Water, Wildlife, and Climate’s Hidden Trade-Offs
Outrage + Optimism: The Climate Podcast
Persephonica
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The climate crisis is not one problem. It is a crisis of water, food, energy, language, justice and power - all colliding at once. So how do we respond when climate solutions create new trade-offs of their own? And are we even using the right words to describe what is happening?
In this episode, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson take on some of the knottiest questions in climate. From water stress and biodiversity loss, to geoengineering, public understanding, and the language of urgency itself. What gets overlooked? What gets simplified? And how do we navigate increasing complexity in the middle of a worsening crisis?
We don’t have all the answers. But as our choices grow harder, these are some of the questions that demand our attention.
Learn More:
💧 Dive into Why Water Matters from the UNFCCC
🦅 Explore how solar and wind energy producers can mitigate impacts on biodiversity
🎧 Listen back to last year’s episode unpacking some of climate’s most common acronyms
☁️ … or return to our most recent episode on geoengineering with Politico’s Karl Mathiesen
🎤 Leave us your voice notes and questions for upcoming episodes on SpeakPipe
Join the conversation:
Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimism
Or get in touch with us via this form.
Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks
Edited by: Miles Martignoni
Planning: Caitlin Hanrahan
Exec Producer: Ellie Clifford
This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. I'm Tom Rivikarnak. |
| 0:05.0 | I'm Christiana Figueres. |
| 0:06.4 | And I'm Paul Dickinson. |
| 0:07.3 | And we are still together and we're still answering your many questions. |
| 0:10.6 | Today we're going to be looking at impacts, tradeoffs and how we talk about climate. |
| 0:14.2 | Thanks for joining us. |
| 0:19.2 | Okay, friends, so another round at these brilliant questions is going to be our third episode of listener questions. |
| 0:25.5 | And honestly, they've been fantastic. So thank you to everybody who wrote in. |
| 0:29.6 | And I guess we should just kick off. So I believe the first one is a question we have from Samia. |
| 0:35.3 | And we have a recording. So let's go to that. I'm Samia |
| 0:39.6 | and Marafa working for water aid in Bangladesh. I'm here in Willem attending COP 30 and I want |
| 0:46.1 | to ask the podcast if water is kept at the heart of the climate conversations. Because in Bangladesh |
| 0:52.7 | back home, water is how we see the impacts |
| 0:55.9 | of the changing climate. This is how the changing climate enters our homes. And I want to know from |
| 1:01.9 | you if water has been given the importance that it needs to be in the decision making. |
| 1:09.5 | A fantastic question. There's lots to say there. |
| 1:11.5 | Paul, should we start with you? |
| 1:13.3 | Well, I certainly don't know as much about the problems of water in Bangladesh as you do. |
| 1:18.1 | I mean, there are obviously two, I'm just going to talk a little bit about categories here. |
| 1:21.8 | People most closely associate problems with water in Bangladesh's rising sea levels, |
| 1:25.6 | where there's catastrophic problems for literally millions of people from rising sea levels. I remember seeing an extraordinary piece of work |
| 1:31.6 | that was about a necessity for families to tie babies up at night because if a baby were to |
... |
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