In this interview with IPCC Vice Chair Diana Urge-Vorsatz she argues that we need to move beyond the phrase 'climate change' and instead build a positive story of climate change. The emphasis should be on how we can make people's lives better, rather than the doom and gloom of ever more worrying numbers. With more walkable cities, greater work-life balance, and more reliable goods, the fight against climate change could be the opportunity of our time.

Climate change and optimism aren’t regular bedfellows, but perhaps climate change could be the opportunity of our time. In recent years political movements across the world have found support in opposition to climate change policies. From farmer protests in France and the Netherlands to a 15% vote share for the UK’s Reform party’s net-zero scepticism. Being against climate change seems to be a real vote winner, especially among working class voters who have been bitten the hardest by the recent inflation crisis. If climate change isn’t politically motivating, how are we to motivate people to vote for ideas that could solve this problem?

In this interview with the IPCC vice chair professor Diana Urge-Vorsatz, she charts a positive story of climate change from the current state of the field, to why technology will be incapable of solving this crisis, to the small social changes that could both improve our lives and incidentally tackle this global crisis.

Harry Carlisle: While it would be great to focus primarily on the positive story, it would be remiss to not cover the prevailing anxiety around the field of climate science. Are you hopeful for our climate future and where does your hope come from?

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz: Of course, scientists often do get in despair, especially when we see the really alarming data and trends. Nevertheless, my optimism and hope comes from the fact that I work on the solutions, and in fact, if you look at what options we have in the end, what I see is that if we pursue social welfare programmes we will have a better work life balance. Our cities will be more liveable. We will lose much less time in traffic and reduce the useless parts of our lives. So altogether, we just can have better lives and an increasing quality of lives when we pursue the right solutions. So that's what gives me optimism that solving climate change can almost be almost a by-product to just making our world a better place to be.

The positive aspect of climate change is usually framed around technological innovation. But your work is more sceptical of technological optimism as it’s known. Why are solar panels and carbon capture and sequestration insufficient to solve this problem and why do you lean more towards the systemic solutions?

Now, of course, technology is a crucial part of the solution. Nevertheless, in my view, and in my scientific communities’ perspective, it is impossible that we can solve this all by technology. Why? There are a couple of reasons.

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But we cannot just plug in another technology to the previous one and keep growing and growing.

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