It's TED Talks Daily, and I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

If there's one thing the COVID-19 crisis has made clear, it's how interconnected we are as humans on this planet.

Climate change poses a similar collective problem for the globe, and Nigel Topping knows this all too well.

He's the UK high-level climate action champion,

and at TED 2020, he sat down with Ted's global curator,

Bruno Giussani, to make sense of the systemic changes afoot,

the hope he has for the next generation,

and how we can individually contribute to solving the climate crisis.

Our next guest is Nigel Topping.

His official title is UK high-level climate action champion

for the United Nations Climate Conference, the COP 26,

which was planned to take place in November 2020 in Glasgow, UK, and it has been postponed to 2021.

Now, 2020 was to be the year of climate, in a way, of climate action, really.

Five years after the Paris Agreement, the moment when the world would come together and take stock of whether

there has been progress or not and what kind of progress, and maybe even up the level of

ambition towards, you know, reaching the targets set towards 2030 and 2050. And then the COVID-19

pandemic arrived and shook that momentum. But in the minds of some,

the health crisis and the economic crisis are reasons for pushing the post-bottom on climate.

Others instead seem to think that the pandemic has actually shown the fragility of the basis of our economic

system and of our society. And that's what we're going to talk about, about climate change

and system change with our guest. Nigel Topping, welcome to TED 2020. Hi, Bruno. Nice to join

you. I think that we need to start from COPP.

...