality. That’s more than deaths from malaria and more than double those in Lagos caused by HIV and aids.

Tori: Generator fumes aren’t just bad to breathe in, they can also ruin Dayo’s and her lab’s best efforts.

Oludayo: The fumes contain carbon monoxide and where you have poor air quality, especially where you have a lot of volatile organic compounds, maybe from fumes or from other kinds of smell that goes into the lab, studies have shown that this actually affects the quality of the embryos within the IVF laboratory. So, if the air is not clean, the volatile organic compounds, the VOCs, which is carbon monoxide and all that, can actually bind to that media, which are harmful to the embryos.

Tori: Dayo’s left in the unenviable position where the generator that is helping give her patients hope could also slash their odds of having children.

Oludayo: Thinking about it now, I mean it doesn’t really feel good, so just take all the precautions but if we didn’t have to use generator of course, we would prefer that, especially for the kind of work we do.

Khalil: That is a really unenviable position to be in.

Tori: Like every single embryo is the hope that someone has invested in, you know, a potential future child. And the success rate of those embryos are almost entirely down, you know, to the lab. And if you can’t keep the power on, then you can’t keep the embryos alive for long enough to re-implant them.

Khalil: For a little bit of context, we’ve brought in Jill Ajineku, the producer on this episode who grew up in Lagos.

Hey, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Khalil. Hi, Tori.

Tori: I know, we’re like suddenly under scrutiny like the producer can’t even say outside.

Khalil: The boss is here.

Tori: I know she’s like coming in to like keep an eye on us. But no, obviously like what I haven’t, I think, what I really want to hear about is actually like what it’s like to live with the continuous hum of a generator.

Jill: I never got a generator because the sound used to drive me crazy. Because it wasn’t just my generator, it was the guy upstairs that had the generator, it was the guy selling in front of the house. This constant roar that’s just in your head and you really can’t think. Some people adapt to it and some people joke that Nigerians are really loud because our voices have to go so high to go above the generator’s roar. I tried to do without one, but it was very much that my, my refrigerator used to get defrosted and sometimes my food would go bad. I couldn’t charge my devices, so I would charge them all up, in the office and hope when I get home there’s actually electricity.

Khalil: And then you just heard from Dayo and it’s like, that’s life. That’s people’s embryos that could be their future child. Like running an IVF clinic under that kind of energy, like, insecurity. I mean, I don’t even know how it’s possible, really.

Jill: Yeah, generators are very essential, in Nigeria, especially for businesses like Dayo’s, where she is actually giving hope to people. Nigeria is a very conservative country, so you sort of have that, sort of like a pipeline where, you know, you get married and then you have children. A couple of months after you get married, people start asking you, where is the baby? Why aren’t you pregnant already? And it’s not enough to have one, you have to have two, three. Previously, children were essential for you when you actually get retired. Children are looked at as, yes, a source of pride, but also, you’re not really considered a woman until you have a child. And it makes it very, very essential in the culture.

Khalil: Thank you so much, Jill.

Tori. I think you should go back and start bossing us around again.

Jill: Thanks, guys.

Khalil: So, when we’re talking about the gens, it’s important to acknowledge that Nigeria, it’s still one of the smallest contributors to world pollution and climate change. Only 0.23% of global emissions come from Nigeria, compared to, if we look at US and China, at the number two and number one spots globally, they’re at 14 and 29% respectively and we’re looking at this from the outside, but if your choice is putting food on the table or breathing clean air, that’s not always going to be the top priority for everyone.

Joshua Gabriel Oluwaseyi: I was, you know, commuted. As a general rule, travelling by public transportation is actually better for the environment. But in this case, it wasn’t better for my health.

Khalil: This is Joshua Gabriel Oluwaseyi, a 22-year-old climate and environmental activist from Lagos.

Joshua: The bus had, like, a hull. So, if you’re sitting down. You literally could be looking at the road as you’re moving. The bus began to smoke and initially we thought the bus was on fire. It was coming directly into the bus. That was just one of those moments where I couldn’t quite fathom how Nigerians are so uneducated on the harmfulness of air pollution that we just, let just, like that slide.

Khalil: When Joshua was 18. He found out he was allergic to air pollutants. He gets itchy eyes, a tight chest and painful sneezing. Not fun.

Joshua: Generally, every single day that you leave and breathe Lagos, you are, you are in the story of an air quality pandemic. These are people who, the kind of people who were in that bus with me, who did not even know that they’re inhaling something so bad for them and it could kill them. It’s just one of those moments that grounded me in my activity, my advocacy.

Khalil: In 2019, Joshua set up his non-profit organisation, Learn Blue. It’s run by Gen Zer's, for Gen Zer's. They inspire young people to take action on the environment and climate change.

Joshua: So, when I learned about my allergies, and also just learned about pollution and went into this rabbit hole on climate change, the first question I asked myself was, okay, my goal is not to protest, my goal is to change people’s mindsets. And so, we focus our attention on Gen Zer's, but also, we are the biggest volunteer generation in the world.

Khalil: One of Joshua’s first campaigns to improve air quality was helping clean up plastic waste. Plastic waste makes up 29% of Lagos’s waste and some people get rid of it by burning.

Joshua: We basically, from one [inaudible - 00:17:24], it’s packed conversation, outrage, passion, reaching over 200,000 people on social media and eventually about a million in about a week. And mobilising hundreds of people across Lagos to, you know, do clean-ups. I ended up cleaning over, I think, 40,000 pounds of non-biodegradable waste, which is an insane amount of waste to clean up in just about a month.

Khalil: As a self-described storyteller, Joshua has taken his message around the world. He’s been on the BBC, the pages of Teen Vogue and attended summits outside his country. But back home in Nigeria, his message may be a bit harder to get across.

Joshua: I kept using the word we’re ill informed, but the reality even more so is, people are poor. There’s a clear link, an often ignored one, but a clear link between climate change, global warming, air pollution, as it relates to my story and poverty as it relates to Nigeria.

Khalil: Nigeria has one of the highest poverty rates in the world. Four out of ten Nigerians live on 97 cents or less per day.

Joshua: People are not thinking about air pollution, the climate, or how it affects their personal health. People are thinking about, you know, when they’re getting their next meal, how they’re going to send their child to school, who’s going to pay the school fees. So, it’s very hard to really make change when it comes to air pollution in Nigeria, or generally climate change, if you cannot understand that people first need their basic needs met. Clothing, food and shelter. If those three things are not met, it’s a lot harder to create frameworks and policies that can address climate change.

Kahlil: Conversations like these also open up difficult questions around access and equity when it comes to energy. Around the world, we all rely on energy every day.

Joshua: And I get frustrated a lot when, you know, our world leaders go to these events and they talk about solutions to help, you know, go green, or they give timelines. And I’m all for that, but in countries or regions like Africa, sub–Saharan Africa, where people are poor, people don’t have constant electricity, these proposals that leaders make are generally not even tailored to the communities they’re trying to serve.

Khalil: Joshua is also keen for Lagos leaders to know that there’s still work to be done and that young people can play a part.

Joshua: I don’t think the government consults news enough. I don’t even think it pays as much attention. And there is still so much more that needs to be done. And, and I think this sort of message really goes out to government and I would also say young people who want to build organisations that, that sort of create solutions that are helping combat Lagos’ major issues. Be it rising sea levels, be it pollution, be it air pollution. We need policy, and we need more advocates and we need more youth involvement.

Tori: I really do like the Joshua. He has a kind of, that activist optimism that you can just keep powering through, and that, you know, voices will make a difference, but equally, it sucks.

Khalil: Joshua’s approach of trying to change people’s attitudes, to build that from the ground upwards and to advocate upwards to government, I have a lot of hope for that, because we’ve tried a lot of top-down approaches and we’re still melting.

And Joshua’s point about the international discourse as well, the fact that, you know, we know that we need to consume less and, and cut down on the amount we’re emitting and our energy use and our resource use, but those are often directives coming from richer countries. Countries that have benefited by extracting resources from other countries for a long time and so it’s got to be incumbent on the richer and more powerful countries to at least support and help find ways for places like Nigeria to make that transition towards a future that is healthier and more sustainable for its people as well as for the world.

Tori: I think actually incredibly hopeful is, maybe people will say it’s naive, but I’m going to go for hopeful, is the scale of the ambition that is stated by the Nigerian government at least right. So currently you’ve got Nigeria sitting at 108 out of 120 countries on this thing called the energy transition index, the ETI, right.

So, they are pretty low down the, you know, where they’re set up for transitioning to clean energy. And yet, they still initially signed up for the 2050 net zero target, just like UK, right. And they’ve recently revised that. It’s like, oh, it’s gonna be a bit harder, but they’ve revised it to 2060, which, I mean, I think that’s incredible to still have that ambition. Right, to not just go, you know what, it’s necessary evil, we aren’t going to bother, you know, we’re going to focus on poverty and getting people out of poverty and we’ll just have to, you know, take the hit on the climate side of things, but they’ve still got that ambition to transition. It’s like, how do we help them achieve it?

Khalil: I mean, the stated ambition is great and hopefully with enough pressure and energy from grassroots activists like Joshua and Learn Blue, that will, you know, they’ll stick to it, but a commitment coming from an oil producing country, I’ll take it with a pinch of salt.

Tori: Yeah, but you could look at it, it’s committed at least. I mean, you say it, you articulate it, it’s more likely for it to happen.

Khail: Oh, absolutely. I’m not writing off this commitment, I’m just, ...

Tori: Never give up, never give in.

Khalil: We’ll know it when we see it. But like you said, never give up, never give in. That’s why activists like Joshua are so important.

Tori: Yeah. Despite your scepticism, Khalil, things are happening. Nigeria is making moves towards a greener economy and taking steps to improve air quality.

Dr Mofoluso Fagbeja: I understand the problem. I have first-hand knowledge of the scientific basis of air pollution in Lagos and the impacts.

Tori: This is Dr Mofoluso Fagbeja, an air quality specialist who lives in Ife, a town about 120 miles northeast of Lagos.

Mofoluso: I am quite conscious of the environment the moment I step into Lagos. I’m like, I need to extra protect myself. I need to be mindful of where I go to.

Tori: Mofoluso consulted on a 2021 study for the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency. In it, they looked at the health and economic impacts and also came up with an air quality management plan to solve the problem.

Mofoluso: Our study conducted the monitoring for a period of 12 months and interestingly that was the very first time that we had comprehensive air quality monitoring in Lagos.

Tori: As part of the study, they set up six monitoring sites across the city. One of the sites was placed in a school in Ikorodu, which sits on the outskirts of Lagos.

Mofoluso: There are a lot of people living in Ikorodu at the same time. It’s also an industrialised area, so there are metal smelting factories in Ikorodu. Some of them are quite close to the school where the monitoring station was located.

Tori: Across a year, the Ikorodu site registered 97 micrograms of PM 2.5. That’s a whopping 19 times more than WHO annual guidelines. They also found lead aerosol ten times more than the USA’s environmental protection standards. No one knew this was happening before the sensors were installed.

Mofoluso: When we observed that and we reported that to the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency, they actually went there and they sealed off some of those factories.

Tori: Lagos also has a waste management problem. It churns out about 13,000 tonnes of solid waste a day. Translated into my favourite unit of measurement, that’s about 2,600 big African male elephants every day. All that waste has to go somewhere.

Mofoluso: Unfortunately, the rate of collection is just a little above 50% so you have the remaining waste grossly mismanaged, even from the waste that has been managed and collected and deposited in landfills.

Tori: Now, remember that horrible smoke from the start of the episode, where in 2018, this mismanagement led to the burning of the Olusosun landfill, an area the size of 20 football fields. Thick, toxic smoke engulfed the surrounding residential areas and people sitting in traffic. It burned for hours.

Mofoluso: That’s what a lot of Nigeria has actually experience. The Liberal State Government has taken steps to ensure that that such a thing doesn’t re-apply again. They are already moving the landfill away from there to ensure that the existence of the landfill in that place is not adversely affecting health of people.

Tori: In recent times, Lagos has been slowly building its governance and infrastructure. Laws are being introduced to regulate generators, industrial emissions and open-air burning. A new metro line is slated to launch in August to help with traffic. They’re working on electrifying their city buses. The state is also collaborating with the private sector to move towards renewable solutions.

Mofoluso: We thought the efforts were putting in place. I believe the buses is going to get there. Yeah, Lagos definitely will get there.

Khalil: Well, it’s great to hear that steps are being taken, like our producer Jill told me about GIVO centres, which are G.I.V.O, which stands for garbage in, value out.

Tori: No comment on our producer’s ability here.

Khalil: So GIVO centres are local. Commercial recycling centres, where people can bring their waste, for example, plastic or glass and then the company who run the centre can repurpose and recycle those materials into stuff that makes them money.

Tori: You sound pretty positive about it.

Khalil: Well, you know, as far as capitalism goes, at least it’s pointed in the right direction.

Tori: Yeah, well, you know, you might be positive about it, but Lagotians, I mean, many of them are sceptical. Because, you know, understandably, you know, people in Lagos are like, really? Things don’t seem to move pretty fast here. There is some scepticism about it. Metro line mentioned earlier that was first announced in 2003, right? And so, it’s supposed to start operation in August 2023. So, I guess we’ll know in a month or so. I like your positivity, but there is some scepticism amongst Lagotians.

Khalil: And I think that scepticism is really important and healthy because that is what’s going to keep people, whether it’s activists or the general population. They’re going to keep their leaders accountable and they’re going to keep scrutiny on them. As soon as you start getting complacent, that’s when you take your eye off the ball and progress can slow down.

Tori: Yeah. I mean, I suppose so, but there’s also the other side to sort of like, you know, kinda world-weary scepticism, like kinda like oh yeah, which is when you kind of just get inured to people saying these things and you just keep on going about your daily grind. Right. Which is, you know, you’re thinking like, yeah, okay, it’s gonna be a metro line. Oh yeah, whatever, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. And you don’t do anything about it.

Sceptical, but sceptical with purpose. And it’s things like people, you know, like Joshua. Other kind of people who keep that purpose going, I feel, like, you know, they’re continuing to sort of push for these little things again and they need to because there is still this massive energy supply gap, which is probably the biggest thing that needs to be fixed for everybody in the city.

We’ve talked about poverty levels in Nigeria. Now urbanisation is something that helps to reduce poverty. And this is happening right now in Nigeria. But a study from the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has shown that since the 1990s, deaths from air pollution have risen at the same rate as urbanisation. How does a developing nation break that link between air pollution and the urbanisation that lifts its people out of poverty?

Desmond Apia: African leaders make the argument that yes, others have developed and this is how they develop. It is not necessary for us to say, because say this continent or this country developed by burning coal, so we also have to burn coal. Maybe they didn’t know better. Now we do.

Khalil: This is Desmond Apia. He’s the country lead in Ghana for the Clean Air Fund. The Clean Air Fund is an international philanthropic organisation that supports projects that promote clean air.

Desmond: You know, the picture is not good. It is getting worse. Our population in urban centres is growing. We’re going to be 65% urbanised by 2050 more. More urbanisation is good, it creates more economic bond, but at what expense and we cannot and should not be going on the path where we are not putting enough investment in sustainable investment that will not have negative impact on the air and on all of us.

Khalil: According to the Clean Air Fund, from 2015 to 2020, Nigeria received just 250,000 in international development air quality funding.

Desmond: When you think about the nature of how the development aid is coming and what it means. We’re getting support to put more money into fossil-based development, which is not tackling the pollution and the other things that need to be tackled in the longer term.

Khalil: Across the continent, people are not waiting for aid before taking action. Solutions are being implemented right now in cities.

Desmond: In Rwanda. In Kigali, they’ve improved the walkways, planted quite a lot of trees around these walkways that people can walk. They’ve introduced electric vehicles. Recently in Sierra Leone, they were planting a million trees so they can reduce their landslides and also improve the quality of air.

If you go to Addis Ababa, they also have a tram system in the middle of Addis. If you go to Nairobi, the new mayor, young mayor in Nairobi, is trying to electrify the Okada, the motorbikes that people are using, to electrify it so that you don’t use fossil fuels and they do not pollute. We need to also highlight the good things that are happening across the continent, so people know that it is not impossible. It is very possible in this our generation to make these changes.

Khalil: It’s great to see local governments and national governments really taking action and making changes that, they’re not just changing systems, but they’re also changing the ways that these cities are, the spaces they are for people to inhabit. You know, talking about making cool tree covered walkways so that people feel more comfortable walking in the daytime rather than getting in a car and sticking on the AC.

Tori: It’s one of those topics, I think, you know, sort of making a city more liveable, which people feel the effects immediately and often even unpopular policies, once they’re in place, people love them.

Khalil: Yeah, and, you know, change can be scary, especially when we see a lot of unexpected negative changes happening in our lives, both locally and globally but once you can get past that, that anxiety, oh, what are you going to do to the city that I live in, the city that I love? Often, you end up with something much better afterwards.

Tori: Yeah, so, you know, like Lagos, by 2100, projected to be one of the world’s biggest cities, most popular cities. On one hand, people see that as a problem, but also like, you know, these young cities, these beginnings, these mega cities, there’s an opportunity, right, to build really good ones if we make it happen. I somehow I can’t help but be hopeful in some ways that if we just like harness ourselves now and I get in there and try and build a really great megacity then megacities could be a way to have people live together without making a mega impact on the world around them.

Khalil: And this kind of optimism and this agency and taking control of what the places we live in are like, it’s exemplified in, there’s a sub-genre of science fiction that’s been growing recently called solar punk and this is coming mostly out of Africa and Latin America, but other places around the world and instead of the kind of cyberpunk dystopian future that all looks like Blade Runner and it’s all dark and gross and grotty, solar punk envisages a future where our connections with the spaces we live in and the nature around it are much more intimate and connected and that we actually look forward to a positive future that we can take charge and make rather than resigning ourselves to a dystopian hellscape.

Tori: It’s not just about reacting to the negative now, right. The negative now is that there are children and people living in poverty in Lagos who are breathing in air they should not be breathing, right. That’s a push factor. But ahead there should also be a pull factor which is the Lagos of the future, which is going to be big and hopefully it’s going to be an amazing, productive, beautiful place to live with the right planning.

It makes you realise that there’s work to be done. You know, there’s work to be done in Lagos, there’s work to be done here in the UK, there’s work to be done in every single large city because cities really are the future. We can’t all live on massive rolling estates of our own and grow our own vegetables and things like that. That’s not going to fix the world. City living is what the future is going to look like for a lot of people and we need to make them the cleanest, most beautiful, most wonderful places to live and be human that we can.

Khalil: And going back to that solar punk vision of the future, you know, a lot of the issues we’ve been talking about in this episode, whether it’s in Lagos or around the world, they boil down to one key central issue. And that’s that we need to build a green energy future for everyone in the world. But to build that green future, we’re going to need a whole lot of resources.

So join us next time on Our Broken Planet where we’ll be diving deep to find out how we’re going to resource this green economy.

Tori: Well, I’m off next week, so I’m going to leave this one to you, Khalil.

Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations just like the ones in this episode. As many of us as possible.

Khalil: Our Broken Planet is presented by Tori Herridge and me, Khalil Thirlaway. The producer was Jill Achenekwu. The series producer is James Tindale and the executive producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Khalil Thirlaway: Hand sanitiser, masks, sombre news reports with super scary graphs. The quiet of a world in lockdown. Three years on from the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, there are still as many questions as there are answers.

Tori Herridge: All our experiences were different, but there’s one thing that everyone agrees on. Bats. Those amazingly adapted flying mammals are a reservoir for coronaviruses. They’re full of the stuff, and other nasties too.

Guest speaker 1: Traces which are thousands and thousands of years old.

Khalil: As humans encroach more and more on the natural environment of bats, these mammals are forced to munch on human crops or get closer to farmed animals in search of food.

Guest speaker 2: We could be the cause of making pathogens more likely to be able to infect ourselves.

Tori: The closer they are to other animals and people, the higher the chance that a virus could spill over into the human population. And a disease that jumps from animals to people is what we call a zoonotic disease.

Guest speaker 3: Diseases which could cause pandemics the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Khalil: Time and time again in this series, we’ve seen how the tension between nature and humanity has boiled over in unexpected ways, leading to massive consequences for the planet.

Tori: Today, bats are under threat of extinction around the world, but their fight for survival may influence the health of every single one of us.

Khalil: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Khalil Thirlaway.

Tori: And I’m Tori Herridge. In this episode, we’re investigating how the destruction of wildlands and the rise of intensive farming is increasing the risk of something that could affect us all – zoonotic diseases.

So, you’re the expert Khalil, right? Zoonosis or zoonosis?

Khalil: I mean, it’s probably kind of a glacier/glacier type thing.

Tori: Okay, well you know I’m rubbish at it then, so I’m going to do both.

Khalil: Honestly, I’m not too fussed about the distinction. People talk about zoonoses or zoonosis. It’s a pronunciation thing. I’m fine with either.

Tori: I personally prefer zoonosis. Like you’ve got like a little zoo nose on. Like I’m wearing my tiger nose, you can put on the anteater, James out there on the desk is crocodile. This, you know, we’ve all got it going on. Sort of snapping away. Go on Dr Khalil Thirlaway, tell us what is a zoonotic disease?

Khalil: A zoonotic disease, or a zoonosis, is a disease that is caused by an infective organism, like a parasitic organism, or a virus, or a bacterium, that is transferred from non-human animals to humans and can cause sickness and disease in those humans.

Tori: So, give us some examples. Covid being the obvious one.

Khalil: Covid’s a big recent one. Another scary virus people might know is Ebola. There’s Nipah virus, but there are also lots of kind of gastrointestinal parasites like Giardia. You might have heard of Toxoplasmosis that people can get from cats. So, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Tori: Yeah and of course for the ones you’ve listed there, Covid, Ebola, Nipah, the one thing I know they’ve all got in common is bats. It’s really interesting that bats are this like massively well-known reservoir of viruses.

Khalil: It’s funny that you used the word reservoir there because that is the metaphor we use to talk about animals that can be a kind of holding place for these diseases that can jump into people.

Tori: Yeah, it’s like they’re sort of sitting there, you know, you store water in a reservoir, these things store viruses, not deliberately, but it’s just a fact, you know, they’re hanging out there waiting for somewhere to go.

Khalil: And bats have some really, really interesting adaptations to their immune system and the rest of their physiology that means that sometimes actually, they don’t suffer from the viruses that they carry. And it’s only when they jump into other organisms, like humans, that you see the symptoms.

Tori: And it’s this ability that bats have to survive diseases that are deadly to humans that’s the focus of cutting-edge research in medicine right now. And the secret to their success may lie in their evolution.

Dr Emilia Skirmuntt: Viruses and their hosts co-existed for millions of years because viruses need a host to exist. That’s the whole point of it.

Tori: This is Dr Emilia Skirmuntt, an evolutionary virologist at Oxford University.

Emilia: And in case of bats, they’re one of the oldest orders of mammals. So, we know that they also coexisted with viruses for a very, very long time.

Tori: Bats have been around on our planet much longer than humans. The oldest bat fossils we’ve found are 52 million years old.

Emilia: We also know that they can get infected with viruses very deadly to other animals, like, for example, Ebola, like rabies, like Hendra Nipah, all of these viruses which, if they will infect us, they will easily kill us. But bats seem not to be affected that much by these viruses.

Tori: Because bats have been up close and personal with viruses for so long, they’ve developed a few tricks to survive diseases that would kill other mammals.

Khalil: Alright, this is where I enter immunologist mould.

Tori: I’m so excited! I won a lesson! Go!

Khalil: So, basically, your immune system is kind of like your military of your body and it identifies incoming threats and it tries to fight them off. But, just like a military, it can often cause a lot of collateral damage and that often comes in form of inflammation and tissue damage. And so, immune systems have mechanisms of balancing between how much they will tolerate other organisms living in our body and how much they will try and clear them out.

Tori: So, what’s going on with bats then?

Khalil: So, bats have a mixture of kind of higher tolerance and less inflammatory responses.

Tori: They’re the diplomats of the immune system.

Khalil: Yeah and you know, bats and other flying animals need a much higher energy input as well. So, you know, you can’t afford to be lazing around sick if your body is using up energy faster than other animals.

Tori: And you can see why people working on these questions are so interested in the way that bats immune system works.

Khalil: And it goes beyond viruses because our immune system isn’t just this kind of defence force against external threats, it’s also really interconnected with all sorts of other body systems as well.

Tori: Yeah, I mean you sort of think like, could bats be the answer to a long and happy healthy life?

Khalil: Viruses don’t leave fossils because they’re just a bunch of genetic material in a protein layer. But there is one way we know about their evolutionary history.

Tori: And Emilia’s doing detective work on how ancient viruses leave their mark in bats very genes.

Emilia: Some viruses can leave traces in their host genomes. That is mostly traces, which are thousands and thousands of years old. These traces can be passed over generations, that’s why we see them. Our idea was that maybe bats have more of them and can use them to help them either prevent or make them less susceptible to severe infection. These traces, these signals would be like an echo of old musical pieces played on old musical instruments. In the same way we see these old viral signals in our present genes.

Tori: The music of the far ancient past.

Khalil: Poetic. But I love this idea of the traces of the past being kind of embedded in our DNA, but it is crazy to think of viruses as not just kind of coming in, messing stuff up and leaving, but like actually depositing a record of their stay.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, we’re basically all 50 per cent virus if you look at the stats I mean, it’s amazing so much of our DNA are basically fossils of the viruses that our ancestors caught. It just shows you how complex and amazing our world is.

Khalil: And there’s evidence that 400 million years ago a virus infected what ended up being the common ancestor of all four-legged creatures on land. So, birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles.

Tori: Yeah, isn’t that right? I mean, it’s even been, like, the implication being that might have been one of the triggers. That it might be linked to that transition to things moving out of the ocean and onto the land. It’s mad!

Khalil: And we know this because of the genes that virus left in our ancestor that then got passed down to all of us. This is why diseases are cool.

Tori: Yeah, exactly. I mean, they are very cool. They have a massive impact on our day to day life, but also, it’s just that part, that kind of like, you know, that almost like, the hidden part of the world that we don’t think about as being, you know, we think of it as being something other, but it’s not other. It’s so integral to us and it’s so part of us that, you know, we have to understand it if we want to understand ourselves.

Khalil: Yeah, and you know like Emilia was talking about these echoes of old musical pieces. It’s like we’re hearing echoes of an old symphony and we only recognise some of the instruments and some of the musical motifs and the rest we’re having to infer and build upon to make this picture of what it came from.

Tori: We also, you can see it happening in real time, right. So, you can see viruses moving in, people are getting sick more often from these zoonotic viral events because viruses can move around. Obviously in the last 40 years, infectious diseases have basically emerged at four times the rate of previous decades and most of these diseases are ones that have come from animals.

Tori: And as humans encroach more into wild areas, it’s only a matter of time before a new virus spills over. In fact, it’s already happened in South Asia.

Dr Rajib Aursaful Islam: In Bangladesh, we have very little amount of forest left. So people are everywhere. So bats have no place to go, so they are living inside the community, very close contact with people.

Khalil: Dr Rajib Aursaful Islam is a veterinary researcher working at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh. He focuses on Nipah virus, a deadly disease carried by bats.

Rajib: So Nipah virus is a deadly pathogen, most carried by bats. In Bangladesh it is carried by Pteropus medius bats and for more than a decade we are having Nipah virus outbreak in different areas of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, it comes to humans through date palm sap, a delicacy in Bangladesh and the case fatality rate due to this virus infection is more than 70% That means if you get the infection, the chance is more than 70% that you will die.

Khalil: Nipah virus is most often transmitted to humans through ingesting the sap of the date palm, a local delicacy for humans and bats. Because of how their immune systems work, there’s a high viral load in these bats. So, all it takes is a bit of animal by-product, like saliva or urine to transmit the disease.

Rajib: It is very tasty. It is light, sweet and clear, transparent, just like liquid and anyone like it. But the problem is there’s a huge chance of bat borne pathogen infection. People shape the upper trunk of the tree and mostly during the winter, the sap drips from the trunk of the tree into a pot and in the night, bats come to lick or feed on that sap. So, if you drink sap contaminated with bats saliva or urine, which bat was shedding at that time, you will get the infection.

Khalil: Bats feed on the date palm sap because humans are creating the conditions for bats to be A. hungry and B. able to access the sap.

Rajib: Bats are opportunistic feeders. You see that date palm sap is not naturally available for them. Yeah, it is a product due to human intervention. But bats come to see what’s there and somehow, they’ve learned to feed on this date palm sap.

Khalil: As a response to this danger, the Bangladeshi government has actually moved to ban the drinking of raw date palm sap.

Rajib: So, if you do not drink date palm sap, raw date palm sap, you will not have the infection. And this is the recommendation of Bangladesh government also, not to drink raw date palm sap.

Khalil: But it’s not just that the bats are feeding on the date palms. Rajib and his fellow researchers are finding links between Nipah virus and domestic animals because of a lack of wild land in Bangladesh.

Rajib: In Bangladesh, people live in very close contact with domestic animals, like cattle and goats, are the principle domestic animals of Bangladesh and in our previous study, we have found cattle, dog and cat positive for Nipah virus antibody, which means probably they had exposure to Nipah virus in the past, but we do not know whether they have any role in the transmission of this virus or not.

So if we can identify or if we can detect that this animals also shed virus, even for a short period of time we have to think about an intervention to keep the animal away from the bats or bat roosts, to reduce contact with bats, those kind of things. You know, bats did not come to actually our habitat, humans invaded into bats habitat. But now we have to find out where so that all animal species, including humans, can live peacefully.

Khalil: And Rajib has a simple suggestion. Planting more trees.

Rajib: If we can plant fruit trees which are edible to only bats, which are not edible to humans, as a result there will be no competition. Maybe by planting such trees, we’ll reduce competition between bats and humans. Probably they will try to feed less on date palm and more on those fruits.

Tori: Basically, it’s our old friend, humans encroaching on wilderness, again. And then something bad happens.

Khalil: Tale as old as time.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: And Bangladesh in particular has lost a huge amount of forest cover. From 2001 to 2022, they lost over 200,000 hectares of tree cover. Which is, you know, over 10% of their forested area.

Tori: Yeah, I mean that’s a lot of wildernesses gone. You know, people have got to live somewhere. And, you know, and Bangladesh is also facing the other threat on the other end of things, you know, people have got to live somewhere and the water is rising and it’s a very low lying country, so, you know, where are people going to go?

Khalil: And that’s a really tricky balance that needs to be struck between the needs of people to have homes and livelihoods, and the needs to preserve the natural environment and to avoid the risks that come with degrading that and encroaching on that. Bangladesh is already one of the most densely populated countries in the world. And so, like you said, when they’re trapped between an encroaching sea and a forest that might be giving them zoonotic diseases, they’re in a really tough spot.

Tori: Yeah, and it’s like, in that situation, like, it’s so difficult to live, you know, in harmony, in inverted commas, with nature. Like, it’s so hard. And yet, it is something that people try to do. Now, you look at the deforestation that we’ve discussed in Bangladesh, we had a whole episode, check it out, previously on deforestation when we focused on Indonesia. And yet there is someone there who has found a way to live in harmony with some seriously big bats.

Pak Warman: The island has lots of trees where bats live or where they hang themself upside down when they come home.

Tori: This is Pak Warman, a fisherman from Sulawesi, an island that makes up part of Indonesia. He’s perhaps an unlikely advocate for the bat.

Pak: There are so many of them. There are tens of millions of them. So, the skies become darker. You cannot see the sunlight at 4.30 in the afternoon. The experience of living next door to bats, for me, I really love it.

Tori: The bats that live on Warman’s Island are Sulawesi Flying Foxes.

Khalil: I’m looking at a picture right now, and they’re beautiful. They’ve got this lovely golden fur around their collar. These big broad wings and these huge round eyes for seeing at night.

Pak: These bats are extraordinary. When they come home, they hang themselves upside down.

Tori: Until 2014, the bats around Warman’s village were being hunted, sometimes to sell as food, but mostly because this flying fox was seen as a pest. They eat commercially farmed fruits, mangos, cashews, wild bananas, avocados and even the local specialty, durian. But Warman knows the value of these bats as pollinators.

Pak: If there are no bats, the durian will never bear fruit. If the bats are destroyed, the durian will only be history.

Tori: Warman has worked with his fellow villagers to ban bat hunting and create a sanctuary for the bats on a smaller island just off the coast. It’s this kind of bat conservation and activism that allows bats and humans the space and resources they need to live in harmony.

Khalil: Now, we’ve talked about sharing space and sharing food, that list of fruits that the flying foxes eat, I’ve got to admit my mouth’s watering.

Tori: Yeah, have you ever seen a cashew?

Khalil: Yeah, I’ve eaten cashew fruit, they’re delicious.

Tori: Like the first time I saw one I couldn’t believe it, like it’s this incredibly large fruit with teeny teeny nuts on the bottom of each one. Yeah, I mean, well I’ve never looked at a packet of cashew nuts in the same way again because it shows you how many trees you would need for one packet.

Khalil: This idea of a bat island is such a lovely example of how we can recognise that both humans and bats need and deserve their own space and resources to thrive.

Tori: Yeah, so Warman’s come up with a really sensible, like, sort of, you know, compromise. He’s made space for the bats, but you know, bats are everywhere. And they are, you know, part of the natural world. And we can’t really, I think, aspire to a place. I mean, I hope not anyway. I don’t want the future to be completely segregated, you know, humans from nature and neither the twain shall meet.

Khalil: And, you know, like we’ve said with fires and smoke and pollution and things like that, bats neither understand nor respect human artificial boundaries like national borders and property lines and stuff like that.

Tori: I mean there’s a reason why they’re like almost over the entire world and that’s because they can fly!

Khalil: It’s because they fly and they are curious and they’re amazing.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: And while it is really beautiful to share our environment with bats, it’s also important to remember that you know, because they are so widespread and because of their relationship with viruses, all it takes is one mutation in one virus for the next zoonotic disease to break out.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, but that’s because viruses are part of nature.

Khalil: Absolutely

Tori: And so, you can’t, it’s not a case you can separate. You’re never going to stop this from happening.

Khalil: No.

Tori: It’s like, it’s viruses are part of nature, we are part of the world. It’s everything is interconnected and part of that world, right all the way back into our deep evolutionary history, as we’ve already said, is about that movement. The fact that humans and viruses, animals, viruses and plants, viruses and everything are going to interact. So, we have to find a way to live with it in the way that basically finds the best route through this tricky problem.

Khalil: Yeah and this narrative is often, you know, oh, these animals giving us their diseases but it’s much more of a two-way street on that.

Dr Dave Redding: It’s very much that pathogens are continually swapped. Like, spillover is a daily event.

Khalil: This is Dr Dave Redding, the lead researcher on biodiversity and health at the Natural History Museum.

Dave: We know that we’re part of this sort of network enmeshed in the kind of complexity and the network of biodiversity itself.

Khalil: Dave’s interested in how pathogens are swapped back and forth between humans and animals.

Dave: Part of that is that we’re sharing pathogens to the animals that are around us and they’re sharing them back.

Khalil: As with Nipah virus, how humans are changing the landscape is driving animals and humans into closer proximity.

Dave: We create landscapes to suit ourselves. And I think, you know, by doing that, we actually have quite a few sort of patterns to the landscapes that we create that we don’t really know that we’re doing it. If you imagine a more natural landscape that’s, say, wooded, shrubs and more sort of rocky areas, we tend to have things like water available in lots of little pools in lots of places. So, if an animal needs to drink, it can drink from one of many places. In a more urban landscape, those areas where an animal can drink are actually quite often really focused into, say, a water container or some kind of, a bit of guttering that isn’t draining properly. And those actually act to concentrate animals together.

Khalil: As humans reduce the extent and richness of natural landscapes and the food sources available, animals have to make do with what they’ve got. And then there’s farming.

Dave: Some of the changes that we’re seeing is actually larger fields of single crops and much more sort of focus on irrigation and industrialisation of agriculture.

Tori: Once again, this land change means we’re rubbing shoulders with animals all the more often.

Dave: We’ve modified so much of the landscape and we’re in so much of the landscape that we’re probably a really important part of actually giving pathogens back to wild animals. So, you can imagine a pathogen is poorly adapted to humans and spills over, but there’s so many of us that the likelihood of it spilling over and it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t have a huge effect on that person.

But then, it spills back and it’s slightly more adapted to humans at that point. And then maybe it spends some time, swapping between, you know, individuals of the same species or cross species and gaining this ability to be more general in its ability to evade immune systems of mammals more generally. And so, I think it’s really interesting thinking that actually, we could be the cause of, kind of making pathogens more likely to be able to infect ourselves just by the fact that there’s so many of us contacting so many animals.

Tori: Yeah, it’s good to be reminded of that perspective. Everyone spends so much time worrying about like the disgusting thing they might catch from a rat, like, you know, getting into their food or something like that in the kitchen. And don’t think about the fact that they might give the rat a disease. No one thinks about the rats.

Khalil: Yeah, right. And we’ve talked about human populations and our effect on biodiversity, deforestation, stuff like that in this series. But this other kind of existential risk is so much harder to see but also has a really profound effect.

Tori: Because these are big problems that cross over multiple different subjects, disciplines, fields of study, expertise areas and all of these people need to come together to bring the different perspectives to understand it.

Dave: It is definitely a puzzle. I think it’s a puzzle that has kind of serious real-world consequences. But it’s, I think about it as we are mostly in the dark, occasionally shining a bit of light on something that even when you shine a light on it, it’s not that easy to understand. And we’ve all got these really different takes on when you shine a light in the dark and you see something, we all see it slightly differently.

Tori: Got your torch.

Khalil: Got mine here.

Tori: Double torch light, head torch as well, shine the lights on everything, all the different people. I do like that analogy. I mean, it is that thing, isn’t it? All puzzles are basically, they’re there. The answer is there somewhere. You just need to, like, locate it. Yeah, with the right skills and enough hands.

Khalil: Yeah, and it kind of creates a built-in humility that’s really important.

Tori: You aren’t the only one who’s going to fix this.

Khalil: Yeah, it challenges this idea that there’s going to be, you know, someone who’s going to come along, probably from a richer country, more privileged background, is going to come along and solve this problem with this one kind of realisation. And this kind of feeds into a concept known as One Health. And One Health is a relatively new way of looking at health and it combines human, non-human and environmental health. So instead of looking at them as separate things they’re looked at as different parts, different facets of the same interconnected relationship because our health depends on the health of the planet and animals and vice versa.

Tori: And we better hope that we do get our act together and you know, get all those torches shining, you know, as brightly and as efficiently as possible because zoonotic diseases are continuing to rear their heads. In 2023, we’ve got the issue of avian influenza or bird flu.

Khalil: You could argue that all flu is bird flu. There’s some genetic evidence to suggest that influenza spilled over to humans from ducks or other waterfowl around 4,000 years ago, so not that long.

Tori: No and there’s been sporadic outbreaks ever since, right. First recorded instance of fowl plague was in Italy in 1878.

Khalil: But it was the devastating so called Spanish flu that tore across the world in 1918 and 1919 that has had the biggest impact. It’s estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died during that pandemic, which is more than the First World War, which came right before it.

Tori: Yeah, just such big numbers. And then you’ve got, like, you know, fast forward, there’s some other influenza outbreaks in between, but fast forward to 1996 and a new strain of bird flu emerged in China – H5N1. It first infected geese and then it moved to chicken farms and all the chickens, all the chickens in Hong Kong were destroyed in 1997 and 1998 to control the virus.

Khalil: Now, unfortunately, that virus re-emerged in 2003 and it spread into the wild bird population. This outbreak was especially concerning because H5N1 can infect humans.

Tori: To date, 868 people have caught this strain of bird flu and 457 of them have died. That sets the fatality rate at 53 per cent, which is very, very high.

Khalil: Yeah.

Tori: It’s a real cause for concern for disease experts.

Khalil: And this is relevant now in 2023. Because bird flu has once again got the world in its talons. As of July this year, 81 countries have reported ongoing outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu. And it’s spreading to other animals too.

Tori: And this is your reminder that if you see a sick or dead bird, be very careful, please don’t touch it, take reasonable precautions, report it to the appropriate authorities and be sure to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water.

Ed Winters: In Europe right now, we’re currently undergoing the biggest ever recorded outbreak of bird flu. And obviously we’re culling tens of millions of birds across Europe.

Tori: This is Ed Winters. Online, he goes by the handle EarthlingEd.

Ed: And so, the problem is there are always outbreaks. You know, it’s not something that stops. There are constantly outbreaks somewhere around the world.

Tori: Bird flu is having huge impacts on poultry farming right now. Over 200 million agricultural birds, mostly chickens, have been culled in the last 18 months. And untold numbers of wild birds have died as a result of this disease.

Ed: You know, I’ve been on dairy farms, I’ve been on beef farms, I’ve been on poultry farms, pig farms and I think for me as an activist, it was important to kind of see that first-hand and have that experience to be able to describe it.

Tori: Ed is the co-founder of Surge Activism, a non-profit campaigning group for animal rights.

Ed: When you walk into an industrial chicken farm, especially the thing, the two things that shocked me at the scale of these barns, huge barns. 30, 35, even 40,000 chickens crammed into just one barn. And so, the scale of it took my breath away, but also the smell. You know, you wear the biohazard suits. It’s very important that you, you know, you make sure that you decontaminate yourself, wear the appropriate outfit so that you’re not spreading any diseases. You would take all precautions that you should. But even with these masks and things on, the smell hits you, the ammonia, the stench of the faeces because these chickens are just living in these barns.

Tori: No one, well, I mean, no one likes the sound of that. I’d defy anyone to go, well, that’s lovely. No, that’s got to be pretty overwhelming.

Khalil: Yeah and I was struck by that description of the biohazard suits, which, you know, those all body white or yellow suits, kind of Darth Vadery, sci fi. It’s something that we don’t really imagine when we think about farming. Like, I’ve worn them in biohazard labs.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: But, you know, when you think of farming, you imagine a big field, maybe some cows...

Tori: It’s all very bucolic.

Khalil: You know, a light breeze rippling the fields. But the reality is that poultry workers have to take really serious precautions because they know that they’re in danger of both being infected and infecting the birds with diseases.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, basically, it makes it pretty clear that there’s like an inherent problem there, right. And that’s exactly what Ed thought too.

Ed: The problem we have with intensive agriculture, in particular when it comes to bird flu and indeed swine flu, is that we’re housing, as I said with birds earlier, tens of thousands of birds in one space. That provides an incredible opportunity for a virus to mutate and spread.

Tori: Scientists are pointing to the ever-increasing intensity of animal farming as a cause for the mutation and emergence of new strains of virus.

Khalil: Yeah, for example, a steep increase in intensified goat farming in the Netherlands led to the emergence of Q fever in 2007.

Tori: Yeah and growing numbers of camels in the Arabian Peninsula led to the MERS outbreak in 2012.

Khalil: And it’s no surprise that thousands and thousands of chickens living together in close quarters has led to new strains of devastating bird flu. There’s over 35 billion farm chickens out there. That’s a lot of bodies for viruses to mutate in.

Ed: The issue that we have and the fear that we have is that a mutation will occur in these viruses, which means that the virus can not only spill over to humans, but actually causes threat to life as well. So, the lethality and the contagion both are kind of brought up as a consequence of this, this genetic mutation. And that is one of the things that concerns, you know, not just vegans, but of course infectious disease experts the world over is. The question is not if, it’s always going to be a when.

Tori: And there’s a solution that Ed is proposing to this problem, but not everyone’s going to like it.

Ed: I would strongly argue that the simplest way to remove the biggest risk factors in the emergence of bird flu and swine flu diseases is to remove the birds and pigs from the farms in the first place. If we remove intensive pig farming, intensive bird farming and these systems of farming in the first place, we’re removing the biggest driver in the emergence of these diseases.

Tori: So, you would say that, Ed, because you’re a vegan activist.

Ed: I would say that, but I’m also a vegan activist that’s driven by facts and by science and by data. And whilst of course removing the chicken farms would fulfil my goal of no longer having cruel systems of food production, or at least, you know, minimising these cruel systems of food production. It also serves another purpose, which is that it helps us as a species because it removes the biggest risk factor in the emergence of diseases, which could cause pandemics the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Tori: That feeling of needing to do something motivated Ed to start his YouTube channel and he’s been a fulltime vegan educator for a few years now. And, although full veganism will be his ultimate goal, I asked him what steps we can take along the way.

What can the consumer do to make an ethical choice? What is your advice to somebody in the supermarket choosing their next dinner?

Ed: Choose plants over animals. You know, in a situation where we have the option to choose plants over animals will of course reduce the risk of many of these issues we’ve spoken about. So, simply, choose plants over animals.

Tori: Can you imagine a world where there is no farming of animals?

Ed: Yeah, I think that’s highly unlikely. I don’t think that the world is set up. It’s complex. Environments are very different. Socio economic situations are very different. I think it’s highly unlikely that that’s the case. I think that when we talk about the problem, we’re talking mainly about affluent nations, where the intensification of animal farming originated from and where it still to this day is the most pernicious. And I think that in these countries, our environmental impact is higher than the global average. And so, the changes that we make are actually more important than the global average. And so, no, not a world, but I think the countries where it needs to happen most are also the countries where it can happen.

Tori: Yeah, we often talk about, you know, individual versus big system, but actually this is one of the easiest things that an individual can do. It’s a very easy life hack, really, just eat less meat.

Khalil: I’m gonna hold my hands up. I’m not a vegan.

Tori: No, me either.

Khalil: But, you know, let’s be real, it is possible to make choices that reduce the amount of meat and animal product in your diet and I’ve been trying to do that. I can’t really, with a straight face, you know, come on this show and talk to people about our relationship with the world around us without at least making some changes in my life. That idea of change as a direction rather than a destination, I think is a good way to think about changing our individual and societal lives.

Tori: Yeah, you’re never gonna be vegan because you’re never gonna give up the jellyfish! Let's face it! Jellyfish episode, please check it out. I mean, I do find that articulating these things, it makes a change. If you say to yourself, I will eat less meat, then, you know, it does tend to happen. It’s one of those really, like, simple changes. Just stop at, as Ed says, in the supermarket, choice of two items, a little nudge towards the vegetable one, the plant based one. It’s a really simple thing to do and all the data, all the data suggests that it’s one of the biggest impacts that you can make on greenhouse gas emissions. And then you’ve got the lovely bonus of maybe killing less fluffy animals.

Khalil: And, you know, change can be, you know, a little bit scary. Like, changing a lifestyle that you’ve got used to, that you like, that you’ve tailored to your own preferences, it can be uncomfortable. But, often, you discover really cool stuff once you open that door that you had left shut for a while.

Tori: Yeah, it is. I think it is. It’s one of the, like, the few things, I mean, I try my best, but definitely, I sort of, you know, when I saw the data on the impact of eating meat and I made a very simple decision to myself to say, okay, I will not eat meat during the week. What you end up doing is not eating meat at the weekend either. Because you discover it.

Khalil: Oh, see, I had this image of you, like, like a werewolf, waking up on Sunday, like, surrounded by bloody carcasses.

Tori: No, I mean, I guess that’s it, isn’t it, right. Because I’m not, I was never, like, one of the world’s carnivores. So, it wasn’t a hard, it wasn’t a hard decision for me to make because I’m probably a natural, like a sort of vegetarian, plant-based eating person anyway.

Khalil: And it also has the added bonus of potentially keeping us safer from zoonotic diseases because, I don’t know about you, but for me lockdown sucked and if I can avoid another one of those in future, I’ll change my diet a little bit here and there.

Tori: Yeah and we’ve got the knowledge to do that, we’ve got people working on all these things, we have the knowledge, we have the understanding and that gives us the power to change what we do, because basically forewarned is forearmed.

So, on that note, thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world to eat less meat and it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode, as many as possible. If you found it helpful, why not share this episode with friends and family?

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag ourbrokenplanet or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast.

Tori: Next time we’re throwing open our windows and breathing in the sweet, sweet smell of air pollution.

Khalil: Don’t you just love the smell of particulate matter in the morning?

Tori: Our Broken Planet is presented by Kahlil Thirlaway and me, Tori Herridge. The producer was Leonie Thomas, the series producer was James Tindale and the executive producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Khalil Thirlaway: The Atlantic Ocean isn’t known for its warm waters. If you took a spring dip off the coast of Ireland, for instance, you’d do well to last more than a few minutes before scampering back for a towel.

Tori Herridge: But for the fish, plants, reptiles, mammals and more who make those chilly depths their home, 2023 is seeing a record-breaking heatwave. Some areas around the coast of the UK are up to five degrees hotter than normal.

Khalil: Now, this is an extreme event, but it’s one of many similar stories that we’re getting used to hearing worldwide. Our oceans are in trouble.

Guest speaker 1: We’ve changed the chemistry, the fundamental chemistry of something which covers the majority of our planet.

Guest speaker 2: A colony that could be hundreds of years old, within a month you come back and it’s just dead.

Guest speaker 3: We have enough marine wildlife to feed millions of people. We no longer do.

Tori: So, what exactly is happening down there in the depths? How have humans caused such damage? And what does the future look like for marine life?

Khalil: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems of our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Khalil Thirlaway.

Tori: And I’m Tori Herridge. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected issues facing our Earth and asking the question, what can we do about it?

Khalil: And today, we’ll be talking about the incredible life that lives in our oceans. Fish, corals, molluscs, jellyfish and more.

Tori: It’s the more that’s key, right? Because there is so much more. The diversity of the oceans is not only immense and in some ways, I wouldn’t want to say unfathomable, but we’re still fathoming it. And to the extent that so many species are discovered every year. I would like to admit at this stage, I, you know, I’m somebody who definitely understands the terrestrial world better than the ocean. And for me, as somebody who is learning all the time on this front, I am faced with surprise after surprise. Sea mouse? Sea mouse? I mean, incredible things. Have you seen a sea mouse?

Khalil: I’ve seen a sea hare.

Tori: Oh my god, wow, I think they may be related, but they’re not mice, and they’re not hares, they’re not mammals – they are worms. Worms! A sea mouse is a worm!

Khalil: So, a sea hare is a type of sea slug. The more you find out about the ocean, the weirder and cooler it gets. But it’s not just a home for a massive variety of forms of life, it’s also an enormous heat and carbon sink for our planet, which, at a time when we’re producing a lot of carbon, without the oceans, we’d be in a pretty rough spot.

Tori: It is doing an amazing job at mitigating, you know, some of the input that we are having directly into the atmosphere, into our world system, and it is absorbing that stuff. But when something absorbs it has an effect on the ocean itself. I mean, just look at global sea surface temperature. It’s increased about, like, 0.8°C since the turn of the twentieth century, since 1901.

Khalil: And, you know, 0.8 degrees might not seem like a lot, but temperature rise lags behind global warming. And so even after we get the larger problem, the root cause under control, sea temperatures are still going to rise. And they’re heating faster than at any point in the last 10,000 years.

Tori: Yeah, don’t forget, of course, it’s not just the temperature. We also mentioned it’s absorbing all that CO2. And yeah, when you absorb something like carbon dioxide, it has an effect. It has a direct effect on the chemistry of our oceans, but more on that later. The oceans, of course, are enormous, but we’re going to start in one particular place, and that’s the tropics and coral reefs.

Khalil: Of course, we’re going to start in the tropics.

Tori: Yeah, of course we are. Not only are they beautiful, but they’re also really, really vulnerable and being impacted right now. Warming temperatures are turning these vibrant, colourful, underwater paradises into what have been described as coral graveyards.

Sanne Tuijten: As you dive in and you go down, you’re really eye level with this reef.

Tori: This is Sanne Tuijten a marine biologist working out in Bonaire, a tiny island in the Caribbean.

Sanne: There’s so many sounds. You hear the fish, you hear the little, you know, critters going around, moving around. Coral reefs are not quiet at all. There’s lobsters hiding in crevices. There’s very bright and colourful and vibrant sea snails, slugs. And as you kind of swim over this reef, you can look up and down and everywhere there’s this like, activity.

Tori: Coral reefs are absolutely teeming with life. While they make up less than 1% of the ocean, 25% of all marine species rely on corals.

Sanne: Every time, even though you go over a reef 20 times, you see something else. There could be a turtle coming up from the depths. There could be big fish just kind of slowly moving. If you’re really lucky, you might see sharks coming by. And there’s just so much activity that was just also really unexpected and that’s what makes it so magical.

Tori: However, due to climate change, coral reefs are under pressure. When temperatures rise, they undergo a process called bleaching.

Sanne: So, corals – most people think maybe that they’re stones or plants, but actually they’re animals. Coral that you’re familiar with are actually hundreds and thousands of coral polyps that make this one animal. They live together with algae. This algae does photosynthesis, so like a plant it absorbs the light and then produces sugar. And this coral really likes the sugar that the algae produces.

Tori: But the beautiful relationship between algae and corals become toxic when the temperatures rise.

Sanne: The rising temperatures cause corals to bleach. Let’s say you’re used to 29 degrees – a difference of 1 degree, 30 degrees for a couple weeks and the coral says, I don’t want you here anymore, and kind of kicks out the algae. And that’s what you see though, a reef of white corals, it’s actually the skeletons. This is a really big problem right now, not only Bonaire, but everywhere.

Tori: Sanne is Operations Manager at the Bonaire Reef Renewal Foundation. A non-profit organisation that studies and attempts to restore the local reefs.

Sanne: What we do is we want to restore Bonaire’s reefs but also give them a chance to gain some resiliency. We want to increase the abundance of the coral, so we want to put more corals on the reef. But then also we’re focusing on increasing the genetic diversity because we’re the same species, right? But maybe I get the flu quicker than you, but then maybe you get less sunburn. And corals are kind of the same. So, one of them might be better equipped to handle temperature increases while there’s the other one is better doing with too many nutrients in the water. And so what you want to do is you also want to increase this genetic diversity that’s on the reefs.

Tori: This task is a big one. Bonaire’s reefs have shrunk massively over recent decades.

Sanne: Residents of Bonaire, they talk about forests of corals. They literally had to hack away a path to be able to exit the corals going into the wider ocean and now it’s just sand, there’s nothing. There’s no indication that that could have ever been there, except for the beaches where it’s just coral rubble skeletons. And then you really, actively see the corals dying right in front of you, like a colony that could be hundreds of years old, within a month you come back and it’s just dead. And that’s really – I’m looking for the right word – it kind of sets you a reality check.

Tori: But there’s still hope for coral. Sanne and the Bonaire Reef Renewal Foundation have had some success in creating new areas of reef. The process is to take samples of corals and grow them on artificial structures. They then choose an underwater site and outplant – ie reintroduce – their corals.

Sanne: We outplant thousands of corals in one go, to make sure they all have the best chance to survive. Overall, we’ve out planted over 50,000 corals to the reef right now. And that’s also the thing that I, for me, really love about my work, is you really see the difference that you make. You know, my first corals that I out planted when I started this job, now they’re so much bigger. So, every time you go back, you’re realising, okay, you know, what we’re doing does make a difference. And we just kind of keep going and keep finding ways to kind of adapt to what’s happening, adapt to, you know, changes that are coming up.

Tori: Do you know, what I really liked about one of the things at Sanne told me was that not only did she like, basically almost do her first scuba dives on Bonaire and has gone back there to work, but also she says, you know, when you go to some of the natural reefs, the branching corals, you swim over them and there’s not much there, like, you can see the end of the reefs. But on some of their oldest, renewed reefs, you can swim over and they just stretch ahead of you. You don’t see the end of them, even in that short time. And that feeling of like, no end, is a really, you know, that’s a…

Khalil: That’s a powerful image.

Tori: It’s a powerful image, you know, that idea of that, and I just, yeah, it’s just a nice feeling to think, yeah, it’s small – drop in the ocean, pardon the pun – but it’s nice.

Khalil: Yeah. And, you know, I actually have scuba dived in Bonaire.

Tori: No!

Khalil: Yeah, back in like 2007 or eight or something. And it was, it’s the only time I’ve ever been to the Caribbean, and I had this image in my head of like, these kind of Finding Nemo-style reefs that would be all brightly coloured and full of life. But a lot of them, like she’s describing, were these pale, crumbling graveyards.

Tori: Oh, gosh!

Khalil: And so it’s really, really beautiful to hear that other visual image and the signs of progress and recovery when we decide to actively help and restore an ecosystem that’s under pressure.

Tori: Exactly, I mean, yes, okay. Can we do that for the entire world? Probably not. If global heating reaches 1.5°C, which is a kind of optimistic target at the moment, we may shoot beyond that, and the ocean will warm and what does that mean for coral, right? The data for that globally, suggests that no corals will escape being bleached. At least tropical corals, right? We’re not talking about the deep-water ones, right? The ones that have algae as symbionts, the ones that get bleached in the shallow warm waters, as that water warms, they are vulnerable.

Khalil: Even so far, we’ve already lost about 40% of the world’s coral reefs and that’s partly from bleaching, but it’s also partly from dynamiting holes in them for shipping lanes and damage from unethical tourism practices and stuff like that.

Tori: There’s also another issue – something that some people have called the evil twin of climate change.

Khalil: Wait, there’s a good twin?

Tori: Okay, yeah, yeah, good point. The ‘eviler’ twin of climate change. And that’s ocean acidification.

Sebastian Hennige: Ocean acidification is what happens when carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean and it makes it more acidic than it is now.

Tori: That’s Sebastian Hennige from the University of Edinburgh.

Sebastian: So, even since the industrial revolution, the oceans have absorbed about 30% of the carbon dioxide that we’ve released into the atmosphere. So, we’ll never put our hand in and get acid burns from ocean acidification, but it is becoming more acidic.

Tori: Right. Time for a very quick science lesson.

Khalil: Whoop, whoop!

Tori: Yeah, well, okay, very, very quick. Cast your mind back to school. Acidity is measured on the pH scale. Now, the ocean pH isn’t changing that much. It’s not a massive change. However, even a small change in the pH level can be a really big deal.

Khalil: Yeah, I guess we have to remember that marine life is living in this water all the time.

Tori: Yeah, so it’s not like sucking on a lemon or like dropping themselves into vinegar or anything as dramatic as that. But these animals are constantly exposed and for some of them, that means the ocean is literally eating away at their skeletons.

Sebastian: I remember one comment from one news commentator, and I think it was somebody arguing that deforestation wasn’t that big of a deal, because what they said was, oh well, the oceans will be able to absorb all this carbon dioxide. And to a point, they were right. The oceans did absorb a huge amount of carbon dioxide. But to the point where we’ve changed the chemistry, the fundamental chemistry of something which covers the majority of our planet.

Tori: Sebastian’s work looks at the damage acidification could cause cold water coral reefs, cousins of the tropical corals but sitting in much deeper water. One of these changes is that their skeletons become more porous. In other words, more holes appear in their structure.

Sebastian: It makes it far more brittle. And so just like osteoporosis in humans – brittle bone disease – this coralporosis was leading to a weakening of coral skeletons, which can lead them to snap or crumble under pressure. There are some reefs which are living in acidified conditions, which the future of many coral reefs may be like. And what we see is that, importantly, there still is cold water coral. But all that framework, all that complexity of habitat, which we usually associate with them, is gone. So, instead you’re getting this bare exposed rock and corals living amongst it and on top of it, but it’s not forming these structurally complex habitats.

Tori: And zooming out, it’s not just coral. Acidification will have an impact all across the ocean, from the bottom of food chains all the way to the top.

Sebastian: So, mussels, scallops, clams, oysters. There’s a organism called a pteropod – they’re found throughout the world’s oceans and many, many fish species eat them. They’ve been referred to as the potato chips of the sea. And we’re starting to see the shells of these sea snails start to dissolve. And so, this means that they’re less protective, there’s going to be less of them as well, and we’re already seeing this start to impact the food chains around these pteropods. These are the kind of threats which will make ecosystem-scale changes in 50 years’ time. The environment that we’ll be looking at globally is going to be different.

Khalil: The acidification of our oceans – it’s not something we think about as much as temperature so much. It’s not talked about as much. But this sounds like it’s really going to impact the entire ways that ecosystems throughout the world’s oceans work.

Tori: I think it’s one of those interesting things, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like that point that Sebastian made, is that on one hand, the ocean is this, you know, is a potential tool in dealing with, like, other aspects of the climate crisis. And it’s like, kind of like, joined up thinking needs to happen a bit. You know, you can’t, you know, you sort of think, oh, we can fix that bit by putting it here, but then you’ve got to think about, well, yeah, what happens to that other bit you’ve changed? Because the world is an interconnected system, yeah? It’s everything is connected.

Khalil: Also, you know, we’re hearing echoes of that old mindset of, oh, the ocean is infinite. We can just keep putting stuff in it and, you know, it’ll just disappear. And it’s the way that people used to think about, for example, land in places like, you know, America as it was being colonised and it’s also how people are thinking about space. And actually, space immediately around Earth is starting to fill up with junk.

Tori: Yeah, there’s already a lot of stuff up there.

Khalil: Yeah.

Tori: Isn’t it? Exactly that, that idea that you can just like pop something up there and leave it behind. I mean, look at all the flags that have been left on the Moon.

Khalil: Yeah, and you know, all those thousands and thousands of microsatellites that people are launching all the time now.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: But, you know, coming back to our relationship with the seas.

Tori: It’s something that’s out of sight, out of mind, right? We’re not so familiar with it. It’s like, you gaze under there, you can’t see it.

Khalil: I think you hit the nail on the head because, yeah, we love the sea and we like, you know, seeing creatures from it and we love eating creatures from it, some of us. But it is this thing of, we very rarely actually see under the water. So, what are some of the solutions that we can work towards to either alleviate the acidification or to mitigate some of the consequences of it? I mean, the big one is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, because it’s the carbon dioxide that we’re putting into the atmosphere that’s dissolving in the sea and making it more acidic.

Tori: Yeah. I mean, that is obviously the fundamental thing we keep coming back to again and again and again, is you can’t ignore that big top line, which is, you know, fix the source of all of these problems. Beyond that, there are localised things we can do to try and find, you know, sticking plaster solutions until we fix the big ones.

Khalil: Like we heard from Reef Renewal, who are reseeding corals.

Tori: What I think is really interesting about that kind of connection between what people like Sanne and Reef Renewal are doing in these kind of artificial, you know, kind of rewilding coral reefs approaches, where they’re using artificial structures to grow corals and then replant them. That really, that kind of like really dovetails what Sebastian was telling me about other potential efforts to kind of think about how you might have an artificial deep-sea reef. Because the issue with the acidification, it’s not that it kills the corals. The corals seem to be okay, the issue is their structure is being eaten away, right? So, you could potentially provide them with an artificial structure, right? Yeah, you see on shipwrecks, like shipwrecks sink and you see artificial reefs growing.

Khalil: Well, I’ve seen some really lovely examples of people dumping old military hardware into the water to serve as artificial reefs. That’s quite a nice image. You know, it’s a kind of swords to ploughshares vibe.

Tori: Yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah. It’s sort of also bleak.

Khalil: At least we’re getting rid of them, you know? Getting rid of weapons and creating coral reefs. I’m down.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: Now, not every species in our changing oceans is on the losing end of this deal. And there’s one in particular that’s quite close to me – and that’s close in a literal sense. I have quite a large tattoo of it on me.

Lucas Brotz: As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut and go into outer space and find aliens.

Khalil: That’s Lucas Brotz from the University of British Columbia.

Lucas: But I had a moment of realisation where the underwater world is an unexplored region that’s full of aliens.

Khalil: And the alien that he studied for 15 years is the jellyfish.

Lucas: It’s certain that jellyfish do have a bad reputation with many people. One thing most people know about jellyfish is that they can sting you and it’s probably in the hundreds, if not thousands of people a year that have died from jellyfish stings. You know jellyfish do interfere with human activities in a number of other ways. They interfere with fisheries, they clog fishing nets and spoil the catch. But they’re also highly beneficial in a number of ways. You know, jellyfish are a natural presence in healthy ecosystems. They’re food for hundreds of species of fish, for seabirds and turtles as well. They play a really strong role in the ecosystem in that way and they’re very important predators as well.

Khalil: Lucas’s research found jellyfish numbers are growing. There’s a few theories why this might be. First among them, you guessed it, global warming.

Lucas: Jellyfish reproduction is often triggered by warming temperatures in the spring, and so if those warmer temperatures are being reached earlier in the year as we have sort of more early springs that could cause jellyfish to show up earlier and they stick around longer. As well, many jellyfish are sort of limited in their habitat and range by the temperatures that they’re experiencing. And so, if the oceans rise in temperature, it may expand some of that habitat. And we’re definitely seeing this with some of the more dangerous stinging jellyfish where they are showing up in areas that were previously inhospitable to them.

Khalil: Humans have been impacting jellyfish in other, more direct ways too. Overfishing, for example, has reduced their natural predators.

Lucas: We take just a staggering amount of seafood out of the oceans, upwards of, you know, 100 million tonnes a year, which is just a figure that it’s hard to even comprehend. A lot of fish will eat jellyfish opportunistically – eat them when there’s no other food around or if they’re just looking for, you know, kind of a quick snack. Jellyfish aren’t very high in nutritional value, but they’re very easy to catch and they’re very easy to digest.

Khalil: And elsewhere, fertiliser from farmland running into rivers and oceans can kick off a series of events called eutrophication, and this results in big, dead zones of water, which don’t contain enough oxygen to support most kinds of life.

Lucas: One group of organisms that can tolerate low oxygen conditions quite well are jellyfish. They have a very low metabolism and in fact, they even have an ability to go to sort of more oxygenated areas, store oxygen in their tissues and then return to these lower oxygenated areas. It’s almost like having a little scuba tank where you can, you know, store up oxygen and use it in these other regions.

Khalil: So, jellyfish numbers are a symptom of human interference. But, if we can improve our relationship with the ocean, Lucas isn’t too worried about an unstoppable jellyfish army.

Lucas: Jellyfish are a natural presence in healthy ecosystems. We know they’ve been around for probably at least 500 million years. If you restore sort of healthy ecosystems by polluting less, overfishing less, developing less, you know, a lot of areas where we’ve just left the ocean alone, the ocean really seems to respond to that and thrive and creates these healthy ecosystems where jellyfish are a part of it, but they’re not the only part of it. And if we do a number of things to restore and improve the health of our oceans, the jellyfish problems will hopefully help take care of themselves.

Khalil: Now, I’ve got to come clean here and express some bias. I love jellyfish. I love them for a lot of the same reasons that Lucas does. They’re so alien and weird and peaceful, but also dangerous. And so, I have eaten jellyfish before, despite them being an animal that I really love. It’s hard to describe without making it sound gross, so actually, I’ve got some here.

Tori: Oh my god, okay, let’s have a look.

Khalil: Okay.

Tori: Look at that. It is a little bit, like, stretchy, but also kind of beautiful, right? It’s like glistening, like a kind of wobbly icicle.

Khalil: Bottoms up, here we go. So, what’s the texture like?

Tori: It is crunchy. No, it’s completely fine. It definitely tastes marine. It definitely tastes marine. It’s got a kind of like seaweed but crunch. Let’s just keep on eating them. Delicious.

Khalil: It might interfere with the rest of the chat.

Tori: It might do. It’s actually quite good though, right?

Khalil: They’re good.

Tori: They’re quite good.

Khalil: So, on the subject of our relationship with the oceans and food, let’s talk about fisheries.

Tori: Coming back to the idea of like, yeah, is the ocean a resource, or a wilderness, I mean it’s both. But we can’t ignore the fact that it is also a resource, right? And humans eat a lot of fish.

Khalil: I mean when you say a lot, you know, we catch about a 100 million tonnes’ worth every year. And around a third of fish stocks in the world are thought to be in a state of being overfished. Biomass is being extracted from them faster than it can regenerate. Back in the 70s, it was about a tenth of our fish stocks were overfished. So, that’s been a massive increase. And that connects us back to the exploding jellyfish.

Tori: Yeah, well, hang on. There’s a bit more jellyfish rustling around here because it’s so – I mean, it’s actually quite moreish, even if it looks disgusting.

Khalil: I am so glad that I’ve converted you to the church of jellyfish.

Tori: I mean, the interesting thing about the whole fishery thing, which I find fascinating is, if you look at the data, actually, like actual fishing numbers, like take catch numbers haven’t changed much since the 90s. People are eating more fish, but mostly it’s aquaculture. So, in that sense, it’s kind of interesting that we’ve kind of hit this kind of plateau since the 90s, but it’s still a problem.

Khalil: Yeah, and so to clarify, the plateau you’re talking about is not a plateau of the amount of fish we have, it’s a plateau of the rate at which we’re taking fish out.

Tori: Exactly, yeah, the fishing is happening at the same rate. Even at that level, it’s a problem, right? You know, these, these fisheries are under threat, and, yeah, they keep on being fished at that rate, we will face problems. And if there’s no more fish, there’s no more fishing. And that is an industry that supports, yeah, a lot of people. Yeah, a lot of people around the world.

Khalil: And at various scales, you know? It can be supporting your family in terms of putting food on the table, or it can be keeping a community or a town economically viable. But it’s not all doom and gloom. There is at least one fish staging a little bit of a comeback – the bluefin tuna. Having been massively overfished in the past, they’ve recently reappeared in UK waters. And when John Hourston of the Blue Planet Society realised this, he began campaigning for it to be a protected species.

John Hourston: They are massive, a fully grown adult bluefin tuna. They’re about the size of a transit van. They are the fastest fish in the ocean. They’re warm-blooded because they need to swim at such speeds. They’re a predatory fish, so they feed on mackerel, they feed on, well, they feed on anything, really, smaller than itself. And, they’re beautiful. They’re beautiful. They’re blue, they shine, and when they leap out of the water, you could compare them with, with, with anything, anything on the land.

Khalil: The story of the bluefin tuna is an interesting one. For around 50 years, they’ve vanished from UK waters. Scientists believe that overfishing of herring, a common component of the tuna’s diet and of course a British seafood staple, contributed to their disappearance.

John: All these timings are a bit sketchy, but they think they disappeared probably around about 1950, 60. With the collapse of the herring populations in the North Sea. Herring were badly overfished in the North Sea, almost to the point of functional extinction and the bluefin tuna disappeared around about then. Now, we’re not absolutely sure why they suddenly popped up again in round about 2011, but they did, they just came back. And they’ve come back every year since.

Khalil: Bluefin tuna isn’t the type you’ll find in a supermarket. It’s a prized fish, primarily used for high end sushi. A single fish can be sold for astronomical prices.

John: You’re talking about an animal that in Japan can sell for 1.5 million. It’s because it’s seen as a status symbol, it’s the first fish of the season and they pay premiums for it. Bluefin tuna aren’t worth 1.5 million yen or dollars or pounds or whatever, but they are worth a lot of money. If you catch a 500 pound bluefin tuna, that’s your day’s fishing paid for and your fuel and everything else. So, it’s a very, very desirable animal to kill.

Khalil: Despite John’s campaigning, in August 2023, licences are being handed out for a trial fishery in UK waters.

John: They will clamour for those licences and this is what worries me. The quota will grow and grow, and if that’s the case, then that’s a tragedy. And that’s why, starting from a unique position of no bluefin tuna to having bluefin tuna, we should have taken another unique position, which is protect them. Don’t eat them.

Khalil: So, I’ve got a couple of graphs to show you, Tori, and…

Tori: Love a graph.

Khalil: Right?

Tori: Love a graph.

Khalil: Thought you would.

Tori: Yes.

Khalil: Fellow scientist, you’re going to love some data.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: So, if you look at the top graph here. This is the trends in Atlantic herring populations.

Tori: Going down.

Khalil: In the, in the northwest Atlantic coast.

Tori: Yeah, not good. Late 60s to 80s. Very, very bad.

Khalil: Right? So, like, we’re going from, like, a million metric tonnes in, like, the 60s, down to 50,000 in the early 80s, late 70s. Then it increases a little bit into the 90s, but since the mid-90s it’s gone right back down again to those bottom levels and even lower. And if you look at the second graph, that is the amount of bluefin tuna caught in the western Atlantic.

Tori: Which has basically flatlined since 1969, yeah.

Khalil: So, you’ve got it ticking along from the late 40s to the early 60s.

Tori: Yeah, not much.

Khalil: And then in the 60s, there is a massive spike. It goes up to 10 times what they used to be catching. And of course, if you start catching 10 times as many tuna, soon that population is going to plummet. And that’s what you get. It goes straight down to zero. And it just flatlines until the graph ends at 2019.

Tori: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I’m guessing that’s not because people decided not to catch tuna. They were probably just still catching, trawling or whatever in that period and they just didn’t catch any tuna.

Khalil: Yeah. And so, you know, if you extend that graph to 2023–2024, you’re probably going to see a little uptick start in that amount of tuna caught. And if the population is only just starting to recover and only just starting to come back into these areas, any amount of fishing is really going to hurt their chances.

Tori: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because we wouldn’t think, I mean, certainly a very large number of people would not think at all about eating, say, elephant meat or lion meat or something along those lines. I think we would understand that is a rare and special animal, and maybe we shouldn’t be eating it. But I don’t think the same thought necessarily occurs when we think of species like tuna.

Khalil: Yeah, I think it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, about the out of sight, out of mind relationship that a lot of us have with anything that lives below the surface of water.

Tori: And what’s really frustrating to me is that we know, but we have the power. We have the power to use our knowledge, the scientific knowledge we have of the marine systems, to work with the industries that exploit these areas to try and do it in a way that is sustainable and actually there is great work being done and conversations being had, but we need to keep that focus, we need to keep that focus that science has to inform the way that we exploit our planet.

Khalil: And it also needs to be done at an international scale, because one of the things that has always been an issue with anything that happens at sea is that there’s disputes over who’s in charge, where the ship is registered, all sorts of international waters and stuff like that, and so it’s one of those things that we can’t do bit by bit.

Tori: It’s funny you should say that because just this year, major, major moment. Major moment and a reason to be optimistic. Because just this year, 2023, the United Nations actually came together and signed a historic agreement called the High Seas Treaty.

Megan Randles: So, basically, we’ve been calling this the biggest conservation victory of all time.

Tori: This is Megan Randles, global political lead for Greenpeace’s Protect the Ocean campaign. They have been pushing for this treaty since 2005.

Megan: So, what it does, it sets up a new framework so that we can establish high seas marine protected areas. And that didn’t previously exist at all. So, whilst, you know, we talk about 30 by 30, the globally agreed target to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030, whilst this doesn’t actually do that, it kind of provides the legal tools for the first time so that we can actually deliver that. This was agreed in February, so all countries came together to compromise and it was just adopted in June, and it was adopted by consensus. So, all countries agreed to it, which is, which is really good as well.

Tori: Megan mentioned the 30 by 30 target there. That’s the 2021 agreed plan by over 100 countries to protect 30% of both ocean and land by 2030. The High Seas Treaty is a roadmap, but the job isn’t finished.

Megan: So obviously it’s a great political moment, but it’s only worth the paper that is written on until we can actually bring it to life by actually getting these proposals in and getting these sites put off limits to destruction.

Tori: The treaty sets up regular conferences for countries to propose these protected sites and offers a legal framework to enforce the agreement.

Megan: It is a massive, massive win for nature. We can’t be complacent though, obviously we did celebrate the agreement being finalised back in March and had a bit of a celebration in June as well when it got passed through. It gives us hope that nature and, you know, ocean protection and people can triumph over geopolitics in such a divided time. So, it’s really, really important that we actually get these sites in. So yeah, I’ll celebrate again in 2030, but absolutely, massively good news story. The best news story that I can think of in my time working at Greenpeace.

Tori: I remember seeing that, I mean, obviously this year, but I really remember how vivid it was because Rina Lee, who was the, like, the conference president, said:

( Audio recording of Rina followed by cheering and clapping ) The ship has reached the shore.

Tori: And she, she was clearly like really, really emotional about it, because I think those discussions are exhausting.

Khalil: I mean, I’m amazed that they managed to get all 193 member states to agree, because they can’t even get 193 member states to agree that ethnic cleansing is bad.

Tori: That is one of the key take homes, right though – it can be done. But it only took them 20 years, right? Remember that, it’s been 20 years.

Khalil: We’ve always known we’re playing a long game though, right?

Tori: Yeah, yeah, but it is like, that in itself is like a great win for, for like multilateralism, like for the fact that these countries can work together because they’re certainly not working together on other topics. Now what’s got to happen is it’s got to be ratified and that happens in the nation states and they need at least 60 – 60 nation states have to ratify it for that treaty to go through.

Khalil: And also, this treaty talks about and addresses legal frameworks for stuff and regulation, but you know, just as cropped up in pretty much every episode of our last series, Wild Crimes.

Tori: Check it out!

Khalil: Like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Things fall through the gaps. Like, you can legislate as much as you want, but you still get illegal, unregulated, unreported aspects of all these industries, and so fishing is no exception to that.

Tori: No, exactly. These things are regulated, right, to a certain degree? Like, shipping is regulated to a certain degree, fisheries are regulated to a certain degree. We know, we know people don’t always do what they are supposed to do.

Khalil: Well, yeah, you can make as many rules as you want, but if you don’t enforce them, do they count? And what did you get on the high seas? Pirates.

Tori: Yarr. And talking about the 30 by 30 target, how do we feel about that? Is 30% enough? I have, I have to say I have no feelings about that. It does sometimes feel like a number plucked out of the ether, doesn’t it? I mean, I guess it’s better than nothing. I mean, I guess that’s a starting point. I’m more concerned that ratifying a treaty, I mean, that takes years and we’re only seven years away from 2030.

Khalil: And then making the change it takes to then implement that, it does seem like a pretty tight timescale.

Tori: And that’s just like, you know, that’s just to ratify and then, you know, actually start the process of proposing a marine protected area. So, maybe I’m sceptical but I think it’s really important to have goals. And legally binding goals. Now, we have got people signed up to...

Khalil: What does legally binding mean?

Tori: Well, let’s not be too pessimistic – it’s the end of the episode.

Khalil: Sure. I’m sure we won’t blow...

Tori: Have some jellyfish!

Khalil: I’m sure we won’t blow past this goal just like we’ve blown past so many other climate goals, but fingers crossed.

Tori: And don’t worry, because there’s always jellyfish.

Khalil: Delicious, delicious jellyfish.

Tori: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode. As many as possible. If you found it helpful, why not share this episode with friends and family?

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #OurBrokenPlanet, or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast.

Tori: Next time, we’re exploring what happens when wildlife and human habitats get a little too close.

Khalil: The results can be pretty nasty. We’re talking about zoonotic diseases. Our Broken Planet is presented by Tori Herridge and me, Khalil Thirlaway. The Producers were John Rogers and James Tindale, and the Executive Producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Tori Herridge: Green.

Khalil Thirlaway: Hot.

Tori: Humid.

Khalil: Massive.

Tori: Dense.

Khalil: Noisy.

Tori: Spidery.

Khalil: Itchy.

Tori: Sweaty.

Khalil: Damp. Vegetably?

Tori: Well yeah, I mean it is the smell that always stays with me.

Khalil: When you think of a forest, especially a rainforest, I bet you don’t think of the smell.

Tori: But it’s there, all damp, and it is that vegetably richness, kind of resinous maybe, and at the back, a kind of spicy tang.

Khalil: And that smell comes from the fertile soil, the wonderful sticky stuff from which the lungs of the Earth grow. Rainforests.

Tori: Almost a third of land-based photosynthesis happens in tropical forests. That’s the process that creates oxygen.

Khalil: And not only do the forests help produce oxygen, but they’re also great at sucking up excess carbon from the atmosphere – something that we know we’ve got to do more of to tackle the climate crisis head on.

Tori: But these lungs have been smoking in recent years and they’re getting smaller too.

Khalil: So, how do we know how much rainforest we have left?

Tori: And how can we protect what’s still there and help our forests to breathe deep again?

Tori: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Tori Herridge.

Khalil: And I’m Khalil Thirlaway. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected problems facing our Earth. We’ll be examining some of the issues that we humans have created and asking the question – what can we do about it?

Tori: And in this episode, we’re investigating the air conditioners of the world – rainforests. Everybody loves a rainforest.

Khalil: Yeah. I mean, have you been to one?

Tori: Surely. Yes, it was my first trip on my own, outside of the UK.

Khalil: Nice. Where did you go?

Tori: I went to French Guiana. It was a bit of like a baptism of fire in terms of foreign travel. But it was amazing! It was amazing

Khalil: I was born in Brazil, myself and although I didn’t grow up there, I’ve been back a few times to visit family friends and stuff. And one of those times we went to the Amazon and nothing can really prepare you for that kind of overwhelming experience. It’s a sensory overload.

Tori: It is, isn’t it?

Khalil: It’s noisy, it’s smelly, in a gorgeous way.

Tori: It’s like, it’s really, it’s one of those, it’s totally sensory overload. It’s the smell, it is what really struck me.

Khalil: It’s the smell of life happening.

Tori: Yes, or rots happening, maybe. Yeah, it’s all there.

Khalil: It’s the smell of, to paraphrase the Lion King, the circle of life. Things dying and that producing things living.

Tori: It’s like properly, properly intense. It’s that kind of visceral experience of a rainforest that really is like a motivating force, I think, for those who want to save it.

Tori: Piassava fiber palm.

Khalil: Leopoldinia piassaba.

Tori: Quinine.

Khalil: Cinchona ledgeriana.

Tori: Rubber tree.

Khalil: Hevea brasiliensis.

Tori: Zebrawood tree.

Khalil: Astronium fraxinifolium.

Tori: Cocoa tree.

Khalil: Theobroma cacao.

Tori: Dynamite tree.

Khalil: Hura crepitans.

Tori: The chupa-chupa tree.

Khalil: Quararibea cordata.

Tori: These are just some of the trees you might see as you step through the Amazonian rainforest. And, of course, the list goes on.

Professor Rico Fischer: They store a lot of carbon. They are a habitat for many species, so biodiversity is a huge aspect. And for the water cycle and for the climate, they are so important.

Tori: This is Professor Rico Fischer of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

Rico: If you go into the tropics, like in the Amazon, and if you have there a forest area with the size of a soccer field, there you have 400 tree species. And in the tropics, you have totally 50,000 tree species.

Tori: Like any complex system in the world, or in our body, it’s good to get a check-up every now and again. Rico and his colleagues are trying to scan the Amazon rainforest, but the sheer number of tree species makes their task incredibly difficult.

Rico: Especially in tropical forests we have many layers of trees within a forest, so we have these very large canopy trees, but we have also sub-canopy trees, et cetera.

Khalil: Rico uses a special LiDAR laser on the International Space Station, called GEDI, of course, which sends down a beam of light onto the rainforest.

Tori: By measuring how long the light takes to bounce back, scientists can work out the density of a forest, meaning that they can track the growth and loss of forests over time, as well as estimating how much carbon all these trees store.

Khalil: But they didn’t stop there. Rico and his team used this data to try and count the entire Amazon.

Rico: So, we implemented 100 millions of these LiDAR laser shots into the forest model and then simulated every tree in the Amazon rainforest, so more than 400 billion trees and got a really nice carbon map of the Amazon. So, now we know how much carbon is stored in every region in the Amazon and we estimated also the full carbon balance of the Amazon rainforest. So, the numbers which were around before our study are between 40 gigatonnes carbon and 90 gigatonnes carbon, so huge numbers, and we found out that it’s in the middle, so it’s around about 60 gigatonnes carbon, which is stored in the Amazon rainforest.

Tori: 40 gigatonnes – that’s 40 billion tonnes of carbon. It sounds like a lot, right? But actually, it’s not as much as we might have hoped.

Rico: And we found out that the Amazon rainforest is still a carbon sink but much smaller than expected before.

Tori: So, what’s making the Amazon less of a carbon sink? A less effective pair of lungs, if you will? Deforestation.

Khalil: Yeah, because over 15 billion trees are cut down every year.

Tori: If you just turn it into football pitches, that would be the equivalent of one football pitch gone every couple of seconds.

Khalil: Wow. Like, even for me, I’m not the biggest football fan, but, you know, I can envisage that size every two seconds.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, there’s no way I could even run across a football pitch in two seconds. You wouldn’t be able to outpace it.

Khalil: Like, in the course of this conversation, that’s an immense number of trees.

Tori: Yeah, yeah. Breathe in, breathe out – another one’s gone. And in fact, how does that translate into day-to-day?

Khalil: Yeah, because, you know, we need to breathe. We need oxygen. These are, you know, not the only source of oxygen. There are, there’s other plants on land and there’s photosynthesis happening in the seas but having trees around is a real benefit. They give you shade, they clean the air, not just of carbon dioxide, but the particulate matter in some cases.

Tori: Yeah. And yeah, that’s a really important point to make, right? The air quality aspect of things. Because of course, rainforests, when they’re cleared, aren’t just chopped down, they also burn. And with that burning comes a whole host of other problems for our planet.

Dr Helena Varkkey: So, on a day when there’s heat, I would wake up and if I go outside, I would actually see either a yellowy tinge or a grey tinge to the air.

Khalil: This is Dr Helena Varkkey. She’s an Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the University Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Helena: And if I tried to look a bit further, I wouldn’t be able to see as far as I usually do. And everything would be a bit grey or a bit discoloured, a bit darker as well. And often, I would also be able to smell smoke or something burning. And, you know, on a day like this, I would know that at least for a few days, this would be my life.

Tori: Southeast Asia is home to 15% of the world’s tropical rainforest. It is lush, verdant, full of life, with 380 new species being discovered in the region in the last two years alone. But like many precious habitats, these forests have been facing severe challenges in the past few years, from logging, to farming, to fire.

Helena: So, the southeast Asian haze is actually smoke that comes from fire, mainly in Indonesia and parts of Malaysia. However, the issue becomes transboundary when the smoke is heavy and thick enough that it can travel across great distances. So, depending on certain factors, it can affect up to six southeast Asian countries at one time, which is why it’s called the southeast Asian haze or ASEAN haze.

Khalil: Now we’ve heard about this tricky transboundary issue before in our fire episode. If you haven’t heard it, check it out. There we learn that the smoke from forest fires can travel for hundreds of miles and pays no attention to human borders.

Tori: You might remember those yellowish, hazy scenes from New York in June 2023. Well, that’s what Helena grew up with and began to experience more and more frequently.

Khalil: Every dry season brings the risk of haze, with the highest chances of a haze event falling between July and October. And aside from the grimness of waking up to a yellow sky, there are serious health issues as well.

Helena: So, the haze is actually made up of really small biomass particles. So, this is something that you can breathe in. They are so tiny, that they can’t be filtered out by your nose and your mucus and all that. So, when you breathe them in, it is sort of caught in your lungs and it can even go into your bloodstream. People will have problems of like shortage of breath. People who have asthma, they will be affected, and if it becomes really bad, basically you can really feel like you’re breathing smoke. So, for example, in Indonesia, the places really close to the fires, they have what they call oxygen houses, where they literally have a house where you can come in for however many minutes or hours to actually just breathe clean air, to sort of alleviate your symptoms.

Tori: So, kind of post-apocalyptic, but it’s like not post anything, is it?

Khalil: It’s now.

Tori: It’s now, right? It’s like, imagine, imagine thinking, “oh now it’s time to go to the oxygen house”.

Khalil: Yeah, the idea of oxygen being a special treat is really affecting.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, and just like that sort of thought, and we don’t think – that’s like the extreme end, right? You’ve got to get into oxygen houses, but it’s actually, it’s just that the fatter end of a wedge that you see all the way closer to home, and you see the figures of children who are growing up with terrible asthmatic problems in London. Because the air quality here is also not great, right? And so, you know, we are just one end of a similar air quality phenomenon.

Helena: What is happening is that certain areas, certain types of land in southeast Asia catches fire and usually these are peatlands. And peatlands are areas that are usually wet. They are flooded, so they are not naturally fire-prone. But when these lands are disturbed, when they are dried and when they are drained for, mainly for agriculture.

Tori: So, what’s actually catching fire in the rainforest is, you know, in Indonesia anyway, is the peat, right? It’s the peat that has been drained for agriculture.

Khalil: Peat is basically flammable soil made of dead plants. It’s mad, the idea of, kind of, the ground being flammable.

Tori: But what does a peat fire look like?

Dr Thomas Smith: The surface is kind of like another world. It’s a mixture of, kind of, greys and blacks and whites, because it’s ash.

Tori: This is Dr Thomas Smith. Assistant Professor in Environmental Geography at the London School of Economics.

Thomas: This layer of ash, and when you walk across it, I guess it’s the closest to feeling like you’re walking on the Moon, because it’s like, your feet sink into it and you make these footprints, and it kicks off a huge amount of fine kind of dust into the air, because it’s this really fine ashy material. The problem is that once they catch fire, it’s very, very difficult to extinguish those fires using conventional firefighting techniques. Really, the only thing that can stop these fires is very heavy rains, and I’m talking about the monsoon rains, not just a kind of heavy downpour. It requires a huge amount of water and we’ve done some experiments to have a look at that. So, the peat is smouldering. It’s not like a huge kind of flaming mass of orange and yellow flames like you’d see with a savannah fire or a grassland fire. And also, it’s burning underground in places and often has a surface layer that is the ash from what had burnt previously. And ash is hydrophobic, so you pour water on it and the water will just flow off.

Khalil: The idea of flammable ground is real creepy.

Tori: Yeah, it’s really creepy. It is really. I mean, ultimately, I think that’s the best way of describing it. It is properly creepy. Imagine being somebody who lives in that area, who lived through to see it transform from one thing to the other.

Khalil: And really overwhelming, the idea that these lush rainforests can become almost moonscapes, like ashy, smoky places that affect lots of different countries.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, moonscapes, ashtrays. It’s horrible, isn’t it? It’s like, it’s literally like the lungs of the Earth, like the rainforest, the lungs of the Earth, have been just like chain smoking cigarettes and that’s all that ash and particulate matter going out into the atmosphere, like spewing out of the atmosphere and people have to breathe it.

Khalil: Yeah, and you know, these forests are being cleared for agriculture. The famous one is palm oil.

Tori: An orangutan in every jar, I believe they say.

Khalil: That’s why it’s orange. ( Tori laughs ) Palm oil is the product, but oil palm is the crop.

Tori: It’s very clear.

Khalil: Palm oil palm.

Tori: Yeah, palm oil palm.

Khalil: It was introduced to southeast Asia from west Africa around 1970. Yet by 2011, exports had reached 50 million tonnes annually from Indonesia and Malaysia alone, with those two countries making up almost 86% of global palm oil exports.

Tori: That is a vast amount of palm oil. Vats. Vats and vats and vats.

Khalil: Yeah.

Tori: Yeah. I mean, the thing is, right, so palm oil is really nutrient-dense.

Khalil: And absolutely delicious.

Tori: And absolutely delicious. And so, in some ways, yes, there is a reason why it is such a popular crop and it is used in everything, you know, biscuits, instant noodles, even things like shampoo or lipsticks,, washing up liquid, sometimes even candles, you know, it’s everywhere.

Khalil: It’s also used in a lot of like traditional cuisines. So, for example, Brazilian cuisine is heavily influenced by west African cuisine because of the transatlantic slave trade. And so there, óleo de dendê, which is palm oil, is used in all sorts of really kind of fundamentally Brazilian dishes.

Tori: Yeah, and people can demonise palm oil very, very easily. But it’s important to remember that actually it’s kind of a wonder crop in many ways, and it’s important culturally to so many different people. So, it’s not so much palm oil is bad, but bad palm oil is bad.

Khalil: But we’re definitely going to be hearing more about the impacts and uses of palm oil in this episode. But it’s not the only product that’s increasing the demand for fertile, farmable land from rainforests. Southeast Asia also exports 87% of the world’s natural rubber.

Tori: Yeah, and then there’s paper and pulp as well. And then lastly, but not least, timber harvesting or logging. These three activities are responsible for degrading around 80% of Asia’s tropical forests and ultimately the only way those things can change is if you put down rules that force people to behave well, in inverted commas, right? And those systems can change with the right pressures and the right campaigners. It is possible to campaign to change laws in one country and that can have a knock-on effect.

Mardi Minangsari: You can walk all alone in the forest but you don’t feel, like, alone. I don’t know whether it’s scary or not but for me it’s calming to walk and then to experience life in the forest.

Khalil: Mardi Minangsari is the president of Kaoem Telapak, an environmental justice organisation in Indonesia. She’s been spending time in Indonesia’s forests since the 90s.

Mardi: That’s one thing that we recognise very quickly, you know, that’s different from the previous visits to natural parks, to the forest, is that the sound of the chainsaws, you know, cutting the trees.

Khalil: Minang and her friends heard the growls of the chainsaws ring out in the forest and they knew they had to do something.

Mardi: We thought all of this devastation of the forest happening, how can we help, you know, bring this to the attention of the government and then try to change things for the better. And also, we knew that it would be very difficult because at that time we were still under the dictatorship, yeah, and we knew that we will face a lot of obstacles because of the complicity of officials in all of this forest destruction.

Tori: Minang and her friends formed the campaigning group Kaoem Telepak in the late 1990s. They were trying to protect the forest from the looting and misuse of natural resources that was happening across the country.

Khalil: Indonesia has had a long struggle for independence. The twentieth century was marked by occupation and then by dictatorship.

Tori: Yeah, President Suharto was Indonesia’s second president and he took control of the country in 1966 and he ruled as a military dictator for 32 years. His reign was marked by corruption and he cashed in on the rapid industrial transformation of the country at the cost of its precious natural environment.

Khalil: But, in the late 1990s Suharto’s grip on power began to slip, especially as a financial crisis began to put pressure on the many foreign companies who’d invested in Indonesia. As the economic and political crisis deepened, the students and young people of Indonesia began to protest. In 1998, they took to the streets to demand change and Suharto was forced to resign.

Tori: Since then, Kaoem Telapak’s work has informed Indonesia’s modern approach to agricultural issues by advocating for more protection and regulation of natural resources, like the forest.

Mardi: So, Indonesia is currently the first country in the world that have a timber legality certification system and that also encompasses like a sustainability certification. And this is big deal. If we remember that when we started, almost 80% of Indonesia’s timber production is illegally produced.

Khalil: Getting a verification system in place is a massive achievement. But unfortunately, recently the political tide has begun to swing away from regulation and protection.

Mardi: In the past several years, we have had quite a few of deregulation, whereby the government is easing regulation to get permits to lure more investments.

Khalil: As is so often the case, the priorities of big corporations are in conflict with the priorities and indeed the lives of local and Indigenous communities. And one of the biggest contributors to this conflict is our old friend palm oil.

Mardi: When a forest is being converted into palm oil, the impact is almost instant. For example, in the rainy season, there were flash floods. And then sometimes this opening of the forest also mean that the sacred forest for the Indigenous Peoples also being devastated. Because for Indigenous Peoples, forest is their identity. So, they have what they call the sacred area within the forest. Usually, this is the ancestral graveyard. But palm oil companies doesn’t give a damn about these sacred sites for Indigenous Peoples. So, can you imagine if you are living your life, you know, the way you know from when you were born and suddenly it’s no longer there. So, you are there, but you’re not who you are anymore. It just destroys your identity.

Khalil: It’s really hard, as someone who grew up in a city, to imagine what it’s like to have such incredibly beautiful and rich nature as part of your identity in your neighbourhood.

Tori: Yes, exactly. Imagine your house burning down and how awful that would feel. And then imagine that, like, your entire community just being gone.

Khalil: And there’s this really powerful contrast of modern industry and commerce and kind of international capitalism colliding with Indigenous communities and people’s traditions and lives and their sacred sites and practices. There are two worlds colliding and one of them has bulldozers and chainsaws.

Tori: Quite, yeah, exactly, and a whole lot of money.

Khalil: Yeah.

Tori: Yeah. It shouldn’t be impossible to, you know, have a better version of this. People do have to eat, and there’s, yeah, at some point, something somewhere will have to give. But it doesn’t have to be entire swathes of, like, the precious resources of our natural world. It hasn’t got to be about trampling over people’s lives and livelihoods, and it hasn’t got to be like that.

Khalil: Brazil has, you know, much like Indonesia, a history of colonialism and then a military dictatorship and then democracy. And there have been, you know, wildly oscillating, approaches to, for example, the nature of the Amazon, and the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon, as well as the kind of the workers in the agricultural and industrial sectors of Brazil, which are massive.

Tori: Yeah, the critical sort of like, you know, take home for all these things is that it’s really, really, really, really, really, really hard to make change happen from below if the people at the top don’t have your interests at heart.

Mardi: Obviously the challenges or the rest of doing forest monitoring, especially monitoring the illegalities or all of this is security. The security risk to the monitors can happen in terms of physical risk. You can get caught by a company or their security guards. You can get beaten, you can get, even in some areas, the worst case is you can get killed.

Khalil: Around the world, environmental activists and land protectors are met with violence, and the consequences fall disproportionately on Indigenous Peoples. In 2021, 40% of all fatal attacks on environmental activists and land protectors targeted indigenous people, despite them only making up 5% of the world’s population.

Mardi: For example, some Indigenous Peoples, like I said, because it’s their identity, they, they are willing to risk their lives for these fights, but even that, we always share to them how to lessen the risk because obviously we don’t want to lose another forest defenders or human rights defenders.

Tori: It really, really makes me cross. People who are losing their lives, they’re defending their homes directly, right? But they’re also literally taking the fall for the defence of parts of our planet that are necessary to all of us, that just don’t happen to be on our doorsteps. And it’s like that disproportionate burden of activism. It really is unfair.

Khalil: It is. And what Minang was saying about, you know, not wanting to lose another forest defender. Activists are not just activists. Activists are human beings with lives and families. So, to value and honour these people who are putting their lives and their homes and their families and their safety on the line to protect these forests we have a duty to pay attention and to spread that and to build that and to use whatever power that we have to amplify that.

Tori: Yeah, which we all can do, actually. So, in some ways, you can one hand feel powerless but on the other hand you can say, well actually that is something when it’s not on your doorstep that you can do. Because if enough people raise their voices and say, this is something we value, these are people that we value, these are, you know, these are places that we value, then bit by bit those voices will be heard.

Khalil: And when we feel powerless, it’s really important to remember that we’re not alone in this struggle. Whether it’s the people around us immediately or people on the other side of the world – there’s still plenty of good people organising and working together to do good things for the benefit of everyone.

Tori: There are good people doing good things. But what we need is for everyone to find that goodness inside them, so they do the right thing in the right direction. And sometimes, these things aren’t opposed. And sometimes, science can show a way where everyone benefits. And actually, amazingly, one of those examples you can see right now happening when it comes to oil palm farming.

Dr Michael Pashkevich: People aren’t dumb and they’re not naive. They realise that there’s a biodiversity crisis. They also realise that we need to be having food and they also realise that people need to have income. And so, they want to be part of this conversation.

Tori: Dr Michael Pashkevich from the University of Cambridge has worked in rainforests in Indonesia and Liberia in west Africa.

Michael: Moving through a rainforest is not something easy and in addition to, say, getting your clothes caught on thorny plants, or random holes in the ground that your boot ends up falling into, but on top of that then suddenly you’ll be covered in ants that are trying to bite you, or, you know, any other number of things where it doesn’t feel like a fragile environment, which is all the more impressive than at the rate at which humans have been able to disturb rainforests, I think.

Tori: Yeah. And then you hit the oil palm plantation.

Michael: Exactly. Exactly. And, and it’s so, it’s so different and it’s a complete change in terms of what vegetation is present. And what then becomes the question is how do we then grow oil palm in a way that mitigates some of those ecological impacts of production and what are ways in which we can do that while still growing food at the same time, so while maintaining those yields. And I’ve sort of set that up as that these are two opposing sides of a coin, but actually there’s no reason why both of those things can’t be done at the same time. And so these are what we call these win-win situations.

Tori: Michael talks about win-win situations, right? Obviously, that’s what everyone wants. And in this particular context, what he was telling me about those oil palm plantations is that you get them, like, they’re often kind of, like, woven through by loads of waterways. So, you know, they’re intersected by rivers, right? And then what he’s interested in is what happens when a river meets the plantation and whether or not you can do something there and one of the things they are looking into are the, what is called in like technical terms, a riparian buffer. Now riparian just means like beside the river right, so like a buffer between the waterway and the plantation.

Khalil: These kinds of biodiversity buffers are not just valuable where water and land meet, but also between neighbouring areas of agricultural land. You know, the rich tangled hedgerows you sometimes get in the countryside – a lot of these have sadly disappeared as farming has got more and more intensive. But, you know, we’re increasingly understanding the value of these little pockets of bi these little havens of biodiversity amongst big areas of monoculture crops.

Tori: Yeah, and that’s exactly what Michael and his research group have been experimenting with, right? To see whether or not that same situation is true for oil palm plantations.

Michael: Our research group has been looking at ways to restore riparian areas and oil palm plantations, and we’ve particularly been looking at that through either relaxing management, so if you stop applying pesticides, you stop applying herbicides and you just let the natural community grow up, and that’s what we call passive restoration. Or by taking what we call an active restoration approach, which for us involves planting trees within that area in order to directly seed that regrowth of structural complexity, with the idea being that it will have these beneficial knock-on impacts on biodiversity and functioning.

Khalil: This seems really reminiscent of what we’ve seen in Europe and the UK, which is the removal of things like hedgerows, and we’re only now understanding the value that they have and starting to try and bring them back.

Tori: Yeah. Riparian buffers aren’t just a thing for all palm plantations. They’re something that is useful across every single agricultural sector. But I think what’s like really like inspiring about hearing what Michael and his team have been doing is that potential for a win-win. That thought that you might be able to carry big oil, big palm oil, okay, big palm oil with you on this journey towards, you know, a more biodiverse, more sustainable world, and that isn’t hopeful, I don’t know what is.

Khalil: Yeah, and what I really like about this story as well is how, just like some of the other stories we’ve looked at over the series, it’s about working with and alongside the nature that we are in, rather than trying to fight it head on and, you know, make a big square flat field with nothing but your crop.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, our world is a complex place. It gets – the complexity is part of the story. Yeah, you need that complexity. I mean, as humans we love that complexity. We look out on a complex, beautiful, natural landscape and we instinctively appreciate it as beauty. And I always think about that. I mean, if you think, there’s a certain like, stark beauty, minimalist beauty maybe, in a monoculture, in its own way, that kind of organised rows, star-shaped plantations, but it gets very boring very quickly.

Michael: Why don’t we pretend like that we’re a bird and we’re flying overhead an oil palm plantation and you’re moving across the landscape and so as you’re looking down as a bird what you’re seeing is oil palm after oil palm after oil palm.

Tori: So, our imaginary bird is seeing all these regular oil palms in the plantation, and then it hits the riparian buffer, where biodiversity has been preserved or reintroduced by planting several varieties of tree. And suddenly, everything changes.

Michael: And if you were to enter into that riparian buffer, then you’re going to be experiencing quite a different microclimate from the surrounding plantation as well. So, it might be cooler, it might be more humid. And then, of course, as well as that, there’s this river that’s running through it, so the sound is going to change, too, because you’re suddenly going to be hearing the sound of running water. And, so help you if you even get into that water as the bird that we are, because then, of course, you’re having an entirely different experience as it is in that right, too.

Khalil: I’m imagining the sound of running water, the coolness of a forest border. I mean, we’re recording this in June in the city and that sounds lovely.

Tori: I might go swim in the Thames. It does sound lovely, doesn’t it? It’s really nice. Yeah, and so you get that, don’t you? That kind of like lovely vision of that beautiful cool river. And this idea that the forest and this biodiverse, complex place are acting like a kind of air conditioner and actually Michael’s been seeing some really encouraging results.

Michael: It was amazing to me that within two years of the trees being planted, I mean, you couldn’t even fit your hands around the, the trunks. And today, I mean, some of the trees, and it depends on the species of course, but they’ve grown, I mean, many metres tall, so they shoot out of the soil in the tropics, it seems to me.

And so, there are already differences and there’s clear changes in the structural complexity of the system, which is really exciting. And crucially, what we probably won’t ever find, is it’s not like that if you regrow blocks of rainforest trees in a riparian area, it’s not as though you’re suddenly going to get back all your rainforest animals, so it’s not like an orangutan is going to grow out of the soil. What we hope, and what we are trying to make occur is that also gradually is that these buffers could spread out over time, so that the trees are going to gradually grow outwards as new seeds fall and as they expand along with them, it’s not only the trees that will be expanding, but also the biodiversity, the non-tree biodiversity within and the different ecosystem functions that they’re performing. So again, this way of growing crops in a way that is both good for productivity and profitability of farmers but also is better for the ecosystem at large.

Khalil: I think a lot of this is really exemplifying the kind of nothing about us without us mentality. Having Indigenous voices at the table, at, you know, local, national, and international levels. It’s so important to really having a fuller understanding and a more kind of equitable approach to how we look after and interact with and live in the natural world.

Tori: Yeah, and I, you know, that wouldn’t be like all twee and, you know, everything’s going to be lovely, because there’s problems, right? There are still problems and we can’t be complacent about things. But it does feel like there’s, things maybe moving in the right direction. I feel like we’re having these conversations now. Like, people, it’s become more normal, more normal – it should be normal – to have everybody at the table. Like, it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that they’re not. It’s ridiculous that people living in places aren’t part of the discussion.

Khalil: I mean, Indigenous People have been actively marginalised and alienised for decades, centuries. And so, we are having to unlearn, collectively, a lot of messed up attitudes and approaches.

Tori: And that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s like, it’s the beginning of something, it’s the seeds of change have been planted and so it’s just up to all of us to help them grow.

Khalil: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations like the one in this episode. As many of us as possible. If you found it meaningful, why not share this episode with the people in your life?

Tori: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join in the conversation on social media using the hashtag #OurBrokenPlanet, or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast. Next time, we’re diving into warmer than expected waters to explore how sea life is getting on in our warming oceans.

Khalil: Spoiler alert, I, for one, welcome our new jellyfish overlords. I’ve even got a tattoo to prove it.

Tori: Save it for next week, Khalil. Our Broken Planet is presented by Khalil Thirlaway and me, Tori Herridge. The Producer was Leonie Thomas, the Series Producer was James Tindale and the Executive Producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Guest speaker 1: Yeah, people, people need to act. People need to protect what they have, right? It’s your paradise here, right in front of your doorstep, so do everything to protect it.

Guest speaker 2: I can see from the work that we’re doing here today that we’re definitely making an impact.

Guest speaker 3: Like last year when I came here for the first time, the first thing I felt after doing it, even though it was a hot day and I was super tired, I felt like my time was definitely worth it.

Khalil Thirlaway: These are the voices of volunteers on Mount Lavinia Beach in Sri Lanka. It’s a beautiful beach along the west coast of the island, next to the capital city of Colombo. It’s one of the most popular places to swim in Sri Lanka and a particularly good place to watch the sunset, I’ve heard.

Tori Herridge: What these volunteers are cleaning the beach from may surprise you. Plastic nurdles. They’re lentil-sized microplastics and you’ve probably never heard of them. They can cross oceans, poison wildlife and are an absolute nightmare to clean up. It also happens to have a deceptively adorable name.

Khalil: Darn, right? So, in this episode of Our Broken Planet, we’re following the journey of these nurdles as they cross continents, finding out what happens when they’re unleashed into our environment and meeting some of the activists with exciting ideas about how we can fix it.

From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Khalil Thirlaway.

Tori: And I’m Tori Herridge. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected issues facing our Earth and asking the question, what can we do about it?

Khalil: And in this episode of Our Broken Planet, we’re unwrapping the plastic nightmare that is nurdles.

Tori: Do not be fooled by their cutesy name. Once they get into the environment, nurdles are hugely damaging, so it’s no surprise campaigners and governments alike want them to be officially categorised as dangerous to transport – just like fuels or explosives.

Khalil: The exponential rise of plastic over the last hundred years is a problem that we’ve all heard a lot about. But don’t worry, we’re not going to preach to you about why you should stop using plastic cups. You already know that.

Tori: Yeah, hopefully. Anyway, so anyway Khalil, nurdles, fill me in.

Khalil: Well, they’re kind of where plastic products come from. They’re little granules of plastic, no bigger than about five millimetres, and they’re made from common plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene, which in turn are made from fossil fuel raw materials like crude oil, natural gas and coal.

Tori: They actually look – they’re like little beads.

Khalil: Yeah, little kind of beads of different colours and they’re melted down and turned into pretty much any plastic product that you can imagine.

Tori: So, if like your plastic Barbie doll could ask you where she came from, okay, like a deep-seated insight into her origin story. Basically Barbie, this is where you came from, you are nurdles.

Khalil: When I was no more than a nurdle in my father’s eye. But the less funny part of it is that billions of nurdles end up in the sea every year. About 230,000 tonnes. You know, they get into our environment pretty easily because they’re small, they easily get blown out of containers and washed down drains, and they flow along rivers and currents, and they just, they get everywhere.

Tori: Yeah, I mean the things that are made of plastic, right, they’ll float, like little, tiny things floating off there. But of course, they’re just one part of what is a much bigger problem of microplastic pollution. Again, plastic’s a big problem full stop, right? 230,000 tonnes is a big number, but that’s still only a small proportion of the entirety of the problematic plastic that makes it into the ocean. And that is why last year, 175 nations at the UN agreed to try and develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution and to have that ready by the end of 2024. They’ve just had second round of negotiations in Paris. There’s another round in the autumn in Nairobi. Fingers crossed.

Khalil: Holding my breath.

Tori: But now let’s look at one of the worst nurdle spills in history.

Muditha Katuwawala: When it first came, I remember I got a call and saying, hey, guess what? There’s a ship in our waters and it seems to be having some sort of problem and nobody really knew what was going on.

Khalil: That’s the voice of Muditha Katuwawala. He’s the coordinator and founder of the Pearl Protectors, a youth-led volunteer organisation which focuses on marine conservation in Sri Lanka. On the 20 May 2021, a container ship known as the Express Pearl caught fire off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka.

Muditha: Those two days, it was kind of silent because it was said that, oh, everything is under control, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a minor incident.

Khalil: It would burn for 12 days, pouring toxic chemicals like nitric acid and methanol into the sea, and, of course, nurdles.

Muditha: My interest towards the ocean stems from younger age. I loved swimming, I started swimming when I was probably four years old. I live in an island which has these beautiful beaches, you know, you can always warm waters, tropical waters. It’s something that really is a point of bliss.

Khalil: By the time the Express Pearl came into Sri Lankan waters, Muditha had been running the Pearl Protectors for three years. They’d done a few social media campaigns to raise awareness about plastic pollution on the island, and one year, they’d even made a Christmas tree from littered plastic bottles. Muditha had some experience of dealing with the aftermath of a shipping disaster before. A few years earlier, an oil tanker carrying 300,000 metric tons of fuel had caught fire off the east coast of Sri Lanka. But, as the debris from the Express Pearl started washing up, it was obvious that this time, something was different.

Muditha: I remember first June started seeing pictures of nurdles and no one in Sri Lanka knew what nurdles was. This was during a lockdown in Sri Lanka. That was a problem because we couldn’t even go out to really assess the situation. But I remember seeing on newspapers and on media, like how people from these coastal areas used to go and collect all these bags filled up with nurdles and just carry it home. It was everywhere. It was just washing up on beaches. It was literally like snow. You go to the beach, it was like seven feet tall nurdles.

The sea was white and every wave that came about, it was just like layers of nurdles, just washing up again and again and again.

Tori: You hear that and you sort of think, wow, that’s, you know, that sounds bad, but how bad can it be, right? It’s just a beach covered in plastic. But the UN says that the sinking of the Express Pearl was Sri Lanka’s worst ever maritime disaster. I remember they’d had an oil spill a few years earlier but this was the worst ever maritime disaster, and it was also the largest plastic spill in history.

Khalil: The government responded by a banning fishing in some of the worst affected areas, which was to protect people from, you know, the impacts of plastic in their food, but it had a massive impact on the livelihoods and incomes of a lot of people, you know, in these coastal communities who live off the sea. The nurdles and the other chemicals that were leaked from the ship also poisoned fish and other marine life in the area and you know, we’ve got an image here that you can have a look at Tori – it’s someone holding open the gills of a of a dead fish on the beach and inside the gills of this fish you can see big, you know, five millimetres plastic beads. That’s the equivalent of finding plastic beads in your lungs.

Tori: Well, people do – we’ll come to that later – people do find microplastics in human lungs. So, you know, but these are clearly like, you know, the way that the gills work is the water flows over them and the water’s full of nurdles, right? So, it’s going to get stuck to the gills. Presumably it’s in their stomachs. These things get trapped inside and the fish is dead either from the chemicals from the same spill or maybe as a direct result of that. Who knows? But once something enters the ocean, it can travel a long way, particularly if it’s light and it can float. And the UN actually estimates the majority of the nurdles from that spill remain at sea.

Khalil: And that’s mad to think about because the beach was feet deep in this plastic and that sounds like an insane gargantuan amount and the fact that most of it is still out there.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, it’s just like, whoa, how much can there be? A lot.

Khalil: 230,000 tons.

Tori: Yeah, that’s a lot of nurdles. Nurdles, like the ones leached from the Express Pearl, can end up places like the tiny and beautiful Lord Howe Island. The Natural History Museum’s very own Dr Alex Bond has been researching the impact microplastic is having on the bird population there.

Dr Alex Bond: Lord Howe Island is probably one of my favourite places on the planet. It’s about a two-hour flight east of Sydney, Australia. It’s in the middle of the Tasman Sea and it’s basically the bits of land sticking up from an old, otherwise dormant volcano. It’s a small island. There’s 350 people that live there. It’s got two fantastic, massive peaks down at the south end and is one of the seabird, literally, meccas. And for us, it’s the biggest colony of flesh-footed shearwaters in the world.

Khalil: The flesh-footed shearwater is a medium-sized seabird.

Alex: They’re a chocolatey brown, big, chunky seabird, kind of like a seagull, only, sort of, pointier wings. They’ve got a tube on the top of their nose, and that’s what all shearwaters have, and that helps them smell – they’ve got a great sense of smell. They’ve got a light beak with a dark tip and pale coloured legs. They weigh about 750 to 900 grammes and when the adults come down and they start courting, they make the most fantastic sound, which, which sounds like they’re shouting, pick me. Like, pick me, pick me!

Khalil: Alex is speaking about the shearwaters with a tonne of love. But what he and his team of researchers have been doing on Lord Howe Island is anything but romantic.

Alex: It’s an early start for us, about six in the morning, which is just about sunrise. And the first thing we do is we go and walk along beaches to look for birds that tried to fledge, chicks that tried to fledge or leave the nest for the first time overnight and they didn’t make it, so they get washed back in. We look for beach birds in the morning, bring them back to the research station, and then we begin the process of necropsying them. So, you know, dissecting them. We look at plastics in particular. So we, you know, take plastics out of their stomach, they get counted and enumerated and weighed and classified. We take tissue samples to try and understand the effects of plastics and depending on how many birds we have, that can take ten minutes, or we’ve literally been in the lab until five or six o’clock in the evening. We have dinner and then we go out into the colony when these chicks are emerging for the first time. They breed in burrows that are three metres deep in the sand and they come out at night, about seven o’clock to, you know, stretch their wings and, you know, some of them to, to make that first flight. And then we catch those birds, and we can actually look at the plastics in those live birds by using a technique called lavage, which is basically just stomach pumping. So, we introduce some, some salt water, sea water, into their stomach. They cough it back up into a bucket and anything that’s lodged in their stomach comes with it. Normally things like squid beaks or fisheye lenses, but also plastics.

Khalil: Through this process, Alex and his team have found all sorts of plastics in the stomachs of the flesh-footed shearwaters – our old enemy, nurdles, but also bigger bits of plastic: bottle tops, fishhooks, aerosol cans and over 15 years of studying these birds, they’ve discovered that ingesting plastic is causing them to develop a disease – one that they’ve termed plasticosis.

Alex: You know, you think about, you know, you’ve got all this plastic in the bird’s stomach. It’s sitting in there for 90 days. And stomachs are these fantastic organs because they basically have all these little folds in them, which basically serves to increase the surface area of the stomach so that all the gastric juices can absorb, you know, and the stomach wall can absorb all the fantastic nutrients that birds should normally be eating. But when you get plastics in there, what happens is you get an inflammatory response, which means you get the loss of these, rugae, they’re called, these sort of, you know, waves and undulations. It basically looks like a sheet of, like, shiny wax paper or something, you know, there are no folds in it at all. And you get increase in water content and ultimately, at the cellular level, you see scarring, like the development of scar tissue. And, you know, the more plastic the birds had, the more severe this condition was. In severely impacted birds when you’re holding a bird, you can sort of hold it between your two hands, sort of around its wings and around the stomach just below the ribcage, you can feel the crunching. You can hear the crunching.

Khalil: Is plasticosis actually killing the birds? Alex says it’s hard to draw the line between whether the bird died because it ingested plastic or another reason, like malnutrition, because the stomach was so full of plastic that the bird’s not eating. Either way, is whether plastic is lethal even the right question to be asking?

Alex: So traditionally, people want to look at what impact does plastic have? They instantly think of population level impacts. So, you know, is it causing a species to decline? Or individual level mortality? This bird died because of plastic ingestion. And if somebody walks up to you and says, how are you today? And your only two options are alive and dead – you know, that doesn’t give you a lot of wiggle room. So, you know, we know that there’s all sorts of things that, you know, drawing from our own experiences, we can be sick, we can be injured, but we can still be alive. And wildlife is no different. So, we wanted to, you know, really understand what was happening with the birds, because when you spend so much of your time in the field, cutting open, like literally making birds vomit bottle caps, you know, you intuitively know that that’s not a good thing. You know, we can sit here and argue until the end of time about, you know, the severity or the degree to which plastic ingestion is bad. But the one thing we can all agree on right now is that it doesn’t do any good.

Khalil: Wow. I don’t know about you, but hearing Alex talk about being able to feel and hear the crunch of little bits of plastic from the outside of a bird?

Tori: Yeah, a baby bird. I could almost feel it in my hand right now.

Khalil: Right.

Tori: Like a kind of gritty, crunchy. Oh, that’s horrible. It’s horrible. It’s horrible.

Khalil: Luckily, we’ve spared our listeners actually hearing it.

Tori: Yeah.

The idea of swallowing bits of plastic is pretty disgusting. Now, we might not be mistaking nurdles for caviar, but unfortunately, we are ingesting other types of even smaller microplastics all of the time.

Dr Fay Couceiro: While we’re in bed asleep, we are probably breathing them in. So, a lot of people will have carpet at home. A lot of people will have polyester sheets or the filler inside their duvets is plastic. So, when you’re moving around and you’re shuffling in your sleep, you’re probably releasing some and you will probably inhale some of those. Once you get up, you’re brushing your teeth – most toothbrushes are still made with plastics, some toothpastes still have plastics inside them. And then once you’re starting to eat, so, you know, you have your cereal, you open your plastic bag that the cereal comes in, you pour that on, you open your plastic bottle that the milk comes in and you pour that on. They’re pretty much everywhere.

Tori: Dr Fay Couceiro is the head of the microplastic research group at the University of Portsmouth. She’s an expert in pollution and in plastic that is really small. Like really, really small.

Fay: We’re talking about, you know the rubber at the end of your pencil? That’s about five millimetres. So, something that’s smaller than that, all the way down to something that is one hundredth the width of a human hair. Not just what’s in the water, but, what’s in the water, the air, the soil?

Tori: That did actually kind of stop me a bit, actually, in my tracks. Yeah, we hear so much about microplastics in the water, I would say, more than anything else, actually. But the air thing!

Fay: I’m a little concerned, but still, the prevalence is for people to think, it’s okay, I’m not impacted by microplastics, I don’t eat fish. I have heard that, somebody has said that to me and I said, I think you probably are!

Tori: What is the actual issue with breathing in, drinking, ingesting microplastics. What are the impacts on human health?

Fay: Predominantly the work has been done on animal health because they’ve been looking in the environment. So, I must say that the human health is at the early stages. But if it’s been seen to cause problems in other species, the likelihood is once we hit threshold, we will start to see some of those problems. So in different species there have been things, such as it has changed hormone balances in them, so endocrine disruption is one of the things. There’s been physical blockaging of their intestines and things for the particularly smaller species and there’s, of course, respiratory distress.

Tori: I mean, I think it would be basically impossible to live in the modern world without interacting with plastic at every single point in your daily life. I can’t see that you could do it.

Fay: Everything has plastic in it, almost to the point of insanity at the moment, you know. Things that really don’t need to be plastic are often plastic because it’s cheaper. So, there’s this real shift in mentality we need to make if we’re going to make a difference here. It’s not about demonising plastic and it’s not about saying people shouldn’t use plastic, particularly in areas where there is no other material that could do the job. But there are many, many areas where particularly single use plastics and things like clothing where there are alternatives.

Tori: So, what can we do about the microplastic situation?

Fay: In reality, the majority of plastic is out there because it’s breaking down from the larger plastic. So, we just need to try to reduce our plastic usage. As we’ve said before, it’s an amazing product. We’re not going to get rid of it and there are places like hospitals where it is absolutely essential in terms of keeping things sterile. We’re not going to get rid of it there. But in the places where there are alternatives, we need to start looking at those alternatives if they have an end of life usage, you know, or there is a plan for their end of life, as opposed to plastic where there is currently no plan.

Khalil: It’s also important to recognise the differences between Alex’s research and Fay’s work. Fay’s really important work on the human health side of microplastics and this kind of level of plastic that Alex is seeing in the birds are wildly different in scale.

Tori: Yeah, yeah. As, as yet, people aren’t finding, you know, children’s stomachs so full of plastic they can’t eat food, right? And Fay is very clear. She doesn’t want to terrify people. She doesn’t want to scare people. She just wants people to be aware that, you know, that if you see what happens to birds and also various lab experiments, then there is an indication that, you know, plastic does have a health effect.

Khalil: And those health effects that Fay is looking at are still really serious from relatively, you know, comparatively small amounts of plastic. Some of these birds that Alex is, you know, measuring the plastic in, they’re ingesting up to 10% of their body mass in plastic. So, you know, an 80-kilo person is going to have eight kilos of plastic sitting in their stomach in that analogy.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, that’s a hideous thought, isn’t it? It’s about thresholds, right? And the problem, though, with thresholds, right? Let’s say there is a significantly high threshold for detriment to human health for various plastic levels, right? But there’s also the issue of what you think of as the precautionary principle. How long will it take for us to find out what that threshold is? And do we want to wait until we see that effect, which might take a generation to, yeah, observe it, when we’ve already then baked in a problem for many generations down the line? So, she’s like, okay, we don’t know what the problems are exactly, but we do have all of these insights that it could be a problem. And that’s just for human health.

Khalil: Did your conversation with Fay make you reconsider some wardrobe items?

Tori: I’m only wearing cotton today. Only cotton, at the moment. What about you?

Khalil: I think I’m mostly, but I mean, I’m wearing trainers, so there’s always a certain amount of plastic in there.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, I have to say, actually, I went through a wardrobe afterwards and most of my clothes is, like, natural fibres, because I’m a bit of a, like, a cotton and wool kind of person, but, you know, I just find it’s that kind of fact that plastic is so embedded in our lives that I think so much of the kind of anti-plastic initiative is focused on individual behavioural change, which is important. It’s really important. But it sometimes feels like this problem, like it’s a distraction from the massive, overarching, bigger issue that is a poorly managed plastic production use, end of life pipeline. That, yeah, it’s that story. It’s like, you know, it’s, that’s the big issue. No matter how, even if I only ever wear, I don’t know, cotton and silk and wool for the rest of my life, and if I never, ever, ever, ever get a plastic water bottle or something like that, if I don’t buy single use water bottles, I feel like that is just a drop in the ocean compared to like…

Khalil: No pun intended.

Tori: No pun intended – a nurdle in the ocean.

But now, speaking of nurdles, what steps can we take to stop them from being spilled?

Heather Mcfarlane: I’ve got some in a jar here. You can hear them rolling around. And these have all been collected from the beach. And the reason that they’ve got from the beach is because they’ve escaped from the plastic supply chain.

Tori: Heather Mcfarlane works for Fidra, a Scottish environmental charity working to reduce plastic waste.

Heather: The good thing about this form of pollution, if there’s ever a good thing about pollution, is that it can be stopped. So, this is a preventable form of microplastic pollution and it can be stopped by really simple measures.

Tori: Fidra have helped organise the Great Nurdle Hunt, an annual event which encourages people all over the world to head down to their local beaches, canals and rivers to look for nurdles and report them online. But they’re keen to emphasise that the solution to this problem has to start at the source.

Heather: So, it could be training staff to stop nurdles being spilt. It could be putting filters in those drains. It could be tweaking your equipment. It could be using more sturdy packaging. Say they’re on a ship, for example, stowing them safely. We have big shipping containers going past here all the time. You’ll see them stacked really high with containers and if there’s nurdles on the top and there’s high winds, those are some of the first to go over. But if they were stored, for example, below deck, then even if there was a storm and a few containers went overboard, hopefully the nurdles would be safely stowed. So, there’s things like this that knowing where nurdles are, storing them safely, transporting them safely, that can really help stop nurdles getting into the environment in the first place.

Tori: Fidra are in conversation with the industry about these simple measures. But, as Heather told us, the key is legislation that can be implemented across the entire plastic supply chain.

Heather: In different countries and different states, there’s going to need to be legislation as well as potentially global agreements.

Tori: When you talk about the entire plastic supply chain, that’s global. And so, you need a global agreement, which is what is happening in Paris, well, has just happened in Paris and will go on to be discussed in Nairobi at the UN Plastics Treaty.

Khalil: Yeah, although like with a lot of international, you know, conversations towards positive change, hopefully, there’s been a bit of a delay. There’s been a disagreement over procedure.

Tori: Well, that’s part of why you have these meetings, right? They’re there to get everyone in the room and to have like really like tedious all-night sessions over the wording of documents. That doesn’t depress me. It’s only the second round. There’s still another go at it, right? And there’s a massive coalition of countries that are on board. The UK is one of them. They call themselves, I like it, they call themselves the HACs, a high ambition coalition.

Khalil: And, you know, one of the big goals that they’re aiming for is a set of global standards for reusability of plastic.

Tori: Did you know only 9% of plastic at the moment gets recycled? Like a tiny amount, you know? Because it’s so hard to recycle plastic. You just need to have like one wrong ingredient and it becomes completely unrecyclable.

Khalil: That’s part of the problem. And so if there are global standards saying that manufacturers have to design their packaging, for example, to be reusable, recyclable if it can’t be reused, then that can start solving the problem from the beginning of the chain, rather than getting everyone to wash out their, you know, food packaging and shampoo bottles and hope that they go in the right box.

Tori: You see, if it’s not set up to make it easy for people to go reusable and like to enter the circular economy, then it’s a losing battle.

Khalil: Right. And there are other approaches that scientists are trying to develop like bioplastics that can degrade in the environment, plastic-eating bacteria that could, you know, maybe get rid of some of this existing waste, or even I’ve heard that people are working on an edible wax spray that can be used to coat fruit and veg to reduce food waste but, you know, it’s harmless to eat, it’s harmless to the environment and it breaks down eventually.

Tori: Yeah, and you might even notice, like, you know, these things are already kind of happening in some supermarkets, right? Yeah, there are changes afoot. You can get ice sold in compostable bags, you increasingly see things like potatoes in like cardboard boxes or even like, you know, sort of like heavy duty brown paper bags, which, you know, feels deliciously, you know, kind of like artisan – artisan because it’s like the olden days, but it’s the future. But yeah, I think, you know, if you want to use a plastic bag, you have to pay for it and it’s kind of like the walk of shame. It’s like, you’re all, you didn’t bring your bag. And that’s probably like powerful message, right? It is. It’s really important because how we regulate our own behaviour depends on what other people think of us.

Khalil: Yeah, it’s shifting that kind of Overton Window of what is normal. I definitely feel the kind of judginess at the self-checkout machine when it says, oh, did you bring your own bag? Would you really like another one? How many would you like? Filthy animal.

Tori: It’s true. But I mean, but saying that, plastic is still part of the basic fabric of our society, because it’s a really great material, right? It’s not about getting rid of plastic entirely. But that still means that we have to think about what we do with, you know, transporting nurdles, for example, or dealing properly with plastic waste. Like, getting that end-to-end system in place for doing these things in a way that stop them being the problem that they are right now. You know, think of plastics from beginning to the end of life and have a plan, a well-managed plan for how to deal with it. Yeah, that’s a big thing to do and it’s in the works. But right now that shouldn’t stop us from doing something. Here’s the Natural History Museum’s, Alex Bond, again.

Alex: So, the thing is, there’s no quick fix. And so, I think, what can you do is a really big question. I think there’s three things. The first is to look at the plastic that you have in your own life and think about, if you can, what plastic alternatives there are. Because ultimately market pressures eventually work. The second one is a lot of the pressure has to come from the top. Plastic, once it gets into the ocean, will literally travel the world. The oceans are all connected and so to really solve the plastics problem requires a global solution. And so, that can only come from governments working together. And the third thing is sort of, you know, the environment around ourselves. You can go to your local park, your local beach, your woodland, and I would wager that within five minutes you can find some plastic. And this is all plastic that, for whatever reason, has escaped the waste stream. And the more plastic we can return to the waste stream and the more leaks in that waste stream that we can plug, the better.

Tori: And what about Muditha and the Pearl Protectors in Sri Lanka? In the wake of the Express Pearl disaster, they assembled an army of volunteers who came together to clean up their home.

Muditha: We knew we had to do something. By 1 July, we had the Nurdle Free Lanka campaign. I can’t even believe how fast we had to plan it out. We even built some of the sieving tools that was needed to clean the nurdles and we had to find funds. Luckily, a lot of people started seeing the problem and that kind of kick-started the whole process. And soon after the COVID restrictions were relaxed and then people were allowed to go out, instantly, we started calling people in – come on, let’s go to the beaches, we’ll start cleaning. And we were cleaning so much of nurdles. I remember 300 kilograms in one go, microplastic. And at the same time, we had to, like, talk to restaurants and to see how we can set up nurdle portals so that anybody who wants to clean at any given time can use the tools that we make. Every week we were out there in the beaches because we knew, as much as we can remove from the beach, that means they will not go back to the sea. And then everybody who came to volunteer, they had a really good time. Every time we did nurdle clean up, everybody was like, in a mad rush to come and help out. It was a, it was a good vibe.

Khalil: So, you feeling inspired to go down to beach and sieve some sand?

Tori: It’s like the sieving, that sieving the sand does seem like – it’s like a proper allegory of like the magnitude of the task ahead, right? And you one time you’re like, I’m so depressed at that thought, but then you see they’re smiling! They’re smiling in that picture, they’re having fun.

Khalil: Also importantly, they, as in plural.

Tori: Yes.

Khalil: So, you know, this seems like a completely insurmountable task for one person, but together it’s something that people, if they organise and collectivise, people can make a difference to their local environment. And you see this with, organisations in the UK like Surfers Against Sewage and things like that.

Tori: The benefit of the environment aside, just coming together with people to make your home better is like always generally an uplifting experience, right? Building community is always, always a good thing. I love going to the park and doing litter picks with my kids. It’s really fun and they have proper fights over who gets to use the picker-upper thingamajig. It’s really, really good. I totally recommend it.

Khalil: And not only does that sort of thing, you know, bring people together, but that communal spirit and, and that motivation can then also be applied when you are trying to, kind of, advocate upwards into power, like whether it’s your local government or national or, you know, international bodies like the UN. You know, it can be very difficult to, to make space in one’s own life. But if we can agitate for system change, then we can make sure that there is space in everyone’s life to live in that kind of less disposable way. And I know we said right at the top that we weren’t going to preach to people about cutting back on plastic.

Tori: Fooled you!

Khalil: But yeah – psych! We really do need to say, where you can, please try and avoid single use plastics. Think about the life cycle of those products you’re using. Like, you know, bag of salad from the supermarket. Does it need to be a bag? Or you could take a leaf out of my mom’s book. she used to always embarrass me as a teenager. When we would go to the supermarket, she would drag me along and she would always bring with her all the plastic packaging from her previous shop. And she would start the shopping trip by going straight to customer service and just dumping it all on the floor and just walk off and continue with her shopping.

Tori: What a woman!

Khalil: And like, at the time I was absolutely mortified – I was like Mum, you’re making a scene! But now I’ve got all the respect in the world for that.

Tori: Yeah, and of course you’re nothing like her at all.

Khalil: Learn from the best. But, you know, we don’t all have to make as grand a gesture as that, but there are always messages that we can send.

Tori: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learnt something along the way, and please don’t despair – we all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world. And it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode, as many as possible. If you found it helpful, then why not share this episode with friends and family.

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #OurBrokenPlanet or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast. Next week, in the words of Axl Rose – Welcome to the Jungle!

Tori: Yeah, that’s right. We’ll be grabbing our mosquito nets and taking to the tropics to explore the effects of deforestation.

Khalil: Our Broken Planet is presented by Tori Herridge and me, Khalil Thirlaway. The Producer was Artemis Irvin. The Series Producer is James Tindale and the Executive Producer is Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Guest speaker 1: The whole space is so magical. It’s almost like you’re hallucinating.

Guest speaker 2: It’s a feeling like you are the first man there. You feel like, you know, we’re wandering the Arctic or in the Antarctic.

Guest speaker 3: If you can stand there and not be absolutely gobsmacked, then I don’t think there’s much that’s going to get you excited in life, to be honest.

Khalil Thirlaway: Glaciers. Slow motion sculptures. Born out of the very heart of winter.

Tori Herridge: Formed over thousands of years, these great bodies of compacted snow are one of the most obvious remnants of the last Ice Age.

Khalil: These icy leviathans shape our world, carving valleys, creating lakes, sculpting landscapes and they are the sources of rivers providing water to millions.

We tend to call them the water towers of the world.

If we look to the Andes, about 90 million people depend on water that comes from glaciers.

Tori: Yet these frozen titans are under threat as our planet warms. Their retreat is one of the most profound indicators of climate change and one that will affect billions.

From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, with me, Tori Herridge.

Khalil: And me, Khalil Thirlaway. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected problems facing our Earth. We’ll be examining some of the issues that we humans have created, and asking the question, what can we do about it?

Tori: And to kick us off today, we’re talking about the water towers of the Earth – glaciers.

Khalil: Now, Tori – you’ve been lucky enough to see one in person, right?

Tori: Yeah, before we get there though, let’s just clear up, are we doing glacier or glacier?

Khalil: Either, either.

Tori: Neither, neither.

Khalil: Honestly, I think this is one of the pronunciations that I think we can cut each other a little bit of slack on.

Tori: Okay, just like, you know, just flagging it up right now, I’m probably going to do both, and I apologise to everyone if it’s annoying, but I just can’t help myself.

Khalil: No apologies, don’t at me.

Tori: Yeah, no, exactly. So, uh, what is a glacier slash glacier like, Khalil? Beautiful, terrifying. It is the only way I can describe it. I’ve always had a massive fascination with them. I work on the Ice Age, right? And, you know, why is it called the Ice Age? Because of the massive ice sheets and the vast number of glaciers. So, when I imagine, say, mammoths that I work on, part of that mental image is basically defined by an Earth that is far icier than the one we have today. I’ve not seen a huge Himalayan glacier close up. But I’ve seen, you know, things in the Alps and I’ve been to Iceland. And, you know, people say, what’s it like, right? And it feels alive. You can feel the coldness coming from it. You can feel, even though it’s frozen, you just sort of feel that it’s a river of ice. You can feel that momentum.

Khalil: That power.

Tori: Yeah, you know it’s moving, even though it’s slow. I mean, I don’t mean that – maybe that’s just me imprinting on it, but you can feel it because it looms, right? And it’s beautiful and terrifying and magnificent.

Khalil: Because, you know, in my head, and I’m sure in some listeners’ heads, there’s images of this kind of pristine, blue, white, shimmering, crystalline thing, like a slow motion tsunami. Is that what it’s like?

Tori: Yeah, I mean, there are glaciers like that. I’ve used to have been lucky enough to see one, all the ones I visited have been kind of gritty and grey and full of rock.

Khalil: They’ve got character.

Tori: Yeah, they’ve got character. But I think, but that’s kind of, I mean, that’s part of the story, right? You do get these kind of really clear ones, but you also get these ones that are discharging, you know, gravel and rock at the same time. And that just tells you something about the awesome power of water and ice. You know, it’s amazing how these things have shaped our world. You only have to look at, say, the shape of hills in Scotland, you know, and these kind of, what they call these U-shaped valleys, these kind of really curved valleys. They were all carved out by glaciers that are now long gone. And when you see these kind of like gritty, dirty looking glaciers, they’re not dirty, they’re just carrying with them all of the like the stone, the rock they have ground up along the way and carried with them, just like the gravel rolling along the bottom of a river. And you see it discharging. You’re like, oh my goodness, this thing is immense and powerful and magnificent. And for me as an ice age scientist, I mean, they are the defining feature of the human world, in pretty much the entire history of our species, you know, going a long way back into, you know, our predecessors, our ancestral human species, has been played out against a backdrop of a world that has had permanent ice at the North and South Pole. That is the land in which humans became humans.

Khalil: I absolutely love hearing about this relationship between glaciers and their environment and the people and organisms that have grown up around them. But let’s hear a little bit about how glaciers are formed. Where do they come from?

Dr Bethan Davies: A glacier is just a pile of ice. They’re very simple things.

Khalil: Dr Bethan Davies is a glaciologist from Newcastle University.

Bethan: If you get more snow than you get melt, then a glacier will grow. And that means they form in places like mountains, where it’s cold at the top. And they also form at high latitudes, like the Antarctic and the Arctic. What we see today is universal glacier recession. Glaciers are now receding everywhere in the world.

Khalil: And so, when you talk about glaciers advancing or retreating, it’s about a balance between how fast they’re melting at the bottom and how fast the snow is arriving at the top.

Bethan: Exactly that. We talk about the mass balance of a glacier. You could think of it like a bank account. And if you spend more than you receive, then your bank balance shrinks. And it’s the same with a glacier.

Khalil: Most of the glaciers on our planet were formed tens of thousands of years ago. But it wasn’t so long ago that our planet’s glacial bank balance was still growing, during a period known as the Little Ice Age.

Bethan: The Little Ice Age was a period of cooler climate and in Britain, it was colder in around 1880. Sometimes the Thames froze over.

Khalil: How little was the Ice Age?

Bethan: It was quite little.

Khalil: Like, a couple of years, a couple of decades?

Bethan: We’re talking about maybe three or four hundred years, when climate was a little bit cooler than today. Just cool enough for there to be a bit more snow in the Alps, and for the glaciers in the Alps to grow.

Khalil: But today, the picture is very different. To continue our bank balance analogy, glaciers are barely scraping a living and rapidly eating into their savings.

Professor Duncan Quincy: The outlook for glaciers at the moment is not particularly positive. I think it’s, it’s widely acknowledged that glaciers across the world are heavily in recession.

Khalil: Professor Duncan Quincy is a glaciologist from the University of Leeds. His primary area of expertise is the Himalaya, the world’s tallest mountain range.

Duncan: We’re seeing these environments change and beyond real historic precedence, at least anything that we are able to have confidence in being able to record in the archive, we’re seeing the rate at which they’re losing mass accelerating through time.

Khalil: Duncan’s research sees him exploring some of these glaciers up close. Recently, he was halfway up Mount Everest taking samples of the Khumbu Glacier to measure its internal temperature.

Duncan: The ice within the Khumbu glacier, which we would expect to be very cold given that it descends from Mount Everest – so, you could effectively call it one of our highest glaciers anywhere in the world –we found that ice to be just -3.3 degrees in temperature, which is incredibly warm. So, the future is a little bit bleak, perhaps, for these mountain regions. And we can expect to see the picture grow increasingly worse. Certainly within the next couple of decades, we’ll see some very stark changes, I think.

Khalil: Of course, as glaciers melt, they release water.

Duncan: If the glaciers are losing mass, or they’re in recession as we call it, then that can have a slightly positive impact on the amount of water that is available for the people living in the downstream areas. But, of course, that only lasts so long, so in the very short term we might expect to see more water in those rivers.

Khalil: More water can mean more problems. Often, the water released from glacial melt accumulates, forming high altitude glacial lakes. However, as this melt accelerates, these lakes become more prone to flooding events.

Gabriel Wolken: So, a GLOF, which is actually a glacial lake outburst flood, is really the rapid release of water from a glacial lake.

Khalil: Gabriel Wolken is a research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and manages the state of Alaska’s Climate and Cryosphere Hazards Program.

Gabriel: Glacial lake outburst floods in particular threaten millions of people globally, impacting those downstream communities, infrastructures, economies, all around the globe. And so, that societal toll can be extremely large. In many cases, these are insidious events, in that they don’t show a lot of signs, overtly, of being quite dangerous. You simply don’t know that that danger exists. Prediction is notoriously difficult. And they’re just far too many variables to account for to be able to have a single predictive model to be able to forecast when an outburst will occur and even where it will occur.

Khalil: One of the worst glacial floods in recent years occurred in Chamoli, northern India, in February 2021. The disaster left 200 people killed or missing. Duncan Quincy.

Duncan: This is an event where a large volume of ice detached from a very high elevation area within the Indian Himalaya. There was a huge vertical drop for that ice into the valley below and the force was such that the ice actually mobilised a lot of sediment that then became a debris flow and went down into the lower elevation areas at extreme pace and along the way cause massive destruction. But a major hazard event which comes about largely because of the warming that we see making these very high mountain areas much more unstable.

Khalil: Now, while flooding often makes headlines, there’s a bigger issue at play here as glaciers recede. Drought is going to become a severe issue over the coming years. Here’s Bethan Davies again.

Bethan: The climate is warming, so the glacier is shrinking. At first there will be more melt water in the stream, so it’s a fantastic time, you can grow more avocados or whatever your cash crop is. As the glacier becomes smaller, that water declines.

Khalil: Because there’s less ice to melt.

Bethan: Exactly. Yeah, the glacier becomes so small, it’s no longer producing much water. It’s all gone.

Duncan: We tend to call the mountain regions the water towers of the world. We reach a point that we call peak water, beyond which the discharge into the rivers gets less and less and less. As that ice reservoir becomes increasingly depleted, the long-term prognosis is that the extremes are going to take over, that there will be more droughts, certainly, and probably there will be some more flood events in comparison to recent years, too.

Tori: Everything you’ve covered there sounds kind of scary.

Khalil: Water, widely acknowledged to be somewhat important for life. Just like with a lot of aspects of our environment, we’ve had an extractive relationship with it that has been quite short sighted for quite a long time. Now that the sources of a lot of that water are being threatened, it’s starting to fall apart.

Tori: It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because like, glaciers, you know, the last two and a half million years have been a story of cooling and warming and glaciers growing and shrinking. It’s part of, if you like, the natural rhythm of a glacier’s life, yeah? So, we’ve got this history of glacial melt and we’ve seen big melt events. I mean, like, one of my favourite, like, glacial lake flood stories is it was a massive glacial outburst flood that formed the English Channel, right, which is kind of mad, isn’t it?

Khalil: Where was the glacier?

Tori: It was like all over the Northern Hemisphere, but 450,000 years ago, massive ice sheet came all the way down to London, stretched across most of Britain, across Scandinavia and there was a really huge glacial lake that kind of spread across basically the North Sea into the Netherlands and lowlands and it was dammed by a chalk ridge that stretched from Dover to Calais.

Khalil: So the White Cliffs went all the way across?

Tori: Yeah, you can see White Cliffs on the Calais side. They were joined up and eventually bit by bit by bit by bit started waterfalls fell, waterfalls fell. You can see like plunge pools in the bottom of the channel where those waterfalls were and then, gone. Massive catastrophic flood carved out the English Channel. From that point onwards, probably, there was a separation between Britain and Europe. But anyway, so glaciers, you know, they do this. Flooding is natural. Glacial retreat and glacial growth is something that happens with the rhythm of climate. I guess what we have to think about is, you know, what climate is going to do in the next 50, 100 years.

Khalil: I guess there’s a certain amount that we can predict based on how patterns have worked in the past. You know, long term environmental data that we get from ice cores and things like that. But the big difference here is that we are, as a species, making changes to our environment that are really messing with that rhythm.

Tori: The Himalayas, right? Mount Everest. Tallest mountain in the world.

Khalil: Famously big, tall, cold, snowy.

Tori: Icy. Yeah, exactly. Himalaya actually means abode of snow in Sanskrit, right? Yeah, so this is a, this is an icy place. But if you look there, like even there, the last 50 years shows a massive change in the amount of ice in those glaciers. If you just look at a map, like look at this map here. That’s the Khumbu Glacier, right?

Khalil: So, we’re looking at a map of Everest and there’s the, the peak at one end of the map and there’s base camp and the way up to it, the Khumbu Glacier at the bottom.

Tori: And so like, you know, talking about Everest, 8,850 metres above sea level, base camp is much lower, it’s 5, 279 metres. And that’s where this Khumbu Glacier stretches down to. Now, on this map, they’ve coloured it in this paper to show how much it has retreated, if you like, or got thinner in that time period, right? So, between 1962 and 2018, this whole area down here at base camp level and below has basically thinned the order of 60 to 80 metres.

Khalil: 60 to 80 metres?

Tori: Yeah, it’s got thinner, so it’s melting, and that’s a significant amount. And if you imagine that like, you know, across the entire glacier.

Khalil: 60 to 80 metres, shallower, all the way along that bottom.

Tori: All the way along of it, and it’s like stretching through a whole valley. Picture that in your head, that’s not much shorter than, say, Big Ben. And that of course is played out not just in the Himalaya, but across the high mountains of the world. And I think, you know, there’s some kind of like ridiculous number, like incomprehensible number of what that equates to in the amount of water that is lost from glaciers per year is something like 267 gigatonnes 267 billion tonnes. I mean, you can’t even picture that amount of water.

Khalil: Our brains aren’t really no wired to think of amounts that big.

Tori: No, no. I like my favourite analogy for it, because you know, of course the scientists who work on this have had to communicate it and they’ve come up with all different kind of analogies. My favourite one, it’s one scientist described it as, imagine a swimming pool, the size of Ireland. That is what it is each year.

Khalil: Wow. That’s nuts, especially when you think of the number of people who depend on, or at least glaciers form a significant part of their access to water.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, like take the Himalaya again, right? Those glaciers in the Himalaya feed a lot of really important rivers. So, they are the headwaters for the Indus, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yellow River, the Yangtze River. Now, these are big rivers that all start on those high mountain areas in Asia and the headwaters are in glaciers.

Khalil: Not just big rivers, but they’re big rivers that run through massive population centres.

Tori: Yeah, yeah, one third of the world’s population live in glacial drainage basins.

Khalil: One third, that’s billions of people.

Tori: Yeah, billions of people who rely on water from these rivers that in part, it’s not in its entirety, but in part is supplied by melt water from those glaciers. It’s interesting to think about what it is like to be, you know, at the kind of business end of that, like living in the shadow of a glacier that you know is changing. So, we spoke to Saba Khan, who is an artist from Pakistan, and whose work has taken her into the foothills of the Karakoram Mountains in northern Pakistan.

Saba Khan: Majestic, rocky, pretty amazing mountains. Really harsh weather. Really dry, very sunny, but extremely beautiful. I call it the Park Painting Club. So, the Park Painting Club is usually like a group of artists that go on expeditions. For the Glacier Project, I wanted to make it more accessible, so it’s a website project. Those are different projects by six or seven different artists and then I do paintings alongside, which are my interpretations of this whole space.

Tori: Saba is from Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city. Her project on the changing face of glaciers due to climate change brought her to the indigenous communities of the Hunza Valley.

Saba: The whole space is so magical. It’s almost like you’re hallucinating once you get there. It’s almost like being in this really amazing paradise, immense beauty. We visited this town called Hassanabad, which had just experienced a GLOF incident, glacier lake outburst. They had lost eight or 10 households which were just washed away. They see the glaciers as a living object, like it’s like a living beast. We talked to one of the elders and he said, I could predict every time when the glacier lake outburst would happen, but nobody would listen to me. And he said he had determined the exact date of the GLOF incident, but the authorities wouldn’t listen to him. They have all this indigenous knowledge that people don’t really care much for. Even if they’re not university educated, they know very well what’s happening. They all know that they’re really at the frontier of climate change, and they live in a very vulnerable situation.

Tori: Saba also travelled to the Skardu District, 150 miles further east. For hundreds of years, the people there have conducted glacier marriages, or glacier grafting, between male and female glaciers. The idea is to seed the next generation of glaciers that will feed and water communities for years to come.

Saba: They believe the black glacier, which has accumulated debris over time, is a male one, and the white glacier is a female one. So, they bring big chunks of ice, like the size of a football, and 25 people carry them over the mountain. Their theory is since the 1600s, their ancestors had been crafting glaciers, and that’s why there’s so many of them. With time, generations have lost the art of it and now the communities are trying to revive it.

Tori: Now, the effectiveness of this practice is up for debate, but it’s no surprise that communities are trying to seed new glaciers. Glacial runoff is highly depended upon for agriculture and livelihoods in the Skardu region and, like the other glaciers we’ve heard about in this episode, those in North Pakistan are receding. It’s this threat of water scarcity that inspires Saba’s work.

Saba: I think it started from this artist’s residency that was in the foothills of the Himalayas in this British hill town. One of the reasons why British also moved away from that hill town was because there was hardly any water. So, I started thinking about water scarcity and how water is such a big issue in Pakistan.

Tori: Before 1947, Pakistan existed only as a part of India, and India was in turn controlled by the British under the guise of the East India Company, and later, the British Raj. They shaped the irrigation system in the country – a vast network of canals, dams and reservoirs fed by the Indus River Basin. Today, it’s a system under pressure, with a growing population, a naturally arid climate, and global warming contributing to water shortages. It’s this complicated picture that Saba tries to capture.

Saba: Where did the irrigation system come from? It was the British colonial project, which was a massive project trying to control the rivers in Pakistan and that still has effects on how we live today. And it’s really destroyed a lot of landscapes, destroyed indigenous farming practices. Then also a lot of these glacier regions were also infiltrated first by the British. So, all these problems go back to colonialism.

Tori: It’s a reminder that issues like water scarcity are more complicated than just glaciers shrinking. There are historical, socio-political factors involved – problems which are only exacerbated by climate change.

Khalil: So, this, I think, really highlights the legacy of the colonial project and the way that we can’t separate history and politics from the environmental science of our changing world.

Tori: Yeah, you’ve got the science on one hand, right? And, yeah, the science is what it is. But ultimately, everything else is about politics. It’s all about humanity and the way we respond to stuff.

Khalil: One of the big things we’ve got to unpick is something that, something that we would like to think that we’ve left in the past, but actually we really haven’t, and that is we can’t agree on who matters.

Tori: I think even if we could, the infrastructure’s there, right, the system’s been changed, and it’s created a kind of a cascading effect. The situation that Saba described, you know, you’ve got villages that are kind of working within the really tight constraints of their environment. And that is in stark contrast to these kind of big, like, grand project, colonial projects of the past where, you know, the rivers were dammed, irrigation systems were changed and that is the same approach that people are still taking today with all the great big hydropower projects that are happening in the same regions.

Khalil: We need a pretty radical shift in our relationship with not just water and ice but every aspect of our natural environment. At the moment, the thing that decides whether a big project is done or whether something is built or whether something is not built is money. That kind of mindset has got us to where we are. And if we’re going to fix it, we’re going to have to completely re-evaluate how we relate to that. And we have the power to make that change. If we can change how we think and feel and act and spend and vote, then we can exert pressure on these powerful systems and organisations and individuals that have the capacity to make these large changes we need.

Tori: You can’t change the science, but you can change the people.

Khalil: Mm hmm.

Tori: When you get to that business end, you know, the people who live right, like, cheek by jowl with glaciers, their relationship with it is so interesting. You know, we might not feel the effects, you know, in Britain, or like in a, you know, fancy city, like downstream, like Lahore. But, up there, in the high mountains, people are having to deal with it, right now, and make changes on a daily basis. If you travel east, outside of Pakistan, into the Indian Himalaya, there’s a relatively new invention that people are using to mitigate water shortages at a local level. They’re called ice stupas.

Professor Mateo Spagnolo: So essentially, ice stupas are also known locally as artificial glaciers.

Tori: That’s Professor Mateo Spagnolo from the University of Aberdeen. For the past few years, his work has focused on Ladakh, a very high, very dry region in the Indian Himalaya. With average yearly rainfall of only three inches, glacial runoff is critical to keeping communities fed and watered.

Mateo: It’s a way to, essentially, store water in the form of ice and use it in early spring. So, the logic here is that during the winter there is still enough water in the local rivers, but then as the seasons progress, usually there’s very little water left. Essentially, that means that the growing season in Ladakh is extremely short and being able to extend that growing season even by a few weeks could make all the difference. So, ice stupa are basically a way of storing water when up high, the glaciers are still too cold to melt, but at the elevation where there is agriculture, melting is starting.

Tori: Perhaps the best thing about them is they’re purely mechanical. They don’t require any fancy equipment or electricity to run. Just a pipe and gravity, taking water from high elevation rivers to lower elevation farmland.

Mateo: They put a pipe into the local river and then take the pipe to a lower elevation next to the agricultural fields or the villages where the water is needed most. And they make it come out in, essentially, they’re sprinkling water like a fountain. Because it’s so cold in winter, you know, we’re talking about several degrees minus zero, the droplets will essentially freeze. They normally build a structure with sticks. And so around the sticks, the water start freezing and then layer after layer, it basically builds up into this large conical shape. The tallest one is incredible height, something like 40 or more metres high, but certainly that could be 20 metres high easily.

Tori: Well, I’m kind of envisaging like a kind of giant, ice Christmas tree.

Mateo: And this Christmas tree made of ice is actually pretty and attractive, right? So, surprisingly, I think the building of ice stupa started to attract not only media attention, but a lot of tourists. So, it has become a source of income.

Khalil: Sustainable, gravity fed, freshwater storage. They sound great on paper.

Tori: Yeah, and they look like beautiful Christmas trees. I mean, what’s not to like?

Khalil: Who doesn’t love a giant cone of ice?

Tori: Well, exactly. I mean, it’s like, yeah, what’s not to like? Well, the thing is, right, they only work under certain weather conditions because, of course, what you’ve got to do is hit that sweet spot where it is not so cold that the water freezes in the pipe, but cold enough that when you spray it up like a sprinkler, it comes down, it’s kind of snow onto the structure. Yeah, so, you’ve got to hit that sweet spot. And of course, that’s quite a narrow window. So, you know, they’re not perfect, but they do provide a way for villages to basically store some water and start their growing season earlier. There are other factors that come into play, which come back to this issue of it’s the politics stupid. One of the big issues is that if you’re storing water and taking it from the river, who owns the ice stupa? Who in the village benefits from it? What about the village downstream, who thinks maybe you are siphoning off some of the water they could have access to. And so, you’ve got these little local, you know, solutions, but they need to be factored into this bigger social landscape. And that’s one of the critical problems. Do they work in the right conditions? They probably aren’t a large-scale solution to the region. And also, you’ve then got to get everyone on board. And when you say everyone, that’s everyone. Not just in the local villages, but the people downstream.

Khalil: Yeah, and you see this kind of dispute also happening on an international level. You know, you’ve got big rivers, like the Nile, that flow through lots of different countries and you get full blown international disputes over who’s taking out how much water, who’s putting in how much pollution, and it can, it can really be a really prickly issue.

Tori: Yeah, and the thing is they get at that local level, four people living in these remote mountain areas, they do provide a potential solution to maintaining this way of life, this kind of special, unique way of life. And it allows those villages to persist. It buys time for these people to find more long-term solutions. And, you know, time is what we need.

Khalil: Yeah, because, you know, like colonialism before it, the climate crisis is really threatening to sever people from their homes and their livelihoods. It can be really easy to see that in the abstract from where we’re sitting, but for these people it’s their home, it’s their life, they don’t want to have to abandon it.

Tori: As we know, we do live in a world where capitalism runs the ship. My script says often, but let’s just say it runs the ship, really. So, we know we live in a world where capitalism runs the ship. But you know, despite that, activism can still be effective in protecting nature. And one of these activists fighting on behalf of glaciers is Dr Gerd Estermann from the Tyrol in Austria.

Dr Gerd Estermann: It’s a very mountainous area with high peaks up to 3,700 metres above sea level. When I was young, glaciers were closer to the valleys, very much closer, about one kilometre or more. My mother, she’s 93 now, she told me when she was working on a mountain hut, the glacier ended right in front of the terrace and they used it as a fridge. And now you have to walk for one hour to get to the same glacier.

Tori: The Oetz Valley, where Gerd lives, has changed a lot in the past 50 years. The ski industry has brought wealth to a previously poor region, but at a cost to the natural landscape.

Gerd: There are some ski area operators that can’t get enough and they want to make more money. They call it landscape modelling, what they are doing. That means to blast off rocks and to use excavators. In summertime, it looks very different. It’s not very inviting. In wintertime, there is snow covering all the sins that they have done in the summertime.

Tori: In 2016, Gerd started a petition to cancel the planned merger of two ski resorts, plans that would have built on three previously untouched glaciers.

Gerd: They wanted to merge two smaller ski areas into a larger one.

Tori: The plans would have levelled 64 hectares of glacier ice – that’s 90 football pitches.

Gerd: We started with a petition, which was very, very successful. We have 172,000 support, supporters. And we had a paper roll 18 metres long and one metre wide, and all the 170,000 signatures were on it. So, this was quite an impressive thing.

Tori: Really impressive. Did you deliver it directly to the doors of the state government house?

Gerd: Yes, yes. Just in front of the house where their jury and parliament is.

Tori: Their activism helped force a public vote and subsequently, in July 2022, the plans were cancelled.

Gerd: Three years ago, I would say 90% would have said they want this project because it gives them wealth. Three years later, there was a majority against the project. That leads to the decision of the company to say, no, we don’t want to build it like this. But now, they try to realise it through the backdoor. We are fighting against this right now.

Tori: It’s actually kind of amazing, isn’t it? That they just, that the developers just have not given up.

Gerd: Yeah, it’s big business, yes.

Khalil: It’s great to hear that with enough campaigning, then you can force a public vote, and then when people are listened to and when those conversations can be had openly and frankly, that people don’t want these kind of developments and they do want their local environment preserved.

Tori: I love your positivity. I love your positivity, Khalil, because what you actually want to say is, I knew it, but business isn’t giving up.

Khalil: This is me turning over a new leaf. I’m trying to be, trying to be happy me. But yeah, you know, you see this pattern of behaviour, not just with ski resorts, but with all sorts of developments. Whether it’s, you know, inner city marginalised neighbourhoods, whether it is building a dam and flooding a whole valley full of Indigenous People and endangered species, whether it’s building a golf course in the desert. It’s this kind of ever kind of flowing pressure of power and capital.

Tori: Yeah, and I think the power thing is really interesting here. It’s like Gerd said, before his campaign, the average person in the area would have been very pro the development of the ski resort because, yeah, all the wealth in that region is derived from tourism. Before the 60s and the ski resorts got set up in that area, people were very, very, very poor. And, you know, now it’s a wealthy area and that wealth has come from people mostly coming to ski. What he’s basically saying is, I don’t want the tourism to stop. He still wants people to come. He just thinks there’s enough. The only people now winning are the people who monopolise and get the massive amounts of profits from these ski centres. People are realising that that doesn’t benefit them.

Khalil: And this is testament to the short sightedness of this kind of approach. In order to squeeze more money out of these mountains, they want to destroy ice and snow, the very thing that people visit those mountains for. They’re cutting off their own nose, not even to spite their face, just to get more money in the short term.

Tori: The most heartening thing for me, from Gerd’s story, is how his campaign, yes it effected change, it stopped. that development of the ski resort, at least for now, but the biggest change that he achieved was changing the attitudes of the people living in the area, and that is the critical thing.

Khalil: Yeah, and it’s easier to frame this narrative as Gerd defeats the property developers, but actually you’re right. You know, him and the people he was campaigning with changed the narrative and it was the people who made their voices heard and reclaimed their relationship with their home.

Tori: Yeah, tens of thousands of people.

Khalil: And that’s the kind of approach that can be built and expanded and shared and spread and used more globally in all sorts of situations.

Tori: Yeah, we can all do it in our own backyards, right? It’s something we can all do.

Khalil: And it doesn’t have to be this thing of like, taking on a huge burden of taking on these systems and these powerful, you know, bodies and organisations and people. It’s a collective effort and that’s the only way that we’re going to get our way out of the situation that we’ve got ourselves into.

Tori: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learnt something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode. As many as possible. So, why not share this episode with friends and family?

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag OurBrokenPlanet, or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast. Next time we’re exploring another consequence of our changing planet. Welcome to the nurdle-ocalypse.

Tori: The nurdle apocalypse? The nurdleocalypse?

Khalil: The nurdle-ocalypse. Okay, we hope you can join us.

Tori: Our Broken Planet is presented by Khalil Thirlaway and me, Tori Herridge. The Assistant Producer was John Rogers, the Producer was James Tindale, and Executive Producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.

Khalil Thirlaway: Imagine a scene – the Empire State Building set against a hazy, burnt-orange background, thick with smoke.

Tori Herridge: Imagine hardly being able to see two blocks down from the iconic skyscraper. Imagine the sting in your eyes. Imagine the smell. We’re not dreaming up the setting for a sci-fi disaster movie film. This is reality for millions of people across North America in the middle of 2023.

Khalil: It’s apocalyptic stuff, but this smoke isn’t even from New York. It’s drifted over from a series of immense and disastrous wildfires hundreds of miles away in Canada. And it’s far from the first incident like it in the last few years.

Guest speaker 1: The power of the fires was the highest that had ever been recorded.

Guest speaker 2: Fire suppression caused a tinderbox in our region.

Guest speaker 3: Sometimes the air can be so smoky that you can’t go outside.

Guest speaker 4: There’s all these terrible words. Hellscape – basically, it was a hellscape.

Tori: As our planet heats, wildfire is becoming more and more frequent, and the impacts are reaching further than ever before. So, how do we learn to live with this new reality?

Khalil: And how can we fight to protect our Earth from these risks?

Tori: From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems of our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Tori Herridge.

Khalil: And I’m Khalil Thirlaway. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected issues facing our Earth and asking the question – what can we do about it?

Tori: And in this episode of Our Broken Planet, we’re exploring something uncomfortably topical – wildfire.

Khalil: Over the course of 2023, Canada has experienced immense and disastrous wildfires, beginning in March and increasing in intensity into the summer months. In early June, images of the hazy yellow atmosphere of New York City, hundreds of miles away from ground zero of the fires, blew up the internet.

Tori: It’s been a horrible reality for those living in North America. The air is incredibly unhealthy to breathe and has forced people across the northeast to take refuge inside. States of emergency have been declared and the Canadian government has sought help from nations around the world to contain the blazes.

Khalil: For a lot of people, this is one of the realities of climate change hitting home. Striking right at the heart of a financial and cultural capital like New York and grabbing the entire world’s attention.

Tori: So, in this episode of Our Broken Planet, we’ll be exploring how wildfire is becoming more frequent across the globe, looking to Earth’s history for a peek at our fiery future and discussing some of the solutions that passionate activists are fighting for today.

Khalil: Now, as we’re recording in 2023, what’s happening in Canada right now has some parallels with other wildfire events that we’ve seen over the past few years. Let’s turn the clock back, just a couple of years, and take a look at Australia to hear about the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020.

Professor Nerilie Abram: There was this orange, browny kind of look – you couldn’t see to the end of the street. It was kind of like fog, but a terrible smelling fog that also had this sort of orange glow to it.

Khalil: That’s Professor Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra, recounting the view out of her window in early 2020.

Nerilie: 2019 was a remarkable year in Australia. It was our hottest year on record. It was our driest year on record. It also came at the end of a three-year period that was very dry, and even if you look further back, the 20-year period that had been very, very dry. And so, when the summer came around, and even before the summer came around, our forests were just incredibly dry and ready to burn. One of the remarkable things about this event was that it wasn’t a couple of fires here or there, or one big fire. It was fires all along the coast of southeast Australia. In total, across that six-month period, the spring and the summer of 2019 to 2020, it was almost a quarter of the forested area in Southeast Australia was burnt.

Khalil: The Black Summer bushfires burnt through nearly 60 million acres of land. To put that into some perspective for you, that’s roughly the size of the entire UK. Huge.

Nerilie: The estimates have been a billion animals killed. It has pushed many of the species of the animals and also the flora closer towards being threatened and possible extinction. In terms of the human costs, there were 33 lives directly lost as a result of the fires. But more than that, there were many hundreds of people who lost their lives because of the smoke pollution and thousands of hospitalisations because of that. So, the impacts on people were enormous.

Khalil: But of course, this is far from the first time we’ve heard about Australia burning. It’s a continent kind of synonymous with fire. A place known as a fire-adapted landscape.

Dr Sandy Knapp: Fire is actually an important element of many, many ecosystems.

Khalil: Dr Sandy Knapp is a researcher in the plants division at the Natural History Museum.

Sandy: Those Mediterranean ecosystems, which are classic fire-adapted ecosystems – places like southern Australia, South Africa, California, those kinds of areas in which you have hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters – those are very fire adapted types of vegetation. Many of these plants in these fire-prone ecosystems, essential oils, very oily kind of leaves, which are very flammable. So, they’ll have these, these flammable, flammable leaves, like eucalyptus, for example. Eucalyptus has a lot of oils in the leaf and they’re very, very highly flammable.

Khalil: And what’s the evolutionary advantage to having these flammable oils in their leaves?

Sandy: Well, to a certain extent, it means that they catch fire easily and the fire moves on. So, one of the things in the absence of there being these hot wildfires, you would get these flammable plants that would catch fire and then the fire would move on when it had consumed them. So, it would make things move quickly. Australia is incredibly diverse. The eastern part of Australia, around Sydney, where we had those really big fires a few years ago, is mostly eucalyptus woodland. You get to the western part of Australia, near Perth, in that other corner of Australia, a lot of that is banksia woodland, which is also fire adapted. And this is where you get the things that are serotinous, you know, that the cones burst open and release the seeds when a fire goes through or that things will sprout up from the base. And that’s also where you get this amazing, what I call a geophyte flora, which is these kind of lily family, Gladiolus, Amaryllidaceae, beautiful bulbs that come up and have a real display after a fire, because they just hang out there in the ground, just waiting for all that lovely nutrition to come after a fire. Because that ash, which comes after a fire, is incredibly high in lots of nutrients, which plants need to grow.

Khalil: So, Australia is used to wildfires, as are the native plants and animals.

But there was something different about the Black Summer bushfires.

Nerilie: Australia, it’s fire prone. We’ve had fires in the past, but these fires were off the record, both in terms of the area that was burnt, just a phenomenal amount, much more than you would normally expect. The power of the fires, so how much material was being burnt.

So, for every month, of that spring and summer period, the power of the fires was the highest that had ever been recorded and also the, the number of fires that went from normal bush fires into these extreme fire events.

Khalil: These fires stretched all the way along Australia’s east coast. Like the scenes from New York, landmarks like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House were bathed in an apocalyptic orange haze from the smoke. The capital, Canberra, experienced the same. But despite the shocking scenes outside the window, it didn’t change the course of government climate policy.

Nerilie: There have been multiple times where I’ve looked at the events that we see happening and said, surely this is enough. I’d had those sorts of thoughts previously when we’ve seen the mass bleaching events of the Great Barrier Reef. Like, surely that is enough. Like, surely we value that enough in Australia that that’s the catalyst for change. And I think that the Black Summer fires were a catalyst in terms of public opinion. At the time we were faced with a conservative government who were very adamant that Australia was doing its bit and we weren’t going to increase our ambition in terms of emission reductions and we have since then sort of seen a change in government here. We have increased our ambition. It’s still not enough of an ambition that it would limit warming to 1. 5 degrees, but it’s an advance on where we were prior to the Black Summer and the years that followed it.

Tori: Well, that’s positive.

Khalil: Broadly.

Tori: Yeah, I mean, there’s a bit of change of government and change of heart, maybe, within government.

Khalil: Yeah, but I think Nerilie’s hitting on something that happens quite a lot in response to big, visible effects of climate change. We’ll maybe change a little bit, but it’s never much. It’s never enough. But, also there was some pretty big kind of governmental blunders in terms of how the Australian government handled the Black Summer.

Tori: Yeah, so you’ve got, obviously there’s like a strategic, basic policy blunders from a climate change point of view, but then there’s also the media aspect of that and the fact that they just really dealt badly with it. So, at the time, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, as it was happening, as towns were burning, and people were losing their homes, and people were evacuating, those apocalyptic scenes of people, you know, sort of trapped on the roads, up and down the coast of New South Wales, turns out, he was on holiday in Hawaii and didn’t rush home, I don’t think.

Khalil: But that’s not just a PR issue, that’s a leadership issue. Like, the whole point of leaders is that at times when you need them, they are meant to, in theory, be a, you know, someone who coordinates and envisions the response to stuff like this.

Tori: Yeah, then you get the feeling sometimes that that’s not the thing that concerns them – it’s the PR that concerns them. So, he comes home, Scott Morrison returns to Australia, and yeah, maybe rather than stepping up and doing the things people wanted him to do, he dealt with the PR issue by, you know, mounting a PR campaign, it seems. So, he flies into New South Wales and people are furious though, because you can see it, you know, you can see it when you’re being like, kind of used maybe? I think you feel like you’re being used in a PR situation. That’s certainly the impression you get if you watch videos from the time. He turned up, I can remember this, he turned up and he went to shake the hand of one of the firefighters and then the guy’s like, nah, actually mate, I don’t want to shake your hand. It was like proper awkward – to refuse to shake someone’s outstretched hand sounds like a small thing, but it is, to watch it, incredibly awkward.

Khalil: And it’s powerful because it’s saying that I don’t want to validate your mishandling of this thing. These people who’ve lost their homes and these firefighters who’ve been trying to get these blazes under control, they’re the ones who’ve been putting themselves at risk or being put at risk by these policies. Honestly, fair play to him.

Tori: Yeah, exactly, fair play indeed. And then also, same PR tour, he goes and visits one of the towns that has been completely razed to the ground by the fire. And whilst he was there, he goes up to talk to a woman called Zoe – Zoe Salucci McDermott –and she was like in her twenties, pregnant. And he goes to talk to her, and offers his hand again to shake it and she’s like I’m only shaking your hand if you give more money to the RFS – That’s the Royal Fire Service, the voluntary fire service – and what he did, he like he just grabs her hand anyway and shook it and then like walked away. Like it’s just completely, it is the most insane video to watch.

Khalil: For those of you listening at home or wherever you are, my jaw was hanging open at that bit. I was riding on the back of that massive respect for this woman Zoe, and then the pits of disrespect to just, you know, grab her hand anyway.

Tori: Yeah, like she went on social media afterwards and she was like, my house has burned to the ground and rather than like, you know, stepping up and going, I’m listening, what can I do? Like, yeah, she said, my house has burned to the ground and the prime minister turned his back on me, right.

Khalil: I mean, obviously it’s terrible, the situation and the conditions that have led them here. But it’s cool to see here that people, who maybe feel powerless in the face of politicians who don’t care about you, to be taking back a little bit of power through these small acts of defiance and protest. Having those symbolic and powerful acts must have contributed to some of those discussions and changes that led to this change of government. And, as Nerilie mentioned, she still thinks that they’ve got quite a way to go on meeting targets for reducing emissions.

Tori: Yeah, and of course wildfires aren’t going to go away anytime soon. First and foremost, they’re a natural phenomenon. They’re happening on a landscape that’s adapted to them. They’ve been around on our planet for a very long time.

David Bowman: Fire is an inevitability when you have photosynthesis and you have land-based plants, you have carbon, you have oxygen, you have lightning. Even without humans you’re going to have a combustible planet and we know from geological history, fire’s been around for a very, very long time and plants and animals have been adapting to fire.

Tori: David Bowman is Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science at the University of Tasmania.

David: It’s about four hundred and twenty-odd million years there’s evidence of fire in the geological record. That’s a big chunk of Earth’s history and we fire ecologists know that that’s part of the deal. It’s part of the life cycle of those plants and animals to have this periodic combustion.

Tori: So, to think of that, you know, just to reframe your idea of the Earth, it’s a blue planet, but also it’s, you know, it’s a red planet in its own way. It’s a fiery planet.

David: Yeah.

Tori: So, while our fiery planet has had 420 million years to adapt to wildfire, the 2019 Black Summer bushfires were different.

David: It was just this unfolding nightmare of fires, particularly concentrated on the east coast of New South Wales. Those extraordinarily dramatic, apocalyptic, genuinely apocalyptic scenes of tourists and communities standing with horses and dogs on a beach in a strangely orange atmosphere, like they’d just experienced a nuclear hit. And in fact, they had, in terms of energy intensity, that those fires really, now we know from the science, behaved as nuclear bombs or volcanic eruptions, in terms of their energy. They were simply insanely intense. There’s all these terrible words. Hellscape – basically, it was a hellscape.

Khalil: Wow. Some very emotive language from David there.

Tori: Yeah. So many people, I think, living in Australia were horrified.

Khalil: Traumatised.

Tori: Traumatised, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Khalil: But what’s also interesting is, you know, what he’s saying about us living on a fiery planet. Like, we live in a world with all the ingredients for fire, and fire is such a natural part of a lot of these systems and processes.

Tori: I think it is really important to remember that, that we’re not going to get rid of fire. It’s part of what our planet is, and really it’s part of who we are as a species as well. I mean, there’s that there too, and that’s kind of why we’re in the problem that we’re in to so many different degrees, you know, it’s like we burn a lot of stuff.

Tori: Yeah, we found a cool, interesting, useful thing, and it turned out to be too cool, too interesting, and too useful.

Khalil: Yeah, exactly. We’ve done a very good job. A very good job at like, you know, of making fire part of our planet’s story. But anyway, I mean, talking of like, you know, stories, I’m going to completely stop this conversation and do a hard segue. ( Khalil makes car screeching sound ) Exactly, handbrake turn. Going back into history, 1970s for a good news story.

Khalil: I was unaware there was anything good in the 70s.

Tori: Ah, but there was a time when the world came together to solve a global problem, and that problem was the problem of CFCs.

Khalil: Chlorofluorocarbons, for those that might not know. And these were gases that were used in fridges and spray cans and in the 70s and 80s, it became apparent that these gases were depleting and forming what we call a hole in the ozone layer. So, the ozone layer is a layer of oxygen-containing gas called ozone that hangs out up in the stratosphere about 10 to 15 kilometres above the surface of the Earth and it acts like a shield, protecting us from some of the more harmful solar radiation, like UV rays that cause cancer. And it’s not technically a big hole, it’s more of a kind of thinning at the north and south poles, but we call it a hole because that makes sense in our heads.

Tori: And then as a result, the world got together and banned CFCs. In fact, before they even banned it officially, people voluntarily changed their behaviours.

Khalil: So, this is one of the rare stories of, you know, scientists identifying an issue, and people taking it seriously, changing their behaviour, and that resulting in system change, and that system change resulting in actual positive environmental change, that the ozone layer is in some ways repairing.

Tori: Yeah, it’s basically, it’s doing what they hope would happen – that people came together, they changed regulations and they fixed it. CFCs are gone. The ozone layer is coming back. It’s getting better. It’s great.

Khalil: And this being the podcast is I can sense a ‘but’ coming.

Tori: But, yeah, so coming back to fire, well, uh, there are these things called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or if you’re a fire researcher, pyroCBs, and these are massive cloud formations created by intense heat, like you get in wildfires, and they force particulate matter up into the stratosphere. An example, one of the first...

Khalil: That doesn’t sound good.

Tori: No, it’s bad. It’s bad. One of the first examples that was recorded was after the Hiroshima bomb in 1945, just to give you some indication of the intensity of energy that’s required to create them. Of course, if you’re forcing particles up into the stratosphere, where the ozone layer is, that is not good news.

David: People should not know what a pyroCB is. But many people do. A pyroCB is basically a chimney from the surface of the Earth to the stratosphere. That is not a good thing to have. That means that the fires that are burning are blasting a hole through the atmosphere and ejecting extraordinarily weird chemical compounds into the stratosphere and black carbon changing the actual meteorology of the stratosphere. And we’ve just learned in the last month something even more terrifying, and that is that a new form of chemistry has been postulated to explain the rapid destruction of the ozone hole above the 2019–20 fires. And the inescapable conclusion is that if these fire outbreaks that we’re seeing and these fire chimneys, these pyroCBs become normal around the world, in fire prone environments, there’s a very good chance we could actually do ourselves and the rest of the planet serious harm by stripping the ozone layer and actually realising that all of the worst fears that we had that drove, you know, the control of the CFCs –that could all be down the toilet.

Tori: That is something that I was not aware of. So, I thought the ozone layer was currently the good news story –the thing that we fixed. But you’re saying there’s new holes opening up over Australia where there were significant bushfires, and it seems to be directly linked to the presence of these pyrocumulonimbus clouds.

David: Correct.

Tori: Thank you for giving me nightmares.

David: But what I find intriguing about this story is that if we’re going to have planetary effects, because there are many other planetary effects that went with the 2019–20 fires – there was also impact on the southern oceans with fallout that led to an enormous algal bloom because there was nutrient enrichment. And there was also 1.6 times the amount of anthropogenic carbon emissions from Australia was emitted by those fires. So, we’re talking about really, really big, difficult to exaggerate Earth system effects.

Khalil: Oof.

Tori: Yeah.

Khalil: And to give listeners a bit of an idea of what a pyrocumulonimbus looks like, I’m looking here at a couple of pictures, side-by-side, and there is the pyrocumulonimbus from the Hiroshima nuclear bombing in 1945, like an entirely person made tragedy, and a pyrocumulonimbus formed from a wildfire. They’re photos taken from planes very high up, you’re above the clouds, you can see the landscape below you, tiny, and it’s this huge pillar, column of like roiling grey and white smoke that goes straight up and then almost like a kind of oyster mushroom, it hits a certain height and starts to spread out. And I guess that’s those weird chemicals, as David Bowman was putting it, those by-products from burning all that biomass, getting up into that high level of the atmosphere and spreading out.

Tori:Yes, really, I mean, the winds in the stratosphere are higher than the winds in, like, the troposphere where our weather happens, like, lower down. So, yeah, once you get up there, things can whiz around for long distances. And the clouds themselves, yeah, they are weird. I mean, they’re like a thundercloud, right, that anvil shaped cloud. But, you know, within them they’re superheated, and you might see rain, hail, lightning crackling through it and then when even tornadoes inside these pyrocumulonimbus clouds.

Khalil: These are not just weird clouds. These dwarf all of the clouds around them.

Tori: Yeah, and you don’t want to be seeing one of those on the horizon. And like David, he’s right, people shouldn’t really even have to be aware of these clouds. They should be rare, rare events. But suddenly, just in that bushfire season of 2019 to 2020, they were more of those pyroCB events than Australia had seen in the last 30 years.

Khalil: Big, scary clouds.

Tori: Yeah, yeah. Big, scary clouds. They are big, they are scary and it makes you think, well, what can we do about it? And David Bowman says that the modern idea of containing fires, trying to stop them really, is well and truly out of date.

David: What’s happening now because of climate change, the top-down approach to fire as being something that can’t be simply contained and concealed is breaking down this amazing transformation. And that’s why I like, you know, the thought that soon we will be going back to tending the earthly garden with little fires, that we will be able not to do this sort of industrial scale burning, but we’ll be able to get people back in amongst it and, and learn as the Indigenous People learned to use fire in a very considered and moderate way and in a safe way to create more biodiversity and more safe environments and more sustainable forests.

Khalil: You can try to hold back this tide of fire, this natural tide of fire, but it’ll eventually spill over. And that’s a really evocative metaphor, I find. And it’s pretty relevant to one of the other most devastating examples of wildfire in recent years. And those are the 2020 California wildfires. These fires burned through 10.2 million acres of land. 47 people died as a direct result. And 3,000 further excess deaths were caused by smoke inhalation. It was a complete disaster. And one that scientists agree was exacerbated by California’s history of strict fire suppression policy. However, Indigenous Peoples in the land now known as California have, for millennia, practiced controlled burns, clearing and maintaining the land.

Elizabeth Azzuz: The colonisers basically thought that they were walking to a wonderful park-like setting and thought that that was something that nature created. Well, it was created with balance with the Indigenous People.

Khalil: Elizabeth Azzuz is the Director of the Indigenous Burn Program for the Cultural Fire Management Council, an organisation that strives to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on Yurok Ancestral Lands in Northern California.

Elizabeth: So, I have been burning since I was four years old. Not on purpose, my grandfather caught me playing with matches and decided to teach me my obligation to the Earth. And so, as a Yurok and Karuk tribal member, I have learned from my elders, my ancestors, how to manage and care for the land. So, I was taught that fire is a tool. It’s not a toy. It’s definitely something we use to cleanse our environment, to restore our medicines, our basket materials, and our food sources. We get together and we say a prayer. We put up prayer in smoke.

Help us restore our food and our medicine. Help us restore this land. Help us to clean our mother so she can breathe. Give us your guidance as we use the most powerful tool you left us as your children.

Khalil: Elizabeth and the Cultural Fire Management Council are facilitating prescribed burning across their ancestral lands. Prescribed, or controlled burning, is a practice where small fires are set to clear undergrowth, shape landscapes, and rejuvenate forests. How do your current fire management practices relate to the land management practices of your ancestors of millennia ago?

Elizabeth: Oh my goodness, so, when fire seclusion was put in place, you know, we could be shot, killed basically for using fire. So, it was taken from our hands as a people because the colonisers, as everyone seems to call them, basically did not believe that we knew how to work with fire and thought that we were trying to destroy everything. And so that was taken from our hands. And now that we’re able to be back on the land, working with the land, we’re training government agencies how to work with fire and how to work with the land. And it’s really amazing to see CAL FIRE, a very large fire entity in this country having commercials on TV now stating that, you know, the way to go is prescribed burning.

Sandy: Human beings today, we suppress fire, partly because we’re building our houses in the wrong places, and so people feel they have to protect houses from fire.

Khalil: Sandy Knapp from the Natural History Museum, again.

Sandy: So fires, if they happen on a regular basis, and there’s not a lot of what’s called fuel loading, so like dead wood and kind of dead grass and stuff, then they burn slowly and they burn cool. It’s difficult to think of a fire burning cool, isn’t it really? But what happens when we suppress fire is the fuel loading gets high and then what happens is the fire burns very, very hot. And that can be absolutely devastating for particular plants.

Khalil: So, by attempting to suppress fire, we’ve actually unintentionally made it much more of a danger.

Sandy: We have, we have. And that, coupled with climate change, has meant that essentially the western part of the United States burns up every summer. And sometimes the air can be so smoky, from fires in eastern Oregon and northern California, that you can’t go outside. The air quality is so terrible. And that’s partly because these fires are burning very, very hot. And so they become wildfires.

Elizabeth: Fire suppression has caused a tinderbox, basically, in our region of California. And it’s not just our region that’s suffering. All along California and pretty much the United States, there’s a huge revitalisation in prescribed burning with Indigenous communities. Cultural fires involved with a group through the Nature Conservancy called the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network. We reach out to tribes all across the country. We teach them about how to get their rights back, how to work with government agencies. We do a lot of government-to-government meetings now, where we’re changing legislature and policy for prescribed burning. So, there’s so many things that, you know, the tribes are coming together and working on that is making change in our world.

Tori: Elizabeth Azzuz and the Cultural Fire Management Council are part of a growing recognition of the value of Indigenous fire management practices, with a renewed understanding of the power of humanity’s impact on our environments. Similar shifts in consciousness have taken flight across Australia and Africa. Here’s Professor David Bowman again.

David: We’ve got landscapes that can burn in some of the most intense fires on Earth. How was it that Indigenous People were able to sustainably coexist with these systems? How is it that they were able to manage fire in a way that didn’t lead to the very dramatic collapse and decline of Gondwana vegetation that followed almost in the last 150 years, we’ve seen, you know, massive retreat of these living fossil forests. What I’m really trying to get at is these big ideas and these big scales actually can come back to local scales and local relationships. A lot of the solutions to these problems are actually going to be found locally.

Khalil: There is hope. Our collective actions have weight, as does the power that we have in inspiring the next generation. For a positive change, all you need is a spark.

Elizabeth: My younger grandson is four years old, and all he can talk about is how he needs to restore the land and get rid of invasive species. And at one point, my son had called me and said that Moya had been called into the principal’s office because he kept saying he needed to burn all this ivy. And so basically, you know, my son had to explain what I do and who I am and how Moya knows about prescribed burning. And so, as a four-year-old, you know, he already knows his connection to the land. So, you know, as long as we continue to teach our future generations who they are and what their responsibilities are, I think we’re going to keep going in a good way.

Tori: It’s so, so lovely to hear all of that stuff from Elizabeth – the personal details, that like, heartening story about the impact of her grandson understanding about controlled burning as a fire management practice. But also, like, the practical stuff. Like hearing about the fact that people are listening. They’re listening to those voices from Indigenous communities that have previously been completely side-lined, worse than side-lined. But, you know, government states are listening.

Khalil: Yeah, it’s beautiful to see that, encapsulated in that small example of a little boy at school who’s telling his friends and his teachers about destroying invasive plant species that that is a little, micro example of people who’ve, you know, been, they’ve been through colonisation, they’ve been through, you know, an attempted erasure of their entire ways of life and their culture, maintaining some agency in their relationship with their world and, like you said, now, the national powers and essentially the colonising powers have realised that there is value in that, not just kind of monetary value, but value for all of our futures in acknowledging and learning from these established relationships people have with their world. With our world. With the world.

Tori: I think, I think some people at this point may raise a sceptical eyebrow and say, well, how can you scale up Indigenous practice that yeah, great for people living at kind of low population densities, as Indigenous cultures might have done 10,000 years ago, or even as recently as, you know, sort of 500 years ago, right? How can you scale that up? But the data is there. It’s really good. It’s really good. And it’s not just in California. It’s also in Australia. And there’s actually a much longer, longer body of scientific evidence there that shows that Indigenous fire practice strategies work. They work – David Bowman’s been working on it for years and he’s an expert and he really does buy into, he passionately believes that this different approach to fire management is going to be key to the future. He sent me, after we had our chat, David Bowman emailed me and sent me this picture of a wooden plaque he has in his garden and it says on it ‘petit feu’, like little fire in French, and underneath it is like emblazoned a little subtitle that says ‘affectionately tending the earthly garden with little fires’, because he’s like, you know, he’s like, people need fire. Fire is part of our world. We’re never going to have a planet where there are no wildfires. So, we have to learn how to live with them. And the way to live with them is to employ these little fires and garden our planet like people have been gardening the planet for probably a hundred thousand years plus.

Khalil: And having these healthier relationships with our environment and with fire as part of that isn’t just good for us. It’s good for the environment and all the other beings in it as well.

Tori: And so, it’s like bringing the humans into the mix with that, it’s understanding how that works and doing it on a scale that doesn’t devastate, that finds a balance. That is a balance that is as biodiverse as possible.

Khalil: And all of these different techniques and approaches that we’ve been talking about in terms of our relationship with fire, if we zoom out a bit, there’s the bigger picture of the changes that we’re seeing on the planet caused by another aspect of our relationship with fire, which is our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. And that is one of the big underlying things that we can change together, is we need to change our consumption patterns, change how we live and how we see our lifestyles of consumption, to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere, reduce our emissions. Because we may not hit the most conservative of those targets, because, you know, getting collective change on a planetary scale was apparently not very easy.

Tori: We did it for CFCs.

Khalil: True.

Tori: We did it for CFCs. Keep coming back to that. It is possible.

Khalil: Maybe Big Fridge wasn’t as powerful as Big Oil. I don’t know. But we all need to, both individually and collectively, become guardians and good neighbours to our planet and the other living things on it. And that can start at home in our communities and build out to larger societal and international change.

Tori: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learnt something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations, like the ones in this episode. So, why not share this episode with your friends and family?

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media. Using the hashtag OurBrokenPlanet or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast.

Tori: Next week we’ll be exploring the water towers of the world – glaciers.

Khalil: Glaciers?

Tori: Glaciers. Find out next week on Our Broken Planet. We hope you join us.

Khalil Thirlaway: Aqua. H2O. Water. You know, that liquid we’re supposed to drink every day and that’s pretty widely regarded as critical for life here on planet Earth.

Tori Herridge: A whopping 70% of our planet is covered in the wet stuff in our lakes, seas and oceans.

Khalil: From the icy depths of the Arctic to the sun-drenched tropics, these bodies play a vital role in shaping and sustaining countless ecosystems.

Tori: But, as our world warms and bodies of ice melt, our sea levels are creeping higher.

Guest speak 1: The rate of sea-level rise is increasing.

Guest speaker 2: The majority of the islands of our country will be uninhabitable.

Guest speaker 3: When we get storms, we’re going to get some pretty big ones.

Guest speaker 4: We have some very difficult decisions to make.

Khalil: So, what will our Earth look like in the future? How will we adapt when coastlines are reshaped and livelihoods are threatened?

Tori: And how can we help our Earth defend us against these waves of change? From the Natural History Museum, this is Our Broken Planet, where we find out how we created some of the problems in our modern world and search for solutions from nature and science. I’m Tori Herridge.

Khalil: And I’m Khalil Thirlaway. Across this series, we’ll be exploring the interconnected problems facing our Earth. We’ll be examining some of the issues that we as humans have created, and asking the question, what can we do about it?

Tori: We’re not going to sugar-coat things. The health of our environment is in a critical condition. Global warming presents profound threats to human lives and livelihoods, biodiversity as our world becomes less wild. But the future of our planet isn’t set in stone. Decisions and actions we take today can have a massive impact for life on Earth tomorrow.

Khalil: So, throughout this series, we’ll be taking you around the world to learn how we humans are affecting nature. And along the way, we’ll be meeting some of the amazing people fighting to create change.

Tori: We’ll also be learning about the science of what’s happening and exploring the social, political and economic issues that are the source, but also maybe hold the solution to these problems.

Khalil: And to kick us off for this first episode, today we’ll be talking about our planet’s rising sea levels. Now, sea levels are one of the aspects of climate change that probably get talked about the most. I guess because it’s hard to ignore the sea getting higher. Yeah. You know, it’s not in question.

Tori: Yeah, and also I think it’s at the forefront of lots of people’s minds because 40% of the world lives within a hundred kilometres of the coast.

Khalil: That’s billions of people. And people rely on the seas for food, for transport, for all sorts of things, for livelihoods.

Tori: It’s almost like the poster child of global warming. I think the first thing you think of is a polar bear on a melting iceberg and you know where that water’s going, don’t you? It’s going into the ocean and if it’s going into the ocean the sea level is going to rise.

Khalil: Most of the sea level rise we’re seeing at the moment is coming from melting ice sheets. Now ice sheets are these huge, great big plates of ice that hang out at the poles of the Earth, north and south. So, let’s go now to the Arctic and the world’s largest island, Greenland.

Laura Tenenbaum: Okay, so right now I am standing on sea ice. Underneath me is about a metre of ice. And then the ocean. We’re all going to walk out to an iceberg. And this is just basically insanity.

Khalil: Laura Tenenbaum is a climate expert and a former NASA scientist. That’s her on the northern coastline of Greenland, well into the Arctic Circle. Greenland is a country which is mostly an ice sheet. In other words, a massive chunk of ice that sits on top of land. There’s only two on Earth. One on Greenland in the north, and one on Antarctica in the south.

Laura: When you fly over the ice sheet, it’s like billowy pillows of white upon white, upon white. Every shade of white you could possibly imagine. When you’re walking across the ice, it makes this very satisfying crunch, crunch noise because the air is so dry. The interior is a two-mile-deep ice sheet that has formed over the last, let’s say, 100,000 years. And additionally, around the coastline, where you don’t have the ice sheet, you have glaciers. It’s rather beautiful.

Khalil: Now, Laura wasn’t just there on a sightseeing trip. Greenland is melting, more and more each year. Something her and her team from NASA were trying to measure.

Laura: Most scientists understand that Greenland is being melted by the increased air temperature that’s melting the ice sheet from above.

It causes the surface of the ice to melt, and then you see these great lakes all over the surface of Greenland in the summer. The water kind of percolates like Swiss cheese through the ice sheet all the way to the bottom and flows out into the ocean. But as much as 90% of the heat from global warming is stored in the ocean.

So, the question is, how much is warmer ocean waters around the coastline of Greenland melting the ice from around? The hypothesis was that a glacier that sits in deeper water would be more exposed to that warm water and would melt faster than a glacier that sits in shallower water.

Khalil: Their theory turned out to be true. The glaciers in deeper water are melting faster than those in shallower water. They also tried to map the seafloor underneath Greenland’s ice sheet, something that had never been done before.

Laura: So, think about where the bottom of the seafloor meets the glacial ice coming off of Greenland, meets the ocean water. So that’s this interesting place that nobody had ever measured before. The other interesting thing, and maybe it’s sad or horrifying or, you know, amazing, is that the ice there is melting faster than we can even measure it.

Khalil: So, here’s a mind-blowing statistic for you. In the last 10 years, scientists estimate that Greenland has lost, on average, 280 billion tonnes of ice per year.

Laura: I’m standing there in front of the ice sheet. It’s like 200 meters high and the water is just pouring off, right? I can just hear the water crashing. This ice is melting right in front of our eyes.

Khalil: All right, Tori, let’s take stock for a moment. There are 280 billion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland every year. Antarctica loses another 150 billion. So, we’ve got well over 400 billion tonnes of ice lost each year from our ice sheets.

Tori: It’s insane, isn’t it? Stupid numbers. Numbers are just so ridiculous. Okay, putting it into numbers that we can all understand. Elephants. Come on, as an elephant palaeontologist, it’s always about the elephants.

Khalil: You can always trust Tori to bring the elephants.

Tori: Let’s face it, the only way to understand that volume of ice is to measure it in elephants. And let me tell you, that is more than 2,000 elephants stepping off into the ocean every second.

Khalil: That is a surreal image.

Tori: The scary thing is that there’s actually more melt each year at the moment than the previous one, so that rate is getting faster.

Laura: Since the beginning of the industrial revolution in, like, the late 1800s, we’ve seen the ocean rise about eight or nine inches, which is like 21 to 24 centimetres, which is bad. But even worse is the rate of sea level rise is increasing. So, of those eight or nine inches, three inches has been in the last 20 years. And this is really bad news for people who live in low lying areas on the coast.

Tori: So, as ice sheets melt, sea levels rise. Makes sense. But there’s another factor to consider here as well.

Laura: There’s two reasons that the sea level is rising. One is that we’ve got global ice mass loss. So, that’s ice from Greenland, ice from Antarctica, and ice from all the mountain glaciers on planet Earth.

But in addition, what you have is called thermal expansion. Everybody knows this from your basic physics class. Warm air expands, warm water also expands. So, we’ve heated up the surface layer of the ocean on planet Earth and that warm water has expanded. About 30–40% of sea level rise is due to this thermal expansion and the rest, 60–70% is due to the ice that’s melting off the land and falling into the ocean.

Tori: It’s left some communities already struggling to fight off the sea.

Laura: There are islands in the South Pacific like Tuvalu or the Maldives that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuels. Those people are climate refugees. Of course, some people are like, who cares about Greenland? But we all need to care about Greenland because more than half of the people on planet Earth live within a few kilometres above coastline.

Khalil: For most of the twentieth century, we were looking at one to two millimetres per year of sea level rise, and that’s doubled now to three to four. And ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet – in the 90s, it was 30 to 40 billion tonnes per year, and now we’re looking at 280 billion.

Tori: Don’t make me do that in elephants.

Khalil: For the rest of the series, all maths done in elephants.

Tori: But it is big numbers. It’s going to affect people from very, very far away from the centres of melt because, of course, the ocean is 70% of the world and it goes all over the place. It’s like an obvious thing, like a blue planet.

Right, you heard Laura mention Tuvalu and the Maldives. I mean, these are island nations in the Pacific that are already seeing larger sea level rises than elsewhere. And another place like this is the Marshall Islands, which is between Hawaii and Australia. And it’s there we’ll visit next.

Selina Leem: My childhood was always woken up with music on the radio that my grandfather would play at around six in the morning because he was an early riser. And then that was also accompanied by the sound of the waves crashing into the corals.

Tori: This is Selina Leem, a Marshallese climate activist. Around 70,000 Marshallese inhabit the 34 islands that make up the nation. Their ancestors have lived there for around 3,000 years. But this current generation are now fighting an existential threat.

Selina: We are in the front line of the climate crisis. Our country is two meters above sea level and the waves, they’re rising at seven millimetres per year compared to the global average of three plus millimetres per year. And so we face inundations every year. They’re very frequent and they’re very big for the size of our land.

Tori: Inundations are flooding events and can threaten infrastructure or endanger people’s lives. Coastal inundations have been a constant threat throughout Selena’s life.

Selina: It was actually my grandfather trying to get me to behave well. He would tell me stories of how the ice in both the North and South Pole would melt and soon flood our islands. And as a child, that terrified me. Whenever we would have floodings, I would think, is it me or are the waves bigger this year than they were last year?

Sitting down with some of the elders in the neighbourhood, the grandmothers would gather around and they would tell stories about how the shoreline was further out into the water than where it is right now. It made me realise just how small our island was, and then how terrifying the ocean can be. And we are completely at its mercy.

Tori: What’s your first memory of an inundation?

Selina: The most prominent memory was when we were at our house and then it started flooding again and my grandfather called to our grandmother and told her to go get one of the hotel rooms in the next town.

I remember it was really dark and I started crying and I was livid because I kept imagining that my grandmother and my siblings and I, we were running away. We are leaving our grandfather behind. And if we come back the next day, I really felt like we were not going to see him again. Because I was imagining a really giant wave coming in.

And so my grandmother had to like, literally drag me away from the house because I was like, I refuse to leave. I am going to – if grandpa is staying here – I am staying here to protect the house with him, to curse the waves if they’re going to come and take him, because I will be the one to hear to protect him.

Tori: Selina became a climate activist at 15 years old. At just 18, her country chose her to represent them internationally, and she flew out to Paris for the global climate change conference, COP21.

Selina: Greetings to you all. My name is Selina Leem and I am a small island girl with big dreams from the island of Maduro in the Marshall Islands. I am only 18 years old, but for a long time I have felt nervous about my home.

Tori: Selina was the youngest person to give a speech that year and was part of the agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Seven years on, while progress has been made worldwide, things look bleak for the Marshalls. Scientists predict that most of the islands will be uninhabitable within 10 years. But Selena hasn’t given up hope.

Selina: I think there has always been optimism in this space and the grit is always there. It’s just so important to be connected to the people and the Earth where you come from to remind you of why this work is so important.

Tori: Do you think the world is listening in terms of those big changes we need to make to slow sea level rise?

Selina: I mean, statistics are showing that a lot of people are actually concerned and are aware of the climate crisis and they want to do something about it. But it’s just the higher ups. They’re the ones controlling the media. They’re the ones controlling how negotiations are being done, and they’re the ones controlling policy making and all these decisions.

Their voice, at times, can overpower ours. And make it seem like, oh, the world doesn’t care. But the world does care because they see now what’s happening in their backyard, and they are realising, oh, wow, I actually do care about my planet. This is where I live. It’s where my children and the generations afterwards are going to live. It’s just the 1% that are being wilfully ignorant and just drowning out the voice of the majority.

Khalil: That optimism is an act of defiance. It is an active act of rebellion against a larger global system that is largely indifferent to her and her people’s suffering and, you know, impending homelessness.

Tori: Highlighting her final thought though there, she says it’s just the 1% of people that are being wilfully ignorant. She sees the world as actually on her side, mostly. It’s just 1% of very powerful people that are the problem.

Khalil: One thing that’s clear is that a lot of the countries and communities are being affected the most by sea level rise are not the ones who put out most of the carbon dioxide that’s warming the planet, melting the ice, raising the seas.

Tori: No, no, no. And that goes hand in hand with all other kinds of unfairness and ridiculousness in terms of people getting stuff they just don’t deserve. And another aspect of the Marshall Islands story that we need to examine around sea level rise links to that. To do this properly, we need to take a quick history lesson and rewind back to just after the Second World War.

Three, two, one, zero!

Selina: We were used as a nuclear testing site by the United States government between 1948 to 1956, and they had tested a total of 67 nuclear bombs in our country. I believe Bikini is probably most well-known because of the Castle Bravo bomb that the US had detonated on the island.

Tori: The Castle Bravo bomb, dropped on the island of Bikini, left neighbouring islands heavily exposed to radiation. The US say this was an accident, that they miscalculated wind direction and the strength of the bomb. Days later, the US sent scientists to the Marshall Islands to study the effects of radiation poisoning. Looking back, Selina feels they were treated like lab rats.

Selina: All the fallout flew to all the islands and the Marshall Islands and people heard the thunder. They felt the Earth shake. They saw the flash and they just saw these mushroom clouds. And so they came outside and they saw this white fallout and a lot of them thought that it was snow. And so they started playing underneath it. They started eating it. And people obviously started getting sick immediately. The US soldiers, their team were then taking our people to test the effect on their body.

Tori: Today, a remnant from all the nuclear tests sits on Runit Island. A 114-metre wide, 18-inch-thick concrete dome known locally as The Tomb.

Selina: It’s literally this giant concrete just slapped into the middle of the island, and it was the US attempt to clean up the radiations on our island. Was not all of it, but the amount that they were able to gather, they put it into this dome. And there was a sign here that wrote do not return for 25,000 years. And it’s jarring to see because the island that this dome is on, it’s just pristine, idyllic, beautiful blue waters, clear, you can see the bottom of it, just beautiful island paradise.

Tori: The tomb contains tens of thousands of cubic metres of radioactive material. And to return to sea level rise, this dome is now under threat of being submerged.

Selina: This dome is leaking and it’s eroding. So, we’re looking at the dome being under the water as well. And the rest of its contents like freely, completely flowing out. This is one of many reasons why our people are so adamant to go out and make sure that our voices are heard.

Khalil: This story makes me so angry, furious, because I do not believe the official US government line on this in the slightest. The US government has a long and filthy history of testing things on other populations, whether it’s weapons, whether it’s health things. It is sickening to see people, even if it was an accident, to treat an island that has people living on and nearby as a testing range for the biggest, nastiest weapon that we’ve ever made.

Tori: It’s mental. Have you seen pictures of this dome?

Khalil: No.

Tori: Okay, google it, because it is ridiculous, right? You have this almost a stereotypical image of like a tropical paradise and then a concrete dome of death. No wonder they call it The Tomb. It’s just like an allegory of everything that is wrong about the world.

Great big, massively polluting nation, massive military superpower, decides to bomb a place which has got people living next door. I mean, it’s just, ah!

Khalil: I’ve just googled picture of the tomb and it is... it’s like something out of sci fi.

Tori: Yeah, but it’s real, Khalil.

Khalil: Yeah, and that’s the worst part. And a tomb normally contains dead things. This contains stuff that will kill you.

Tori: It’s more just the intent, I think, to me. It, yeah, it is just so...

Khalil: The complete disregard for people as people.

Tori: The oldest generation of the Marshall Islands, they would have grown up under the shadow of that happening. And then from that point onwards, you go from like radioactive fallout into continual and repeated and more frequent inundations of your land by the sea and a projection towards a future where things look incredibly bleak.

Khalil: Death from above, death from below. Selina’s story and the story of the Marshall Islands is a really, really stark example. But if we zoom out from there, there are so many other cities and communities that are at risk from coastal inundation and major flooding events.

Khalil: Scientists have been able to somewhat predict what cities will be most vulnerable and exposed by, you know, for example, 2070. And some of the numbers of people and the range across the world of places that are going to be affected is staggering. So, like Kolkata in India. You’re going to have a predicted 14 million people exposed to this risk of flooding. A lot of places in South Asia, actually. Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and all of these have double digit millions of people who are going to be at risk of death or displacement from climate change related flooding.

Tori: Coastal places are just, you know, they’re good places to live, right? Big flat areas, lots of people live there. You raise the sea level, lots of people get flooded.

Khalil: Most of the top ten cities on this table are in Asia. But number nine, you’ve got Miami in Florida, so it suddenly becomes scary when rich people get threatened. And New York is number 17. Remember, you know, a couple of years ago there was that flooding in New York and suddenly the risk of flooding in rich countries became scary.

Tori: You’ve got that number of people living in coastal situations, 40% of the world. But there are natural defences against coastal inundations, and the good news is that over millennia, nature has got pretty good at coping with sea level rise.

Dr Mark Spalding: You feel like you’re in a real sort of wilderness forest. You get the sound… water lapping, insects, bird song. The other sound you hear a lot is the constant clicking and that’s often… it’s crabs. Thousands, millions of crabs in their burrows.

Tori: Dr Mark Spalding is a senior marine scientist for the Nature Conservancy. He’s telling me all about his area of expertise, mangroves.

Mark: Mangroves are trees that have adapted to grow in saltwater. And they grow in the intertidal zone, between the mid tide and the high tide for the most part. And to do that, it’s a really tough environment for any plant to live in because it’s sometimes dry, sometimes wet. About 70 different types of tree have adapted to grow in these systems and they form forests.

Tori: But here’s the real kicker. Mangroves are not just beautiful, wild, amazing places teeming with life. They’re also a fantastic defence against sea-level rise.

Mark: so, let’s think about mangroves as this narrow strip really between the sea and the land. And they form a sort of a barrier, a very permeable barrier, which the sea can get through. But nonetheless, think of this great tangle of trees and roots. They’re in a really important place, and as the sea comes in, they tend to slow waves as they come through the seas. This barrier between sea and land protect us from storms and flooding and erosion.

If you imagine a wave coming through anything, any kind of complex structure, it’s very quickly diminished. It attenuates, we call it. And so you just need a few tens of metres of mangroves between the big storm and the land and those waves don’t make it to shore anymore. They’re just completely flattened.

Every year, thousands of lives are saved by the fact that people have mangroves between them and the storm. Another thing in the context of storms is that they basically block the movement of debris, and actually one of the biggest killers in storms, even in tsunamis, has been the huge amounts of debris. And they all get tangled up in the mangroves as well. So there’s just this kind of safety net, and this barrier against waves. Permeable barrier, but they really slow it down.

Tori: The big danger of sea-level rise worldwide isn’t just that the seas themselves are rising. It’s that when they rise, the risk of inundation is so much higher. In some places, we’ve built walls to keep the sea out. But of course, that’s very expensive and very difficult to do. But mangroves can do some of the job for us.

Mark: People have done work on the cost of building sea walls and they’re incredibly expensive to build. And if you can have a barrier of mangroves, you can reduce the height of the wall on the inland side because the waves aren’t making it anymore. So actually, you can spend a lot less on building walls and still protect your coast.

Tori: Despite this, in the past 100 years mangrove forests have been lost to humans. Urban growth and agriculture has eaten into their habitat. However, Mark is now seeing shoots of recovery, as people’s understanding of the value of mangroves change.

Mark: The good news is that mangrove loss has really dropped right off. We’re almost stable now. Mangroves are very opportunistic as ecosystems. They’re not this sort of delicate ecosystem that once it’s gone, it’s gone. They will come back if we give them half a chance. They will also spread. I went kayaking through some mangroves in Mexico in Baja, California, and only afterwards I was reading a paper about a restoration site, and I thought, that looks familiar. And it had been restored about, I think, only ten years earlier. For me, it was a mangrove wilderness, completely unchanged and so on, so it’s pretty cool, actually, to see that.

Tori: That is really cool, to be so restored that it could fool you, somebody who knows their mangrove.

Mark: It’s really heartening. I tend to think of mangroves as ecosystems of hope. We can get pretty gloomy about many things, rightly, but these are opportunistic systems. If we let them, they will be with us for millennia, thriving in our coastal areas and delivering many benefits to us.

Khalil: Ecosystems of hope. That’s what I like to hear.

Tori: No, no, it’s good. It is good. They do sound amazing. He was properly, properly, properly spirit lifting. So many cool things that we haven’t even touched upon. He mentioned the fact that they can grow quickly. If you get it right, you can restore those mangrove areas pretty fast.

Khalil: And if they’re growing quickly, that means they’re capturing carbon.

Tori: Yeah, and they’re capturing it in that kind of like, disgusting intertidal area, which is really stinky and murky. If you put your feet into it, it’s like all smelly because nothing’s rotting. So not only that, they’re really capturing carbon, you know, so they’re super, super, super good carbon capture systems.

Khalil: And I guess also because they’re based on sediment, as the water level rises, they’re going to rise with them, hopefully, if we let them.

Tori: Not in all scenarios, but in some scenarios, he actually says the rate at which they can capture sediment can keep pace or be faster than the estimated rate of sea-level rise. So, what is not to like?

Khalil: Yeah, because that’s one big difference between mangroves and coral reefs, because mangroves grow quickly, whereas corals, which also act as a break against sea damage, grow notoriously slowly.

Tori: Yeah, quite. I mean, the thing is, like coral reefs, however, mangroves are limited as to where you find them. You know, these are tropical systems. You aren’t going to get them in the northern hemisphere. They’re not going to be a solution to the UK’s problems.

Khalil: Guess we’ll see how many degrees we hit.

Well Tori, luckily I’ve come equipped with a natural solution of my own. While you’ve been out in the tropics, I’ve been closer to home, in what scientists like Mark consider to be the cold-water equivalent of mangrove forests.

Iris Moeller: Salt marshes form where the tides are able to deliver really fine sediment into areas.

Khalil: Iris Moeller is a professor of geography from the University of Dublin. She’s been studying salt marshes for decades.

Iris: So, behind barrier islands, you know, where you have, islands that are really close to the shore, within estuaries, within embayments, you get this deposition of what we really call colloquially mud. Very gloopy, watery stuff that deposits there. But once that consolidates over a period of time, it raises the surface elevation of that sediment to a level where plants can come in and survive. When you start walking on them you of course, your feet sink in, you get the kind of ( sucking sounds ) sound as your feet move through the mud, and you can hear water trickling around from the creeks.

Khalil: Salt marshes surround the coastlines of countries with cooler seas, including the UK, Northern Europe and North America. They might not be as naturally beautiful as the lush tropical vibes of mangrove forests…

Tori: Sorry, total interruption here. Disagree hard. Hard, hard, hard disagree. Beautiful! Saltmarshes are beautiful.

Khalil: ( Laughter ) Just bad lighting, I guess. But what they lack in what some might perceive to be conventional attractiveness, they make up for in practicality. They’re super effective coastal defenders.

Iris: On account of climate change, we have projections that suggest that exceptionally high water levels might occur more frequently in the future. We are being protected from high water levels and from waves on account of the salt marshes being there. Slowing the water down, slowing the waves down as they travel over them. And that of course means we experience less erosion on any areas that are landward of where a salt marsh exists. And we experience less flooding. And that’s a really beneficial side effect of the salt marsh being there.

Khalil: Like mangroves, salt marshes break waves, helping to prevent coastal inundations. And Iris would like to see more land given back to marshes.

Iris: We need to allow space for the salt marsh to move upwards and landwards to continue to exist to protect us. And that’s often really difficult, because to the landward side we have often agricultural fields that are producing our food and we need to protect them from salt water. So, it becomes a difficult political decision to then decide to say we’re actually going to allow the salt marsh to move further landwards and take out a sea defence that we built several centuries ago when we reclaimed that land for agriculture.

We have some very difficult decisions to make here when we’re thinking about how we farm, how we build our houses, how we develop our land or how we develop our coasts.

Khalil: I guess this goes to show that any solutions we come up with are going to have some kind of cost or trade-off attached.

Tori: We were talking about local solutions, you know, to this kind of global problem. And I think salt marshes is exactly, it’s a perfect example of that. And it’s been one that’s been dealt with locally for thousands of years, actually, in Northern Europe.

Khalil: I think the one thing that has tied together all the stories that we’ve talked about today is that this is going to change everyone’s lives, whether that is the effects of sea-level rise – getting rid of people’s homes and endangering their lives – or whether it’s the fact that we’re going to need to change how we live to try and avert the worst of these changes.

For example, you take the issue of immigration and refugee status. A massive issue at the moment. Sea-level rise is going to be a massive contributor to people needing to move around the world, because if your home disappears under the water, you’ve got to go somewhere. We’re all going to have to acknowledge that people are going to have to move around because of this, and we’re going to have to change our lives to avoid the worst of these changes, and to accommodate people’s needs in the wake of it.

Tori: Yeah, and I think also, really wise to remember when we say people, that person could potentially be you.

Khalil: And even if it’s not, they’re still people.

Tori: Thanks for listening to Our Broken Planet. We hope you’ve learned something along the way and please don’t despair. We all have an important role to play in helping to fix the problems in our world and it starts with having conversations like the ones in this episode, as many as possible. If you found it helpful why not share this episode with friends and family.

Khalil: Let us know what you thought about this episode and join the conversation on social media using the hashtag OurBrokenPlanet. Or check out the bonus content and resources over on nhm.ac.uk/podcast.

Tori: You can listen to our next episode right now, where we’re exploring another consequence of our heating planet, the increasing instance of fires around the world, and what that means for us humans. We hope you’ll join us.

Khalil: Our Broken Planet is presented by Tori Herridge and me, Khalil Thirlaway. The Assistant Producer was John Rogers, the Producer was James Tindale and the Executive Producer was Will Yates. Our Broken Planet is a Whistledown production for the Natural History Museum.