Lessons from the forest for climate change

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2022

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, has set us a challenge: Is it possible to tackle climate change whilst also lifting people out of extreme poverty?

Her question - posed to the BBC's Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt - is inspired by her own experience of tackling deforestation in Tanzania. As her colleague Emmanuel Mtiti explains, they convinced local villagers to stop felling trees, and to restore the natural habitat of chimpanzees, by offering them an alternative path to prosperity.

So could an equivalent path be available that avoids increasing carbon emissions? If so then it would break with the pattern seen in Europe, America and China, where economic development was almost entirely fuelled by burning coal, oil and gas, according to Hannah Ritchie, head of research at Oxford University's Our World in Data team. But the micro-finance pioneer Muhamad Yunus says that solar power does now offer a carbon-free way forwards.

The programme contains audio from the 1965 National Geographic documentary film Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, as well as audio recorded at Gombe National Park and the surrounding area by Ruth Happel and Bernie Krause.

Producer: Laurence Knight

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to Business Daily on the BBC World Service with me, Justin Rowlat. I'm the BBC's
0:07.2	climate editor and today we'll be exploring a proposition put to us by the world's most famous
0:14.0	primatologist. Can we actually tackle climate change without also alleviating poverty.
0:22.1	That's the question from Jane Goodall, who's been doing groundbreaking research with chimpanzees
0:27.4	since the 1960s. Unfortunately, though, the data is not encouraging. There is a very tight
0:34.9	connection between carbon emissions and your level of income.
0:39.5	As you get richer, typically your CO2 emissions will also rise.
0:43.6	So will the world's poorest have to stay in poverty to save us all from global warming?
0:48.6	Don't worry, the answer is no.
0:50.8	But stay tuned to Business Daily to find out why.
0:59.3	In July 1960, Jane Goodall, a 26-year-old English girl, has embarked on a remarkable adventure.
1:06.8	It is more than 60 years since Jane Goodall began her pioneering work in Tanzania's
1:12.4	Gombe National Park, as reported in this National Geographic documentary from way back then.
1:19.2	When I arrived at the Gombe Stream Reserve, I felt that at long last, my childhood ambition was
1:25.1	being realised. Well, Jane is now in her mid-80s and still going strong.
1:30.8	I'm mostly known for having studied chimpanzees as the first person ever
1:36.3	and finding out that we humans are not the only beings using and making tools.
1:41.9	And of course, your studies of chimpanzee population revealed unexpected things like they eat meat.
1:47.9	They can be hideous, violent bullies sometimes, as well as incredibly tender and loving.
1:53.1	Yes, they're just like people.
1:54.6	They have a dark side and a loving side, just like us.
1:58.8	Jane's been invited to be a guest editor here at the BBC.
	...

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