Nina Alexandersen on Actions Everyone Can Take On Climate And The Nuances Behind Climate Change Leadership

Nina Alexandersen is an independent strategic advisor and writer based in London. She began her career in entertainment, producing theatre shows and music concerts.

She ran a charity, the Wings for Life Spinal Cord Research Foundation, and was head of Healthy Living Initiatives at Disney UK, where her campaign inspired millions of children to get active. In 2016, Nina experienced a debilitating postnatal depression following the birth of her son. The episode was life changing and led her to focus on social and environmental impacts of climate change. She worked for The Sunrise Project in Australia launching the digital platform, WorkforClimate. Then in 2020, she unexpectedly found herself in the role of people engagement lead for the United Nations High-Level Climate Champions at COP26. Her efforts are now focused on public engagement, social impact, and supporting people to take action on climate change.

the COP process, how leadership globally is approaching climate change decision making, and why individuals must reconnect with their natural surroundings to take responsibility for the environment.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to the work you do now?

[Nina Alexandersen] - Climate change was not something I thought much about in my 20s and early 30s. I was living in the London life, I had a great career in entertainment, and all those problems felt quite far away from me.

Then two things happened. First, I became a mum. Unfortunately, I had a severe postnatal depression, which meant I was medicated up to my eyeballs and I became quite dependent on people. It changed my understanding of what it's like to live with vulnerability. At the same time, I had this new child and an enormous sense of responsibility, which made me think about the future in a different way.

The other thing that happened is Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion exploded onto the scene. Here in London there were tons of protests, and watching these kids (some of them really young) pleading for their future was quite jarring. Then I watched a woman who looked like me and was my age glue her hands to the headquarters of BP.

I remember thinking to myself, “things must be worse than I realised,” and it sparked this sense of urgency to ask what is really going on?

What is climate change? How does it work? How could I be involved? I had mother's guilt, I felt like my son was going to grow up and ask me, "Mum, when you knew things are bad, what did you do?” I didn't have an answer.

I left my job at Disney (which I loved) and looked for a job in climate action. We had the chance to move to Australia which happened to coincide with some of the worst bushfires the country had ever seen, the ones in 2019. What was theory in my head had suddenly became very real.

I don't know what things were like in Brisbane, but in Sydney the smoke and stench just covered Sydney and the scale of destruction was horrifying. We drove for miles and all we saw was burnt forest. It hit home how close climate impacts were. I was lucky at the time to be working with an organisation called The Sunrise Project here in Australia. We had this theory that lots of people were worried about climate change and employees wanted to do something at their companies, but they didn't know what to do or what would have the most impact.

People were recycling or doing meatless Monday, but they wanted to do something more impactful, and so I helped to launch WorkforClimate. It’s a digital platform which gives employees the tools, the playbooks, the content, and the community to take climate action together at work.

Then the pandemic hit, and so we went home to London. I got this consulting job almost by fluke with a group I'd never heard of before called the United Nations High-Level Climate Champions. It's a grand sounding title, and I found myself in the heart of climate politics, so I was working on COP26. COP is that annual conference where all the world leaders fly in and negotiate a deal the rest of us have no idea what they're all talking about, it just all seems important.

Honestly, I knew nothing about politics, I thought the job was a marketing gig! My title was People Engagement Lead, and I thought I'm going to do what I did at Disney, create all these exciting public campaigns so people will feel inspired to get involved.

That was not the job. The job was to work with dozens of civil society groups who represent citizens’ rights, everybody from the big NGOs like Greenpeace and WWF, groups of mums campaigning against air pollution, Indigenous groups who were being dispossessed of their lands, and youth activists. I met so many people, and a lot of them were pissed off. They felt after 30 years of meeting COP was not putting planet and people in front of profit, and they weren't getting the job done.

When I look back, what I heard all day long, day in and day out, were stories of suffering. Climate change wasn't some distant thing happening somewhere, people were starving because of droughts now, people were losing their homes because of storms now, and for countries like the Marshall Islands, this is a genuine existential threat.

These groups wanted their voices to be heard, they wanted governments to stop talking and start doing something, and the COP process was one of the best places to do that.

Can you demystify what that COP process is, what was going on in those conversations, and a little bit more about the systems in general?

Honestly, it is so complicated, people who are inside the system don't even understand it, so the rest of us have no chance. When it comes down to it, it's simple. There are two things they're negotiating, one is they're greenhouse gas emissions, and the other is money.

I'm going to geek out on the science for a second, because I didn't know any of this when I started, like biology 101 or chemistry. When we say greenhouse gas emissions, we're mainly talking about carbon dioxide, that's why people often use the shorthand carbon emissions.

Carbon dioxide is what gets released when we burn fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas, and we do that for everything. We use it to make electricity, manufacturing and transport, so our entire economies are built on fossil fuels. It's not like you can just snap your fingers and turn the systems off, you need a transition.

The other main greenhouse gas is methane, which comes mainly from agriculture. That's why people go on about not eating meat, because of all the fertiliser for land to grow and feed those cows, and the cows are burping and farting. That’s the methane component. These gases get released when we burn stuff, the gases trap heat from the sun, and that is what causes global temperatures to rise.

It sucks moisture out of the land and the water like when you're blow drying your hair, that moisture has got to go up to somewhere. That moisture gets held in the atmosphere, moved around the planet, and in some places gets dumped down with rain, floods and storms, while others just dry up and have droughts. That's why the bushfires are worse, because you now have all these crispy dry trees. Then the warmer temperatures make our ocean currents go crazy, and then we have stronger hurricanes and more flooding.

That's the boring science bit, which I don't find boring at all, I love it! The COP process separates out countries into different groups, and it gives them different responsibilities.

On one end, you've got richer developing countries like EU, the U. S., Australia; these countries have historically burnt more fossil fuels, which made them richer. At the other end you have developing countries who haven't been burning fossil fuels for that long. They haven't had their share of the wealth, but ironically, they're the ones who are suffering the worst impacts of climate.

The richer countries agreed that they had been doing this for longer, so they needed to bring their emissions down faster while providing money for other nations. That money would help them get off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy, and protect themselves and all of us. We protect you; we protect the whole world.

But of course, it gets complicated because China and India are starting to catch up on emissions and rich countries have got economic problems, so they don't want to stump up the cash. Governments can't do this alone; they need big businesses to step up. They need the finance sector to mobilise the trillions (forget the billions) of dollars we need for a transition.

If you're just an ordinary citizen, it's very hard to see how you can affect the COP process, and the civil society groups I was working with, while they're allowed to go to the negotiations, they're not allowed to talk. They can sit there as observers, and behind the scenes they can lobby government officials. But think about it, they are wildly outnumbered and outspent by lobbyists. In Glasgow there were over 500 fossil fuel lobbyists, that's more than most countries were bringing! That's more than country delegations, so they've got very little chance.

What you end up with is this huge tension between citizen groups who are demanding governments work faster, smaller countries crying out for moral leadership, tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets if they're allowed to, and all these press stories full of doom and gloom.

Saying we're not doing what we need to do, the future is bleak - it puts people in a difficult place. But even though I was feeling despair, I also realised we don't need to wait for people to fix things. We can take responsibility, and when I say we I don't mean everybody. There are genuinely people who don't have the resources, capacity, and time, and that's okay.

But many of us do have these things. My focus is to make it easier for people to get involved with climate, I work with a bunch of different organisations who make climate action more inclusive. I'm trying to demystify these issues through my writing. Like every other guest you have on the podcast, I'm writing a book! It's a 101 dummies guide to climate change, but it doesn't take itself too seriously.

The first thing to know is you don't need to be an expert; you don't need to have any special skills. The second thing is just by saying you care about climate out loud and that you want to do something about it, it doesn’t make you a weirdo, it doesn't make you some angry activist, it just makes you normal.

There are five areas where people can get involved: work, money, nature, politics, and spirituality. If that word freaks people out, then just think of it as wellbeing. You don't have to do all five things. For most of us, work is where we can have the biggest impact, because it's where we have our biggest networks.

Even if you're a solo entrepreneur, you still have supply chains, clients and customers, so step one is to tell all these people you care about climate impact and social equity. That might sit under the sustainability banner. Then step two is to find friends and allies, we can't all be doing this on our own. This idea of the individual being responsible is not how change is going to happen.

Find some buddies, who they might be inside of your company, or they might be in your sector. Then, you can get together and figure out what your business is doing on energy, waste, natural resources, and investment. A lot of people don't think about their company pensions, I just ticked the default. Company investments and pensions are one of the most powerful tools they have.

That brings me on to the second bucket, which is money, and a lot of people (especially here in Britain) don't like to talk about money, but we need to talk about money. There are your own pensions and investments, and you can check they're not in fossil fuels or companies that are damaging the environment. Then you can move your money to support companies doing clean energy and social impact.

If you've got any money to give away, give it to people and organisations building social movements and resilience. Whether you believe in green growth, degrowth, post growth, or whatever, most of us are over-consuming. We can choose to spend our money with companies who take climate and the circular economy seriously, this includes food. The third bucket is nature. I've been talking lots about carbon emissions but:

Nature is at the heart of our survival. We've been so programmed to see ourselves as separate from nature and other animals, and so the first thing is to try and reconnect and see ourselves as part of this greater living organism.

There are plenty of organisations restoring nature, rewilding, and protecting, that includes in the cities. Politics I personally find is the hardest, but at the most basic level, if you live in a country where you're allowed to vote, then obviously choose politicians who are serious about climate, the environment, and social equity.

If it's in your character (and unfortunately it's not really in mine), then protest. Pressure the government to do more, or if you don't feel like doing that, then help organisations out with volunteering or giving them money.

The last bit is spirituality, and the disconnect most of us feel from our communities and history. There was a time where that void would have been filled by sacred rituals, religion, singing, praying and dancing together. We don't have that anymore - it's not woo woo, it's just the state of the world we're in.

Trying to find ways to reconnect with ourselves and bodies, and again see that we're part of this greater organism. This is going to be important to motivating people to get through this. But I'm not saying it's easy and I've found all the answers. I'm still on the search.

What key learnings have you gained from working in the systems change space?

When I first started working in climate and people talked about colonialism, racism or exploitation, I honestly felt uncomfortable. I didn't understand how those things linked, and it's only after spending a lot of time with people who've been at the sharp end of those systems for not just decades, but generations, that I've started to see how they completely overlap.

At the end of the day, systems are still made from people. We made these systems, and we can change these systems, but the point is it’s a lot easier for people who hold power, it’s not easy for people who don't.

One important thing is to recognise where you are in the system and how you hold power. I'm always amazed by how little power people think they have, even millionaires say, “what can I do?”

People have a lot more power than they think, so again it's about getting together with other people who feel the same way and using your power together.

If you hold a lot of power, one of the things you can do is get out of the way. Share your power or make way and give power to other people, let them have a chance to speak and share their lived experiences, which may be very different from yours.

Have you seen systemically privileged people who have recognised this and passed the floor to others?

I would say I've seen efforts in this space. I've seen people recognise it's a problem, they might even say it out loud. I very often am in meetings where I hear people say, "I know I'm a white middle class man, but I hope it's okay that I'm here." It's fine, that's not what it's about.

You don't have to apologise for it, it's not a judgment in that way, it's about sharing. I do see efforts and some recognition. When I was working on COP, there was a lot of tokenism.

It was always like “let's get a woman, an indigenous person and a youth activist to be at these panels so we can make sure we're being diverse.” It’s not actually having a conversation with people, that's not listening and empathising with their shared experiences and then making space for them to grow.

I think little by little we’re seeing changes with the press, and I'm starting to see that in the donor space. You've got big old philanthropical foundations that are acknowledging their money came from harmful things like colonialism, acknowledging that there's repair work that needs to be done.

People get freaked out when you use the word reparations, I did too! But people are starting to acknowledge there's a lot of repair and healing that needs to happen. I'm feeling optimistic with this. I don't always feel optimistic, but I'm feeling optimistic on this process.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

I am interested in how we build relationships between people who don't normally speak to each other. There are two organisations in the UK who are doing that quite well, one is Tipping Point, and the other is Decolonising Economics.

I'm also interested in Indigenous groups and wisdom, because they get a lot more airtime now. People are always talking about Indigenous wisdom, but they get a fraction of climate funding. By the way, climate funding is still a fraction of philanthropic funding!

There's a lot of talk, but not a lot of movement of money. The organisations I think who are doing good work in this space are the Gaia Foundation, the Seventh Generation Indigenous Fund, and Global Greengrants Fund, all of whom I've met, and they are brilliant.

Finally, it's hard to talk about climate change. People glaze over, they think it's boring or worry you're going to judge them. They think it's going to be complicated, but I'm seeing some inspiring initiatives trying to help normalise these conversations. You don't have to be an expert.

Larger Us trains people to have more effective climate conversations, and The Week is a short program where you get together with your friends and family to watch three short videos and talk about what you saw (they prompt you). Climate Fresk runs free workshops, and then at least here in the UK we've got things like climate cafes popping up.

There's this thing called People, Planet and Pint where you just go down to the pub and have a drink and chat about the climate. The other day I even saw a local church group who were having a climate chat day. I feel there's a desire and a need in the community to talk about this stuff.

I'm not saying we must talk about climate change every second of the day, I mean my husband would just love that! I just think we need to be comfortable with the discomfort, it'll make us much more prepared.

What books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I like to read and listen to stuff that's not too heavy. The subject matter of my work is quite heavy, and you can't just be in that darkness all the time. I like things like The Mothers of Invention podcast with Mary Robinson, and if I want something a bit deeper, I'll listen to Planet: Critical with Rachel Donald or Your Brain on Climate with Dave Powell.

If people are interested in narrative change or storytelling, my friend Paddy Loughman runs Inter-Narratives, so you can follow him there. Sometimes it's good to read stuff which pushes you outside of your comfort zone. If you have a look at Climate Justice Alliance, there are a lot of resources there. Most of the time I just read stuff I'm interested in.

I'm interested right now in food, mushrooms, how trees work and education. We can't just read stories that make us miserable, we also need to come up and see the light.