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Finding Net Zero with Integrity: A Climate Chat with Alexis McGivern

[Climate Decoded theme music starts, sparse and slightly reverberant, anticipatory]

KIM KENNY

Welcome to Climate Decoded. On this podcast, we decipher climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice. And welcome to a series we're calling Climate Chats, where I have casual conversations with people doing pretty dang cool climate work, and we discuss that work through a communication lens. 

This is our very first Climate Chat, and I'm so pleased. It's with Alexis McGivern. Alexis is the Net Zero Integrity Manager at Oxford Net Zero, and she's been my friend for years. In this episode, we'll be talking about Alexis' work at the last Climate COP, how that relates to Net Zero and the uplifting idea of Radical Hope, and a whole lot more climate conversation. So, without further ado, please enjoy this chat with Alexis McGivern.

Okay, so welcome, Alexis. You are the first guest of Climate Chats for Climate Decoded, and I just wanted to start off by letting you introduce yourself. Could you say a bit about how you came into climate change work?

ALEXIS MCGIVERN

Sure. Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited. I love Climate Decoded, so I've listened to the episodes, and I'm excited to be on Climate Chats. So, I'm Alexis McGivern. I have been working on climate change for a long time. I started getting interested in this issue when I was a kid. I think many people in this space have an origin story that dates back a few decades, and I remember learning about climate change when I was at school in a class that actually wasn't part of our curriculum, but just a wonderful teacher took it upon themselves to kind of give us the bad news.

I remember feeling this intense sense of betrayal that my parents or the adults in my life knew about this huge, scary thing, and that I hadn’t been informed. I was like nine, so it’s probably fair enough that they hadn’t, but since then, I think coming up with that lens of something being profoundly existential and slow in many ways, has kind of shaped the way that I’ve grown up and lived my life and made a lot of decisions and choices. I think climate intersects with a lot of things that I really care about, particularly, for example, migrant justice, food sovereignty, identity, care, and creativity. All these things are kind of affected by climate change, and therefore, I feel like climate change has been kind of a lens through which I viewed other routes to justice. Climate justice being a frame for not only a climate-centered vision of the world, but also a world that is more equitable, fair, and full of life. So yeah, I think yeah, a bit of a long answer, but I think it's climate has always been the lens through which I viewed other forms of injustices in the world, and it just happens to be the one that I'm working on right now, but I could see myself weaving in and out of other areas of work to kind of further the ultimate goal, which is a kind of better, fairer, nicer society.

KIM

Thank you. Yeah. I admire your motivation so much, and I came to know you through plastics work.

ALEXIS

Yes!

KIM

Which also has connections with general climate, and yeah, I’ve always admired your passion around that. So, it’s cool that you’re bringing this all to the climate world. Something I’m trying to ask now to anyone that I talk to about climate change is: What is your environmental ID? I learned about this concept of how we originally came to know nature in our own personal story, and what is your identification with the environment around you? It could be playing in your backyard. It could be that you grew up on a farm. But everyone has this way of identifying with the real world, and I don’t think I know yours at all. I know you grew up in Switzerland, so maybe?

ALEXIS

Yes, I did. I mean, Switzerland is where I grew up. It’s also where we met, which is special for many reasons for me. If I think about time outside, I think it really centers around the lake that I grew up near, which, of course, you’ve been to many times. I used to spend a lot of time at the lake growing up. I mean, I lived walking distance from the lake, and I think now that I live in a place that is not by the water, you really notice it. If you grow up by the water, I think you spend a lot of time there.

I have two sisters, and basically, our summer holidays were just waking up, walking down to the lake, and spending all day kind of jumping in and out, lazing around. My sisters would bully me to jump off the kind of pier that I found really dangerous and scary. So, I would often not do it and chicken out, but I think that for me, that time of my life is very much linked with the lake. And even if I had this superstition, which I still do, that I feel like if I ever go more than a certain number of months without dipping myself into Lake Clemont, like something bad will happen to me. And so, I always, I swim a lot when I'm home. Last summer, for example, I was training for a triathlon, and I was swimming a lot in the lake to kind of prep for my triathlon, even though it wasn't there, I was just home and swimming a lot. And so, yeah, it holds a lot of memories for me. A lot of peace as well.

KIM

I love that! I didn’t know you were training for a triathlon. That’s so cool!

ALEXIS

Yeah, I did it last summer. Thanks!

KIM

Oh, congrats!

ALEXIS

Thanks!

KIM

I also grew up on a lake, totally different—one of the Great Lakes in the U.S. in the North, Lake Erie—but I relate to that. We were a block away from the lake. 

ALEXIS

It makes such a difference. 

KIM

Yeah, I love that ritual too.

ALEXIS

Totally. And actually, I was just over lunch chatting with a colleague who works in the same department as me, and she was doing some analysis on access to green space within the UK and indices of social deprivation and their access to green space, outdoor space. And this is something to think about a lot, because we know that being outside is so good for us. Being in nature is so good for us. There are many studies that show it calms you. I saw this interesting study about awe and how being awestruck is genuinely good for your brain. It makes you more compassionate and patient, which I think is really cool.

But if we think about coming back to my original point about climate being the lens through which I view a path to a more fair world, even just access to outdoor space is political and should be politicized in terms of how we relate to nature. Because I’m sure there are many people who don’t have an origin story like that, who grew up far away from nature, and I don’t think that’s fair. It would be good for everyone in the world to grow up with some sort of environmental ID.

KIM

Yeah, it's kind of a privilege to even have an environmental ID, or an ID that's in a positive light versus one that’s polluted. Okay, so to get a little bit more into your work—your day-to-day profession—what kind of climate change work do you do?

ALEXIS

Yeah, so I work for the University of Oxford, I sit in a roughly 30 persons research group that bridges across multiple departments of the university. So, we have colleagues in law, anthropology, physics, Earth sciences, geography, where I sit. I always miss a few, but yeah, several departments across the University. We're in a research group called Oxford Net Zero. So, it's an initiative that’s actually funded by the university as part of what they call their strategic research fund, which is basically, how do we take the research that's being done at the university level and give a little basically to make sure that they can do work that is actually meaningful beyond just their research group. 

So, this was actually the first initiative that was funded through that. But other there obviously are lots of other initiatives of research within the university. I mean, for example, is the Astra Zeneca vaccine that came out of Oxford. So, there is lots of research being done at the academic level that is hugely applicable at the global level. But we basically sit as this kind of interdisciplinary hub to look at the challenge of getting to net zero by 2050 through the lens of multiple different disciplines. And the idea behind that is, previously, a lot of the climate work at Oxford was quite siloed. You'd have the biologist doing kind of nature based solutions work. 

For example, there's an initiative here called the nature-based solutions initiative, and we had the lawyers, kind of sitting in the sustainable law program we had, you know, there were all these different actors within just the Oxford ecosystem who didn't have kind of an umbrella to sit under. And the purpose of Oxford Net Zero is to kind of bring those people together. And I sit within that group as part of the what we call the engagement team, which is basically bridging academia and practice. So, it's how do we take all of these academic insights? It's interdisciplinary academic insights and essentially sort of translate and operationalize them for the “real world”.

I don't really like to use the word real world, because I think it kind of is a bit patronizing towards academics. But trying to make sure that we take that guidance from academic knowledge and make it useful and usable. So, an example, we worked really closely with the International Standards Organization the year before last on basically creating a set of guidelines which is now being converted into an ISO standard on what it means to reach Net Zero, what it means to get to Net Zero at an organizational level. Because something that we've struggled with since the kind of framing of Net Zero was embedded in the Paris Agreement in 2015 is that there's been a real mistranslation of Net Zero as a physical science principle into what that means for like non-state targets, or even state-level targets. 

So, we are very wary of Net Zero being used as a legitimizing frame to kind of slowed or non-existent climate action or offsets or other forms of climate kind of action that we don't necessarily agree with. And so, what we did with ISO was basically say this is kind of authority and what it actually means if you say you're achieving Net Zero, it means you're abiding by this set of criteria. And that came from both the kind of Oxford landscape and as well as canvassing. We do the sort of outward looking research as well. We did a mapping, a systematic review of 33 different other voluntary initiatives that guide on Net Zero, and we said these are the common criteria across all of them. And then we fed that into the ISO process. 

So yeah, we basically take insights across the academic research group and then find strategic partnerships to make that knowledge kind of used. We also track through our Net Zero tracker program, every Net Zero commitment from all the 2000 publicly listed companies, Forbes, 2000 lists every city above 100,000 in population and every country in the world. So, we also kind of act as watchdog for the quality of Net Zero targets, and we produce an annual stock take, which basically says this is the status of net zero, how it's being implemented, and whether or not we're meeting our climate goals as a result of those Net Zero targets. 

KIM

Fantastic. Congratulations on such a cool job. I know you're working on. Could you briefly define, not to get us too off track, but could you briefly define Net Zero, as you know? 

ALEXIS

Yeah!

KIM

What is Net Zero?

ALEXIS

Yeah, it's a great kind of point of discussion, because Net Zero is to say it's a physical science principle. So our director, Miles Allen, is a physicist who was among a group of other physicists in 2009 who published a paper that basically showed that the amount of warming in the atmosphere is a result of cumulative emissions that once we reached kind of, we had this assumption for a long time that once we reduced the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, that we would see temperatures go down. And the thing that was interesting about this paper, that Miles Allen and David Frame and others published in 2009, was that temperatures don't decline for many centuries after carbon emissions are completely stopped. And so when we understand that climate change, is caused by cumulative emissions, and that as a result of those cumulative emissions, even if we stop emitting, that temperatures won't come down for a long time, that basically then led us to the next realization, which is that reaching a stabilization of temperature change, or of the impacts of climate change, requires matching the amount of sources and sinks in the atmosphere. 

So to put it plainly, and maybe this can actually go before I go into that big spiel, Net Zero is basically balancing sources and sinks of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. And the state of Net Zero is basically when that is matched. And basically, it's not just about reaching zero emissions. It's about making sure that we balance emissions with sinks. And the framing of Net Zero is important because basically that's just how our climate system works, is that there needs, once we reach that kind of balance of sources and sinks, we'll see a state in which we will not see, you know, the changes in temperature. But the problem is, is that that discussion of sources and sinks becomes super political as to what sinks, where, when should we use them, etc,. And what we, you know, so if I give you an example of Net Zero being implemented badly, at COP 26, Australia released their nationally determined contribution where they basically had kind of a around a 1% emissions cut until 2030 and then they were going to, from 2030 onwards, deal with all of their emissions through negative emissions technologies. 

So, basically relying on technology that has not yet been used at the scale that they were planning to use it to justify the continued emissions through to 2030. The problem with that is that while there is a space for negative emissions technologies, for example, carbon capture and storage, and there will be because we've delayed action on climate for so long, the result of that is that we are using that future capacity of removals to justify emissions now. And when we do that, we put ourselves at great risk, not only because of the potential that those removals won't work or work at the scale that we need, but more importantly, and this is kind of the drum I beat every single day within my research group is that the burning of fossil fuels, is bad for more reasons than too much carbon in the atmosphere. 

We don't like fossil fuels, not only because they cause climate change, but also because they represent an inequitable way of distributing energy. They have huge human health consequences, especially for the communities that live near extraction sites. They have harms to biodiversity. There are issues over land tenure and access to land that is under potential extraction sites. So even if we manage to sequester every single ton of carbon that came out of burning of fossil fuels, we would still not be wanting to use them. And we have the opportunity now that we've opened a discussion about fossil fuels, to discuss about shifting, particularly our energy system, which 80% of our energy system globally is reliant on fossil fuels. So, when we have a discussion about changing from fossil fuels, we also have a discussion about opening up a much more equitable access to energy that is more aligned with our other for example, Sustainable Development Goals, just as an example.

KIM

Beautifully described, I love how you weave in the physical science component with climate justice and then also climate change. One of our goals for this conversation was to talk about the COP, so maybe we can use this as a segue to get into that. We're recording this in January 2024 and COP happened in November 2023 so just a couple months ago, but it feels like a long time ago. And you've been to multiple COPs, including this past one COP28 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. So , I wanted to ask you, kind of your impressions of that COP, but I'll go into some specific questions. So we talked about your climate change work, and more specifically, how does that relate to what you have done at COPs and what you were doing at this COP28?

ALEXIS

Yeah, so as the University of Oxford were observers to the COP, which basically means you have this officially mandated role within the UNFCCC to observe and kind of add your inputs from afar to the negotiations. So observers cannot take the floor within the negotiation spaces, but there's a lot of architecture for observers to influence the decisions that are being made at the COP. So, just as an example, I'll give an excellent example of my colleague, Angie Johnston, who sits within oxygen zero as well, as well as the institute that I sit in. So she's an expert on kind of the voluntary carbon market, and she was tracking the Article 6 negotiations very, very carefully. So she is an expert who goes to COP as an observer, tracks the negotiations to a degree of minutiae that a lot of the negotiators wouldn't have because they're covering so many different agenda items, and was making kind of advisory recommendations to say this would be an option that would lead you to XYZ, whereas this option would have these potential consequences. So as an expert in her field, she has the opportunity to basically guide decisions and to provide a layer of robustness and expertise. As an example, as well, my colleagues who work on carbon removals, we have a carbon removal research hub here at Oxford, which also kind of sits in across Oxford Net Zero as well. There's a lot of people wearing multiple hats within Oxford. It's kind of a theme, but they were also giving a lot of advice and on the text on carbon removals. And I think the role of academia, especially the role of academia for trusted institutions like Oxford, who have a long term reputation of academic integrity, is basically offering the truth as it is and not something that is necessarily politicized. I think, this is maybe a bit of a, you know, rosy view of academia, but I really one of the reasons why I love academia, and why I have stayed in academia for the last almost five years now, is I really believe in knowledge being produced for the sake of knowledge. And absent of, you know, not, not that you know, any knowledge is, you know, contextualized, but I do think, within our research group, I really admire the researchers who are producing it so that humanity has a better understanding of where we are on climate, rather than for a specific, you know, market function or for specific lobbying function, or there are many ways that knowledge is produced in ways that look at a very particular piece of the puzzle without zooming out. So, I think, as observers, I guess the first thing is, yeah, adding robustness and expertise to the decisions that are made and offering that sort of guidance role. The second is, I think, driving attention to neglected areas of climate action. So this was my role, really sitting outside of the where the negotiations are and more in the space of kind of non-state actor ambition on climate.

So just as an example, I spent the good chunk of 2023, working with the Race to Zero, which is a UN backed global campaign to basically ratchet up ambition for non-state actors to reach net zero. So obviously, the Paris Agreement handles state actors and the Race to Zero as a kind of ambition and mandate to get non-state actors more engaged on climate action. So they have within their ranks, you know, corporates, including lots of SMEs, educational institutions, hospitals, other kind of non-state actors and their commitment is to, you know, meet a baseline of criteria and join the Race to Zero, i.e. have this kind of ambition to act on on climate action. And I spent a good chunk of 2023 working with them on a working group that they set up on defining and bringing better light to what we ended up calling serviced emissions, which is the emissions that are enabled by advisory services like consultancies or law firms or advertisers. And we had a working group that I was co-chairing with another Oxford colleague, and we brought together kind of a series of recommendations. And at COP, we launched those to say, this is what you know, currently, the landscape for carbon accounting doesn't really have a good space for these kind of emissions, which are enabled, but not necessarily entirely under the purview of, you know, for example, management consulting firms. And so part of the work there was to say, this is robust because there's an academic institution behind it, but there is a kind of an air of authority, because the Race to Zero has been the convener of this. Bring those two actors together and say this is what we think about service emissions, and then start to seed those conversations of saying this will eventually be a part of the things that we come to expect from advisory firms, that they will be either acknowledging their impact of service emissions or abiding by some kind of maybe potential future criteria. But trying to socialize those ideas is something that is a big part of COPs, which I don't think isas you know,  a front of mind, yeah.

And then I guess the last one, the last area that Oxford, in particular, in that I was working on, is obviously as an educational institution. We work on capacity building, which is both capacity building for the people that we interact with. So like, for example, some of my colleagues do some capacity building with policymakers, try to get them to understand, what is Net Zero, what does good Net Zero look like, what's bad Net Zero look like. But my capacity building project that I ran last year was really about strengthening the observer ecosystem, particularly when it came to young activists. Because at COP 27 I had met a group of young activists who said, you know, we know tons about climate change. We work on climate action within our own regional or domestic contexts. We've come to COP because we think it's really important, but COPs are super confusing and really hard to wrap your head around. And there, we feel like our voices aren't being listened to because our ideas aren't being packaged in the language that the UNFCCC will see. So we don't know how to translate these kind of big goals or domestic projects that we're working on into the minutia of, you know, whether or not you should advocate for a negotiator saying calls for or suggests, you know, in the in the final text.

And so myself and colleagues at Oxford Net Zero as well, partnered up with a group called the Global Youth Coalition which are an amazing group of young activists, and we basically put together this training program to try to get young activists to kind of get to grips with the complexity of the UNFCCC system. And that was a really interesting partnership, because it was a mix of the energy reach and network of the youth movement to say this has happened, this course is happening, it's legit, we want people to sign up. And then the kind of gravitas of Oxford to be able to invite really heavy hitters to speak and be a part of the course in our training program, and, for example, to fundraise extremely quickly to cover the course so that every participant who did it did for free. The kind of access that we have at Oxford is something I'm extremely aware of. And, so we put together that program really quickly. We had 4500 people go through it in six months. And a big part of my role at COP was also to basically go back and say, we did this amazing program. It was super cool. But what are we missing? What are the capacity needs that we didn't quite reach? What are some areas that we could work on improving for 2024? So, that was also kind of part of my mandate at COP was saying, when we're thinking about capacity building. What else do people need? So just very fun tasks, actually, just talking to a lot of really interesting, fun people and asking them how Oxford, in collaboration with the Global Youth Coalition and other youth groups, could be a better as an educational institution, could better serve the climate justice ecosystem by facilitating capacity building for more people.

KIM

Now that you've had a couple months to decompress and reflect and hopefully get a little bit of sleep after COP. I know running around at a COP can be very stressful, and I've tried to follow some of your content, and I know it's hard to like do the work and then share the work at the same time. So now that you've had some time, what's your big picture reflections on what happened at this COP28, like the biggest wins and losses? I mean, we mentioned fossil fuels for the first time, which I don't know how big of a win that is…

ALEXIS

Yeah. So, it's interesting, because we we mentioned fossil fuels for the first time a couple of COPs ago, which is crazy, the first time you ever mentioned it, but it was the first time you mentioned transitioning away from fossil fuels, which was kind of the big change from previous COPs to this year to, I guess, last year COP28, which in many ways, like is insane that we first mentioned, you know, fossil fuels.

KIM

Right, like we haven't known about fossil fuels for years.

ALEXIS

But I also think it is quite phenomenal to see in just a few years, it transitioned from a complete nail biter of whether or not it was going to be mentioned in the text in COP 26 to then being discussed is transitioning away within three years is quite interesting. I mean, it's definitely further than we expected, but not as far as we need to go. That's kind of how I would put it. I will say, some of the wins, like as this is always my win from COP, is the coordination among civil society or climate justice groups in particular, is phenomenal. There's a real sense of purpose drive, one sense of direction that everyone's going to and I do think that the fossil fuel phase out calls provided a real rally and cry for lots of different types of groups to come together behind and there was this kind of mantra of fossil fuel phase out being fast, fair, full funded, and I heard forever as well from some people. But, it was very clear people were echoing each other's points. There was a lot of coordination, which I mean, it's every year, that is my key takeaways, the strength of the climate justice movement. There was also interesting cross-sectoral and particularly private sector, ambition is maybe too strong a word, but involvement in the double down, triple up kind of campaign, which was basically doubling down on energy efficiency and tripling up of renewables capacity. There was really wide engagement on that. And actors like the, we mean, Business Coalition were good at kind of rallying support around that, which basically was good to have businesses saying, this is what we want, double down, triple up, and that actually ended up making it into the kind of final GST covert text, like we need to double down on energy efficiency and triple up energy, triple up renewable energy capacity. It's quite interesting to see businesses pushing for that as kind of a landscape, fair play. What do you call that? Fair playing field? There we go.

KIM

Yeah, yeah. Fair play.

ALEXIS

Level playing field, there you go. So, I guess those are some of the wins that there was, good involvement. There's also, in general, the pros and cons of COP growing exponentially bigger every year. It was absolutely enormous this year and that has changed dramatically. The biggest cop ever by a long stretch. And Oxford climate policy, which is a hub here in Oxford, they did a mapping of registered delegates each year. And, I saw a presentation that they did last week where they showed the bar charts, and they had to, you know, they have to zoom out to show how big the one for COP28 was. In many ways, I totally agree with the people who are outraged by that, and saying 100,000 people traveling is obscene, and, that is not at all where we need to be. In other ways, I somewhat understand people also saying, in a way, we think about the scale of the problem. Is it fairly reasonable to have that many people working on it from all these different sectors? Is it kind of a good sign that people are viewing it as a place that they find valuable discussions or work? I do think it's very much been co-opted by corporate interests. And I have very, I take issue with the amount of people that go just to take pictures and say that they went. But I also, in my New Year's resolution, I'm trying to be less grumpy about things and trying to kind of see the positive. And I do think that is kind of a win. On the losses, I think the main thing that I saw is, as I said, sort of a co-opting of the climate space, but a real need for better climate literacy to understand, what I think that corporates have gotten really good at the double talk, and are no longer saying things that are very obviously not good for climate. And, I think the problem that I see is that at first glance, everything they do now looks good, and you actually need quite a bit of expertise to be able to peel it back. So just as an example, there was the oil and gas decarbonization charter, which had a bunch of, I think around 80 or something, I'd have to fact check myself, oil and gas companies committing to Net Zero emissions by 2050. And they had, as you're walking in to the venue, they had kind of messages that were on these massive screens that would kind of scroll through on the day. And there was, basically a whole day that was dedicated to a video that just showed all the signatories of the oil and gas decarbonization charter, and then there were these big videos saying, you know, all this oil and gas companies committing to Net Zero emissions by 2050. That's amazing, that's amazing. But actually, if you scratch below the surface, or scratch beneath the surface, you see that they're going to Net Zero emissions by 2050 for their own operations, which doesn't cover the scope three emissions, i.e. what they sell, which is what accounts for 95% of their emissions. So, I think the problem is that there is this real, at the best case scenario, it is like a misunderstanding. The worst case scenario is an incredibly sinister co-opting of actiony kind of language. But a lot of people don't know the difference, because you'd have to know what scope three emissions were. You'd have to know what that meant in order to kind of critically evaluate it or so, another kind of dog whistle for that is talking about fossil fuel emissions rather than fossil fuels. So when the one of the draft texts came out for the global stock take, had fossil fuel phase out as one of the options, like with that were being negotiated. And there was, quite famously, or like scandalously, there was a leak from a letter from OPEC to member states of the UNFCCC, which then got leaked to the press, that was basically how the exact text urged them to, “proactively reject any text or formula that targets, i.e, fossil fuels rather than emissions”. And of course, that basically means we're fine with potentially talking about CCS, potentially paying for CCS, that could be a potential way to manage this. But we definitely don't want to stop using fossil fuels, which, as I said earlier, like we need to move away from fossil fuels for more reasons than just sequestering carbon.

KIM

Right.

ALEXIS

And so if we think, if you are talking, and it's interesting now talking to people who are not that familiar with COP using phase out of fossil fuel emissions and phase out of fossil fuels interchangeably. And I want to, I always want to correct them, or I always do correct them, because I'm obnoxious saying, those are two different things. Those are two different things. And if you allow yourself to be swung into this state of….

KIM

Rose-colored glasses?

ALEXIS

Yeah! And thinking that you know that you're okay because they're talking about fossil fuel emissions like that in itself, is a signal for them trying to do something much more sinister. So, I do think that was the thing that was the key loss I took away, and apart from other things like the final language not having enough provisions for financing of a transition away from fossil fuels. Because there were lots of countries who were opposing a discussion about phase out for fossil fuels, not because they love fossil fuels and want to, you know, continue using fossil fuels forever, but because it's not fair to say no more fossil fuels and give no financing or support in order to be able to do that. So, I agree with that kind of approach on Net Zero, and I realize I'm taking a long time to answer each question, but.

KIM

No, I love everything that you're saying. I hope that you're [INAUDIBLE] also.

ALEXIS

Okay. On Net Zero, like there were some interesting pieces. So last year, the UN Secretary General established what he called a high-level expert group on the Net Zero commitments of non-state actors. And basically, it was, COP26, I think about the COPs in terms of Net Zero, which I do, COP26 was like wild west, every single Tom, Dick, and Harry was making a Net Zero commitment without any sense of what that actually meant. And then COP27 was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what does Net Zero actually mean? Can we put some like qualifiers on what it means to actually get to Net Zero? So that was like we launched the ISO Net Zero guidelines that I was talking about earlier. Antonio Guterres assembled this amazing group of experts. One of my colleagues, Jessica Omokuti, sits within Oxford Net Zero was on this group of, I think 25 people who are basically evaluating what good Net Zero looks like for non-state actors, and they released their guidance at COP27. And there was kind of all these people piling in to say, this is what good Net Zero looks like. And COP28 was really about, how do we take those key criteria for Net Zero and embed it into regulation. So it's not just in the voluntary landscape. So Antonio Guterres' high level expert group, the next sort of phase of that is the task force on Net Zero policy and regulation. So they're basically working to align the policy and regulation landscape with Net Zero, with achieving Net Zero alongside, kind of the recommendations that they made last year. So that was a big win on Net Zero. It's good to see there's like a continual, emerging ecosystem of accountability, which I feel Oxford Net Zero is very much across. We have colleagues who work across these departments, which makes you feel very close to this Net Zero integrity landscape, which I like. I guess the theme for this one is that loopholes are closing. So we had the Race to Zero guidance that I worked on, come out on service emissions. So it's like just because you're a consultancy doesn't mean you can hide. Just because you're a law firm doesn't mean you can hide. It's not binding, but it's kind of our first attempt at saying these emissions are important and deserve being looked at. And the Net Zero tracker, which I mentioned, which we track all the Net Zero commitments, we added on another, we say we, my colleagues, added on an additional part of that tracker, which basically showed people, countries or cities or corporates who have a Net zero commitment, how many of them include a fossil fuel phase out commitment as part of that? And it's very few. I think it's like, I'd have to have the exact number in front of me, but I think less than 5%. So that was also great. It's a great triangulation of  what Net Zero means. So there were some definite wins there, I would say. And then, apart from anything else, there’s so much resistance, there's such joyful resistance. There was a massive demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza, which showed the which happened inside the COP venue, which just showed the sort of intersections between our movements. I really feel that, I read somewhere, that climate grief or climate anxiety is really just an expression of love for place and people, and I think that you can really see like a lot of righteous anger, but beneath that is like a carefor each other, a care for ecosystems, a care for place. And I was very heartened to see like, I feel like COP is both incredibly draining and overwhelming, and this total kick up the butt to be to say, there are loads of people relying on you to get work done, and it's kind of a good energizer in that way too.

KIM

Yeah, sometimes I think about love and grief as two sides of the same coin. If you love something, then you're going to miss it greatly, and you're going to grieve the loss. It's like the buy in that if you choose to love, you have to be okay with the other side of it. Fascinating. Thank you for that. Now moving on to the communication part of it, since this is ostensibly a communication podcast that we're doing, I wanted to ask you how you communicate about climate change in your work, you are so eloquent in how you talk. I have to say using so many different phrases and keywords, I feel like I have a running list of these keywords that you're using.

ALEXIS

Oh that's good, because I feel a bit, my brain is a bit sludgy after a day of work. So it's good to hear. I'm somewhat coherent. So communication during COP is interesting, because sitting in an academic research group with an objective to further climate action with integrity is interesting, because we are trying to further climate action with integrity, but we are also academics. And academics, as I have learned, they are their own people, and they should be able to say what they want that reflects their research and their goals and their outcomes. And I originally approached my work at Oxford Net Zero thinking we're sort of like a think tank NGO. Like we have the key messages that we want to get across, we're all going to agree on them, we're all going to push them out with every chance that we get. So for example, at for pre COP28, we gathered all of the researchers across the oxford Net Zero ecosystem, which is, as I said, like 35-ish researchers. We said, what do we agree on? What are the key messages we agree on when it comes to nature-based solutions or sustainable finance, or carbon capture and storage or fossil fuels? And can we agree on that and send those out to journalists? But I think what I realized is that part of the joy and frustration of academia is that people are their own agents, and as an academic, you're very much your own, you kind of stand alone. So we went into COP with this sort of understanding of each other's key messages, but no, you're not beholden to them. Which is both good and bad. I'm glad that I'm not beholden, and I can say the things that I want, which is great, but it also is frustrating when there are, for example, colleagues that we have different ways of viewing the world, that we respect each other, but I it's hard, especially when you're all under the label of Oxford Net Zero, or are all under the label of the University of Oxford to communicate that to other people who know that you work with others. So to say that you don't necessarily agree with your colleague is an interesting one. For myself, I think what I have always tried to do is explain things in plain language. I have a massive bugbear of academics who can't explain their research or their key messages in ways that a 15-year old would understand. People sometimes say five year old. I get that you you need to have some level of complexity, because things are complicated. But I think that being, I always think about, would a teenager understand this? And if they don't, then you need to peel it back and peel it back. Because, I mean, in no way kind of say that the average person is, at the level of a 15-year old. But you know, when I read articles, I think about this all the time, I read articles, I read the news every day, and I'm reading about things that I know nothing about, and I need a journalist to explain that to me in ways that will effectively capture the backstory and give me the points I need to know. And I think that climate experts in particular are bad at, myself included, are bad at not giving 30 minutes of context before you get to your point, especially academics, we caveat everything we say. So thing what we try to do is simplify the language that was pre COP, like explaining in plain language what, what is COP? What do we expect to get out of COP? What would a good COP look like? Trying to engage people in ways that are a little bit different. For the first time ever, we did some TikToks with the University, which was an interesting experience. It's so time consuming.

KIM

Are you doing dances related to climate change, like?

ALEXIS

No, just saying, kind of fun. Like a day in the life for someone at COP28, for example, but adding in a little bit of personal information as well, not just like, I went to this negotiation and I stood there and you're kind of adding a little bit of color to it, which I think kind of humanizes. I mean, I think part of the reason why the university wants to do that is to humanize people at Oxford and make people feel, especially Oxford, which has a long reputation of being very exclusive and putting people off who are not from a very particular class background, I think trying to make it, seem more accessible. But yeah, trying to communicate in ways that are a little bit different. It's also interesting, because a lot of the most valuable information that I got was disseminated through WhatsApp.  It's interesting, because WhatsApp and Twitter become like my two lifelines during COP because you're added to a bunch of group chats of people sending by the minute updates. It feels very strange to like move your life from emails and like teams, for example, into WhatsApp, which moves really fast. And then Twitter, I was like, checking for the specific, there are some journalists that I follow, who I trust, and then some kind of NGO advocates who I trust as well to kind of give me the scoop on different negotiation items that we are following. So during that, I kind of am both absorbing in those ways, and then kind of communicating my own things in those ways too. And then post COP, to be honest, we haven't really done a post COP debrief. I think I'm still a bit like burnt out from it, but I think what we will be doing in the coming weeks, just kind of where do we get to, and what does it mean to particularly progress on Net Zero, which is kind of everything. But you know, particularly in the sort of Net Zero accountability landscape. I just did a presentation last week to some students, which is good. I feel like the teaching opportunities are good way to kind of consolidate. But you know, what do we, what were the outcomes from COP and what did we learn, and that kind of stuff helps me reflect on the sort of, what I was saying earlier, wins and losses and things. So a little bit more internal Oxford facing at the moment, but soon we'll kind of compress, like digest enough to be able to go outwards.

KIM

Wow.  Yeah!. I'm sure as an organization, you're still coming to grips with what just the heck happened. Thank you. Transitioning now to the future, I'm still figuring out how to ask this question, but some concept of you can't really live the future that you can't envision, or I feel like there's a lot of dystopian views of what's going to happen with climate change and novels out there and Cli- fi and like, the world is going to end and burn and, you know. But I like to orient the conversation about the future more about, the positive view of what we want to envision, and then work toward that vision. So you don't have to give a positive view, if that's not your honest take on it. But what's your vision for the future of I kind of framed it as the climate, but specifically about COPs and looking ahead to which is an Azerbaijan, I think, coming up.

ALEXIS

Yeah. So this is a good test my New Year's resolution, which was to approach climate work with a sense of radical hope. Radical hope meaning, not a naivete about what it will take to get us there, but hope in that I'm not just gonna lay down at halftime and give up, especially because my privilege and security and, removal from the immediate impacts right now of climate. So, I think it's profoundly unethical for people to, I understand climate grief, and I experience a lot myself. I do think it's frustrating when people say, therefore, I can't engage and I won't do this work, which is maybe a bit insensitive, but I think it's, especially for people who I know, who are in very, very privileged positions, who choose not to engage because it makes them feel bad. All this to say trying to approach climate work through the lens of radical hope and my positive vision for collective future is, I think, really centered around communities that live in harmony is maybe a bit too, you know, Kumbaya, a word, but in harmony with each other and with the natural world. I would love to see a future where people at a baseline have a sense of what it means to live in community. Not only your immediate community, but having this sense of solidarity across borders and having a sense of solidarity to someone you have never or will never meet, and understanding that your actions will impact their quality of life would be an amazing thing if people were brought up and lived their lives feeling the kinship that they feel with their neighbors, with people that they will never meet. So I think my positive vision for the future is this sense of solidarity, where people wake up and go to bed thinking about others and thinking about the natural world, spending time in the natural world. It would involve very different relationship with work, for example, and having work as a reflection of identity. I think my main problem that I have with work, and the work that some of my colleagues or contacts do, is that work is very much just a paycheck and a way to allow themselves to afford like their lifestyle, rather than a reflection of who they want to be and what they want to reflect in the world. And I very much understand that people need to work for a paycheck. I'm not saying that everyone has to do like mission-oriented work. But I also think that having a reflection on whether or not the things that you do in the day-to-day, whether or not they're making the world a better, safer, more just place or not, and thinking about where you sit within that, and whether or not if you have the relative privilege to be able to perhaps, pursue a different line of work. So yeah, that's one bit on work. I think energy access is like a big piece that I view on a collective future. And I think a lot about transitioning our energy system from one that doesn't work in the UK, we've had so many discussions about energy in the last couple of years, and we see a conservative government that has very much weaponized the discussion of energy security to further their own kind of political goals, and saying that oil and gas is the way forward for energy security, and that couldn't be further from the truth. We are very much within reach of having a system that operates on, basically that the reason why we don't have a future that operates on, don't have an energy system that operates on community owned renewable energy is not because it wouldn't be possible, it's because there are lots of vested interests trying to prevent it from making it happen, including sort of $700 billion annually in subsidies to prop up the fossil fuel industry, to make it seem like it's a cheap option when it's not. It's not both financially as well as for our health, for our environment and all the natural capital that we lose. So yeah, I think a very different approach to energy. I struggle with this question, because there's so many different pieces to a collective imagined future, and there I've had windows into it in many ways, like I live in a town that has like a library of things, and people all go to borrow, like an air mattress, like I don't own an air mattress when I have guests to stay,  I can rent it out from my library of things. And I love pieces like that. It gives me, a vision of what it might look like in the future. When you think about COPs, I think my main thing is just like a vision, if I think about Baku and like, what it will be like in November, which feels terrifyingly close, is more trained up, more connected civil society movement that is able to respond in real time to changes in the negotiations that would have a material impact on the outcome of a COP. So, having a network, much like the informal network, so they exist sort of on WhatsApp and through these sort of trusted networks of saying, this is an option on the table. I need to mobilize the experts to validate why this is a bad idea, or why this is a good idea. I need civil society to sort of mobilize their ranks, to push their negotiators. I need sort of trusted relationships within the finance communities to say whether or not they'll act on making sure that finance is delivered and mobilized in time. So I think having this sort of ecosystem that can support and prop up the negotiations and really get back to what an observer at COP is meant to do, just like very much, be facilitating good outcomes. I think that would be my ideal outcome for a future COP.

KIM

Love it. Thank you. For all of it. A final question or opportunity to plug your Oxford Net Zero or your other work, other groups, channels or things that you think people should be more aware of.

ALEXIS

Yeah, for sure. So you can find our work at netZzeroclimate.org. You can check out all the different researchers that I mentioned there. We have this wonderful ecosystem of people within Oxford. I would really plug the Net Zero tracker, which is the one that I mentioned, that we track cities, countries, and corporates. The work that they do is phenomenal and really important watchdog function. And then the last thing I'll plug, I guess, is our Global Youth Coalition Oxford Net Zero Youth Climate training. I will send the link to the kind of page on our Oxford Net Zero website where we talk about that, because it is all available, accessible online, on YouTube, we made everything open access, and it's available in French, Portuguese and Spanish as well. So would really love to hear people's thoughts on that. And we're working towards our next cohort, which will be in the summer, God willing. And so, I'm really lucky to work with really smart and compassionate people, and I'm always really curious and keen to connect with people who are in this ecosystem. So if you have any questions, if you, I don't know if they can get in touch, but Alexis would give her, you can find me on LinkedIn or whatever. I always want to make sure that the Oxford ecosystem is not a closed one, and that we're always kind of open to chatting and learning and yeah, being taking a more ecosystem approach to this work. So thanks so much for having me. It's been really great to chat with you.

KIM

Thank you. Thank you so much for all your time, and I know how busy you are and all the great work that you do. So thanks for taking the time to chat. Yeah, and you're just so inspiring, and all the work that you do is fantastic. So keep it up, even when you're feeling grumpy about it.

ALEXIS

Thanks so much, Kim. And thank you so much. And I just want to say, like, you're one of the people that I think of very often when it comes to people doing work with integrity and spirit and soul. So yeah, keep doing what you're doing.

KIM

All right. Ending on a love fest, and see you later.

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KIM

You've been listening to Climate Decoded. Climate decoded is produced by Chantal Cough-Schultz,Schultz, Lara Davis-Jones, Isabelle Baudish, Greg Davis-Jones, Jens Wendel-Hansen,Hansen, Jamie Stark, Gracie Neher, Alex Teske, and me, Kim Kenny. To read the transcript, learn more about today's guest and find other resources. Check out the show notes to keep up with the podcast. Follow us on all the socials. We're at climate underscore decoded on Instagram and Twitter and Climate Decoded Podcast on LinkedIn to support the show, hit that follow button on your podcast platform of choice and drop us a rating or review. You can also donate to the podcast. Every little bit helps us bring you more climate content. You can find the link to donate in the show notes. Thanks for helping us get more people thinking about, talking about, and acting on climate change. Until next time, take care of yourselves and keep up the good work.

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