It's Elise Hugh. This is TED Talks Daily. Something powerful is happening around the world.

The issue of climate change has moved from the margins to the mainstream. And in his talk recorded

for Countdown in 2021, Alec Sharma, the head of COP26, which is the UN's big conference on climate,

unpacks what this shift means for the global economy and the urgent actions that need

to happen to limit global temperature rise. Learn more about countdown and get involved at

countdown. ted.com.

I'm here in the heart of London's financial district, the square mile.

This is the area where I worked at the start of my investment banking career in the 90s as a fresh-faced youth.

But if you told me then that I would end up as COP26 precedent,

I think I'd have asked you what COP26 was.

It's a 26th United Nations Climate Conference,

and it's taking place in the UK.

But forget the technical terms.

What COP26 really stands for is our last chance to avoid the worst effects of climate change. And I'll come back to that later. The point is that when I began my

Korean banking, climate didn't feature particularly highly, but certainly not in finance,

and not so much in the rest of the country either.

In the 90s,

of Sykeichael Swampi,

who spent time occupying trees and tunnels,

and he was the main face of climate action in the United Kingdom.

But you know, things change.

I remember being on a flight in the late 2000s and watching Al Gore's film and inconvenient truth. And I really watch an entire film, but this one I watched twice

...