{"transcript":{"_id":"5463a65f7f3f05887d000045","audio_id":1895363,"created_at":"2014-11-12T18:26:39.907Z","modifier_id":null,"nugget_id":"5463a65f7f3f05887d000042","public_nugget_id":"565cd59f6b48d4000300131e","sent_to_speechpad":true,"status":"completed","text":"

Up until now climate change has mostly been a story about challenges. Challenges to our communities, challenges to our economies and challenges to the natural environment that sustains life on earth. But with challenge comes opportunity; opportunities to live and work more sustainably, opportunities to transform economies, and opportunities to shift to a low carbon, climate resilient future. But here's something that might surprise you. Action on climate change is not some far-off event. There is an enormous groundswell of action already underway to fight climate change. It's happening right now, all over the world. That's why climate change is also a story about hope. There are thousands of examples of people taking action to address climate change. We wanted to take a closer look at some of these people. By sharing their stories they show us that action on climate change is creating green jobs, inspiring entrepreneurship and creating ripples that spread across communities and economies. Take India for example. In the slums of Bangalore an organization called Pollinate Energy is creating green entrepreneurs and bringing solar lighting to the city's most vulnerable populations.

At Pollinate Energy we're a social business that improves the lives of India's urban poor. We do this by providing them with access to clean energy technologies. In India there are around 390 million people who don't have access to electricity. And we found that a lot of these people were living in non-permanent urban settlements, with about five people in each tent the size of your dining room table, and are perfect candidates for something like a solar lantern.

We used to spend 70 to 80 rupees on kerosene, but we still lived in the dark. Now we have light and we save money. Our children can study and we can cook using the light.

Here in Bangalore we have a network of micro-entrepreneurs which we call Pollinators. They're from the areas around the communities, they speak the local language, they spend time with the communities explaining the products so that they can understand them. And then they provide them with a payment plan so they can pay the system, which costs $30, off over five weeks. The way that they keep track of this is through a mobile phone app. On top of the fact that they have a job and they can earn money a big benefit is the fact that they now have a community and a sense of belonging.

This job is like the social service for me and that's very fulfilling. Seeing a smile on a customer's face makes me happy.

So in India there are around 390 million people who don't have access to electricity and the aim is, over the next 10 years, to try to get to the 53 cities in India with more than a million people.

Before, we lived in the dark. Everyone is happy with the light.

Green Entrepreneurship is the key to shifting to a green economy. In Ghana green entrepreneurship is being propelled by women's leadership. The Bamboo Bikes Initiative is building not only cleaner transportation options for Ghanaians but building careers for rural women as well.

Bamboo Bikes is training girls in clean jobs and reducing carbon emissions. We started as a women's initiative. We are three women and we got to know that women are the deprived communities. They are suffering, especially in terms of economic empowerment, but they can use the natural resources within their villages or their communities to come out with projects that will really help them. So we are training them on how to build the bamboo bicycle. You know, a bamboo bicycle doesn't produce a lot of carbon emissions. It's at carbon zero because bamboo contains a lot of oxygen that balances carbon dioxide. The first step is we take you through the plantation to learn how to harvest the bamboo. Then after, we take you to the workshop. We take you through a whole lot of processes. At the least it should be in five to six months, you should come out, you should produce a prototype.

I love everything about the initiative because after school I was just in the house, I had nothing to do. But when I became part of it I helped Mommy buy one or two things because of my sister's school fees.

Investing in a woman is not only the right thing to do but the smart thing to do because most women are community leaders and they are really making an impact for change in their communities.

In the last few years we've seen unprecedented leadership by women who are rising to meet the climate challenge. In Australia the organization 1 Million Women has one simple goal with big impact: get 1 million women to save energy, cut pollution, and reduce waste in their daily lives.

1 Million Women is about inspiring women to take practical action on climate change. It's about taking bite-size actions that have real and tangible outcomes. We focus on the things that we do in our daily life--food, fashion, shopping, travel, home energy--to cut waste, to cut pollution and to save money at the same time. We focus on women that by global standards live very privileged lives in wealthy countries. We do events. We have a really big social media program.

We're sharing stories, we're sharing experiences, and then you know that you're not alone, and the website is a wonderful way to do it, and Facebook. Because it can literally be the women of the world doing this and that's really powerful when you know that you are part of a much bigger movement for change.

We talk about things like how we're driving less, how we are managing our transportation so that we are able to drive less. How we're aware of the pressure to consume and trying to reduce the impact of that pressure to consume. Things like shopping local and in-season so you can actually use your money more wisely. All of us have a choice when we have a $20 bill in our hands: that we can actually choose to use that money for the good of the planet or we can choose to arm the planet. And it is not that difficult a choice.

Our philosophy is to act in your own life and try to rise above politics to just get on with it. And action on climate change needs to happen from absolutely every level. Yes, it needs to happen from governments down, but it needs to happen from grassroots up, and it needs to happen all at the same time.

Sustainable progress is best achieved when local communities are directly involved in the decision-making process. In Bangladesh Action Aid is leading an initiative that solves climate related problems from the ground up.

Laloua is a village which is extremely vulnerable being located in the Southern Delta, and this area is very dependent on rice cultivation and that was being threatened. The community-based adaptation project was led by the women in the communities.

Weather patterns and rainfall have changed drastically due to climate change.

They have to address erosion, they have to address salinity, and they have to address the frequent floods and cyclones.

We sit together as Gono Gobeshona Dal (Peoples' Research Team) to discuss our problems, their causes and consequences. Then we try to figure out possible solutions.

The community, for the first time, realize that actually women could play this role, and the women started doing an assessment and came up with practical solutions to address their problems.

We raised dikes for ponds to preserve fresh water year-round for household work. We stopped saline water intrusion in canals with a temporary mud dike for cultivation during dry seasons. And we built a bunker to protect our valuables during tidal surges and cyclones.

They came up with the solutions which worked, which were practical, and today they have not only got food security because they are bringing in the rice, but they have saved and they have created a wealth for themselves. Any one of us would have difficulty surviving with such bare minimums. And not only are they coping, they're coming up with new solutions every day.

Living in an area threatened by climate change doesn't necessarily mean that the community must abandon the place that it calls home, but that adapting to a new set of circumstances is possible. The BOMA Project helps women living in Kenya's arid North adapt to climate change by starting small businesses that help reduce their economic dependence on land threatened by drought.

At The BOMA Project we work to help women earn an income so they can accumulate savings and survive drought.

Climate change has had a big effect on these communities.

What we're seeing in Northern Kenya is what we think is happening across all the arid lands of Africa. The pastoralists are settling. Livestock is becoming less sustainable, so now the women and children are left back in the village to survive on their own because it's too dangerous to travel with the herds.

We wanted a lasting solution; BOMA offered one. And we wanted to empower the women; BOMA gave them that.

The women go through a two-year period of mentoring. Our local mentors deliver training to them, business skills training, as well as savings training. When you go to see a typical BOMA business you're going to see a small hut and they're going to sell basics like washing powder, sugar, tea. In two years women are able to double their incomes and the most important thing is they're going to have savings so they can survive the drought periods because the droughts are now coming too often and they're too severe.

Before this project with BOMA the Rendille people suffered during the droughts. The drought will suffocate you. Now nobody suffers due to drought. BOMA introduced us to savings and we started saving money in the box. Now we even have enough to give out loans. And that's the whole goal of this program. We're graduating women from extreme poverty so that they can better withstand the shocks like climate change.

From the most vulnerable populations often come the most innovative ideas. In Ghana an organization called Recycle Not a Waste employs the disadvantaged in poor urban communities to turn recyclable waste into eco-friendly goods.

RECNOWA makes you think before you throw your waste away. One of our main projects is working with women's groups. So what we did was that we took them through three months training on how to make beads from plastic waste, old cassette tapes, old plastic in general, and what they do is that they melt them and then mold them into different shapes of beads. And then they sell it to the general public. They also give beads in single sessions to other people who would want to use it for different purposes. We consider waste not just as something we would have to throw away but something which is more of a material in transition. With the plastic furniture, for instance, one single armchair could have about 400 to 500 bottles. That means that it's about 400, 500 bottles taken away from the dump sites. The sachet pack of water is the best to be considered by most Ghanaians, so it means that there's a lot of that waste that is produced. So RECNOWA, with our partners, have developed other programs where we have some of these made into umbrellas. We've made raincoats out of that, we've made school bags, career bags for school children and a whole lot of things we try to develop. Even though the urban poor are probably not employed they are very creative people, they are very entrepreneurial, and they are very determined to make something out of themselves, to make a living. So their desire to go through all of this helps them to come up with creative ways of using the waste that is collected or that is generated in their environment. So we put them into such a business so that they can collect that waste and then transform it into something profitable.

Taking action on climate change involves all aspects of our lives, especially how we use energy in our homes. Governments, too, have a role to play in residential energy use. In Mexico the government has partnered with international development banks to encourage housing developers to build homes designed to decrease our carbon footprint before we even step out the door.

In the case of EcoCasa we found, together with our partners, that the best way was to offer concessional bridge loans to developers that have a housing project that meets a certain level of emissions reduction. The case of Mexico is particularly relevant because we can see these innovations happening in low-income housing.

We are participating with 1,000 houses, 750 in Los Héroes Capellanía and 250 in Héroes Monterrey. We have realized that sustainability is compatible with affordability and with providing better housing for the population. All of these things can be perfectly combined. Just about five to six years ago we started working with solar heaters, with water reduction and heat reduction in houses, thermal insulation, the sorts of finishes we use, the extra measures we take in terms of sustainability.

We decided to buy this house because of its construction and for the comfort level it provides. The energy savings are important for our finances above all. We don't have to pay for air conditioning or for anything else to feel comfortable, and now we're paying a quarter of what we paid for electricity.

We feel that the moment this multiplies and we can do these things for all the new homes built in our country there will be undoubtedly less emissions and the situation will improve. And this will all be replicable. I'm completely convinced.

Changing how an industry does business can be a daunting task but EcoCasa shows it can be done. In the Philippines the Sustainable Energy Finance Program is teaching banks the ins and outs of clean energy to encourage them to lend to sustainability projects.

Sustainable energy finance is all about teaching banks about energy efficiency and renewable energy.

There's still an apprehension of catering to the sustainable energy technologies, especially on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Lending without the SEF is kind of difficult for us, for the banks in general, because we don't have the technical knowledge, technical expertise, to handle these kinds of situations. In the case of Starmall here, it's a chiller project. We are not familiar with what kind of air conditioning units to use, what kind of power savings there will be, so that's where the invaluable support of the IFC people comes into play.

The project is completed and is realizing close to 70,000 US dollars a month in energy savings. Excel Farm is a piggery where pig manure is used to generate electricity through biomass energy.

Most of the houses you see in this farm are climate-controlled, as we call it. It's very electricity-intensive operations where they have to consume a lot of energy to keep the houses cool, and this project what happens is you can utilize the waste to focus cold air on the pigs.

We're not actually teaching the banks to be engineers but making them understand. By helping their clients improve their energy costs this product will actually help them increase their loan portfolio and acquire new business as well.

The role of governments in taking action on climate change isn't just policy-oriented. They can provide incentives to businesses and citizens to act sustainably as well. In China the Clean Development Mechanism Fund is a national climate fund that leverages private sector investments in clean energy projects and supports low carbon growth across the country.

China CDMFUND is a national climate fund mandated to support efforts to tackle climate change. It ensures that a large portion of revenues from international CDM transactions can be re-used to support low-carbon development in China. The fund acts as seed money and bridges public and private partners. They also help introduce innovative tools and spark great ideas.

Under the [Jiangsu] Project we have issued six loans. The total number is 125 million RMB.

50 million Yuan of concessional loans from China CDM Fund helped us solve the issues of fixed investment during the construction phase of our project. They strongly supported it and gave us a push to get started. This plant produces combined heat and power. It uses agricultural waste to generate electricity and the excess steam is used to generate heat. It takes in about 20,000 tonnes of waste and debris a year and is expected to reduce 210,000 tonnes of emissions annually. Primarily it solves the problem of burning the waste on farms and protects the environment. Second, it provides extra income for farmers. Third, it creates a new model of cooperation between farmers and enterprises.

We collect waste from over 60 families and transport it all together. Collectively we make 10,000 Yuan a season. Now people in the village are living better lives. We eat better, we're clothed better, and we live better. And we're very happy about it.

All these stories feature different people in different circumstances, but they all share the same goal to build a low-carbon, climate resilient future. They show that action on climate change is happening on the ground, in communities large and small, all over the world. Most importantly, they show that there is momentum for change. Change for good.

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