Achim Steiner | Breaking Barriers to Progress (S9-E8)

 

 

 

 

Melissa Fleming 00:00

I guess all of us are looking for a world that is peaceful and also prosperous. But how do we get there?

 

Achim Steiner 00:07

Some of our greatest risks lie if we don't solve problems - inequality, poverty, but also transition to clean energy, addressing gender equity. I mean, these are things that will tear us apart and will destroy the foundations for life. So we have to find a way to come together and work on this.

 

Melissa Fleming 00:31

For Achim Steiner it is about what's called sustainable development, but it's also about fairness. Born in Brazil to German parents, Achim is also an environmentalist. He now serves as the administrator of UNDP, which is the United Nations Development Programme. From the United Nations, I'm Melissa Fleming. This is Awake at Night. Welcome, Achim.

 

Achim Steiner 01:07

Thank you very much, Melissa.

 

 

Melissa Fleming 01:08

I was looking at a list of places where you lived and worked. Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the United States. You're like a mini-United Nations yourself. I guess the UN felt like the right environment for you.

 

Achim Steiner 01:25

Well, it began by really having a passion for traveling and living in other cultures. I was born in Brazil. By the time I had finished university in the UK, I knew that I wanted to work in development. But I also knew that to me one of the great fascinations would be to live in other countries. So the two kind of converged. And yes, I've been given this wonderful opportunity to live in many different places. Always felt at home in them. And in that sense, yes, I then later on only became a part of the UN family. I mean, it began outside the UN, so to speak, more on the non-governmental and development cooperation arena.

 

Melissa Fleming 02:09

I understand in Brazil you grew up. Your parents were German. You lived on a farm. What was your farm like? Like what did you grow? Did you have animals?

 

Achim Steiner 02:21

Oh, yes many. My parents after studying agriculture, tropical agriculture, moved to Brazil in the late 50s. And they had been offered a job there. And the idea was to develop new varieties that Brazil could use to reduce the import of grains. And therefore it was a traditional also plant-breeding farm, but it also had cattle. It was in the south of Brazilian Rio Grande do Sul, the country of the famous gauchos. And so I was born in a small town in Rio Grande do Sul, and then grew up on that farm for the first eight years. And, then the last two years, we lived in Porto Alegre, which is, you know, the state capital and the city by the coast before my parents then decided that it was a moment in which they wanted to move on. And so, unfortunately, I'd say to this day, we left Brazil when I was ten.

 

Melissa Fleming 03:18

What was that like, moving from such a beautiful, warm environment to Germany?

 

 

Achim Steiner 03:24

You know, maybe as a young kid you don't necessarily see the weather as the main characteristic. It was more having grown up in Brazil and having grown up on a farm. I mean, I literally learned to ride a horse before I could walk, in a sense. I was just put on... You know because this was a cattle ranch as well. So you had a lot of gauchos looking after cattle. It was done with horses. So anybody who knows a great gaucho saddle knows that it's one of the most comfortable places to be on Earth. So I was simply parked on one of those saddles and taken along.

And that sense of freedom, and also, you know, having an opportunity to ride sometimes for hours without hitting a fence. The first thing I remember noticing - we had then moved to Germany for a few years - was that wherever you turn there were fences and there were boundaries, and you couldn't move. And how dare you set foot on somebody else's land. And, you know, these kinds of experiences that as a kid you register far more quickly. And you know, school life was very different as well. And frankly, the football team that I most loved and adored was actually doing very well in those days. This was, you know, the 1970s. And in that sense, I felt, at least initially, in the wrong place.

 

Melissa Fleming 04:40

What was the football team?

 

Achim Steiner 04:41

Brazil. In terms of the World Cups, right? Yeah. The national team. The Seleção as we call it in Brazil. Yeah.

 

Melissa Fleming 04:49

Where did you move to in Germany?

 

Achim Steiner 04:51

It was in the centre of Germany, Lower Saxony. It was a rural area. My parents being farmers then set up as farmers there. And so, you know, I continued to grow up on a farm and that made it over time also fun. I spent a lot of time essentially, you know, on tractors and on the fields and so on. I mean, this was a farming family, so it was fun.

 

Melissa Fleming 05:14

I imagine they spoke to you in German at home or were you also speaking Portuguese?

 

Achim Steiner 05:20

Well, I grew up at home with German and my parents' Portuguese, as I grew older was always a bit of an issue that you would keep in the background because they had to learn it as they moved to Brazil. But I actually went to a local school in Carazinho. I learned Portuguese. I sang the anthem every Monday morning. And I was born in Brazil, so I also have, you know, Brazilian nationality. It was part of my upbringing. So in some ways, actually, my parents were getting a little bit worried that I only spoke Portuguese by the time I was eight or nine and not really German. And so they had to also, you know, make a decision, would they stay forever in Brazil? And I think they themselves felt that the world was too large to, you know, settle down. And that's why they then decided around my age of ten to move on, so to speak.

 

Melissa Fleming 06:08

And what did the kids say about your accent when you spoke German? When you came back and went to that first day of school.

 

Achim Steiner 06:16

You know, where we then moved to in Germany was a very rural area. So it was one of those schools, primary schools, where there was one teacher, four classes taught in parallel. So my biggest difficulty was German grammar, which anybody who has tried to learn German will confirm if you have to learn it, not as a mother tongue but as a school subject, is close to a nightmare. It took me a while to adjust and, you know, as a young person, it's amazing how you quickly adapt and, you know, you learn languages very quickly. So it wasn't... Language was not sort of a preoccupation after a while.

 

 

Melissa Fleming 06:54

And you didn't stay in Germany though long, and you went to study in Oxford where, yet another language was being spoken. Why was that? Why did you decide to go to the UK?

 

Achim Steiner 07:06

Well, one of the things that then was clear to me very early on having had this life and sort of as a child, I wanted to work abroad. And I had fallen in love with the idea of something that was still quite unusual in those days. At the University of Oxford there was a course called "Philosophy, Politics and Economics". Today you can study it in many universities. In those days, it was quite rare. And so that's how I ended up choosing very deliberately, let's say, a field and a career that would automatically take me into the world at large.

 

Melissa Fleming 07:41

And I believe as a postgrad you worked in Pakistan for two years in the north-west border region. How did that experience change your life?

 

Achim Steiner 07:50

Well, a couple of intermediate stations or stops on the way. When I left Oxford, I actually went as a volunteer to the south of India. I was an apprentice with a local NGO. This was a very important... That's why I only mentioned before Pakistan a very important part of my life because it recalibrated this view of what can you actually do as an outsider, maybe as a foreigner in development. I worked literally with one of the Gandhian NGOs.

It was a tough year. I mean, living in a small room with my colleagues and having to confront the fact that a lot of what I had learned... I mean, here I was. I had graduated from the University of Oxford. I had done development economics. It was, at least initially, totally irrelevant to what people were struggling with there - land rights, human rights. You know, the challenges of being a Haryana non-caste person, etc..., gender.

And after leaving India, I knew that I had to go back and do some more thinking and studying.  That's when I went back to the London... the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, followed by a training in the German Development Institute. And then I was offered a project assistantship with GTZ, today called GIZ, in Pakistan. And this was in what was then called the North-West Frontier Province, with the extraordinary tribe of the Pathans and was the perfect induction for me. Because if you ever want to meet a people who will not wait for outsiders to come and try and tell them what needs doing or what they should be doing, then it is the Pathans.

 

 

 

Melissa Fleming 09:32

It seems that that struck you and there was a kind of veiled point about international people showing up somewhere and thinking that they can come with all the answers.

 

Achim Steiner 09:44

Exactly.

 

Melissa Fleming 09:45

They taught you that that isn't always the case.

 

Achim Steiner 09:47

Well, the wonderful combination was - there are no more hospitable people than the Pathans. I mean, literally your worst enemy is friend. When they are entering a village, you will first invite them to your house. This is a, you know, ethos amongst the Pathans. So it was never a 'Why are you here? Or what will you bring?' It is more, 'If you want to help us, then let us tell you what we think needs doing and then share with us what you bring. And then together we will decide on what needs doing.' And for a young development professional it was a very empowering experience because first of all, you don't know anyway what may be the best solution. Secondly, people who are willing to take you in and say to you, 'Look, we'll teach you about our life, and then together we'll think about what needs doing.' Was a very inspiring experience.

 

Melissa Fleming 10:39

And where did that lead you next? I understand you ended up going to live and work in so many parts of the world.

 

Achim Steiner 10:47

Then, in a sense, life had taken a very serendipitous sort of route. In Pakistan I had come across an organization called the International Union for Conservation of Nature. IUCN is one of the more remarkable conservation bodies, one of the oldest in modern times, a global organization. Almost like a UN, but without being a UN organization. And they had essentially overtaken the development community by the 90s in thinking about environment and development.

So I decided to leave the development community in the traditional sense and joined IUCN's regional programme for Southern Africa, moved to Harare. And worked under an extraordinary Zambian. I think he was probably one of the first environmental diplomats, really. India Musokotwane was his name. And in the years that I worked with him, I really began to, I think, find the theme that has been central to my working life, which is how, in our age, do we overcome this supposed competition between ecology and economy, which is leading us really to so many destructive and ultimately increasingly catastrophic realities around the world?

 

Melissa Fleming 12:00

This career choice of merging environmental sustainability with economic development. Some people might say that those two goals are contradictory. What would you say to that?

 

 

Achim Steiner 12:16

It's precisely this myth that already began to frustrate me at university. The rules of the game are that we are suffocating ourselves with pollution. We are destroying our atmosphere with carbon emissions, and we are also destroying biodiversity and our ecology, our ecological infrastructure all over the world. The costs of that to people and the economy right now are already so phenomenal that I think we just have to accelerate the pace of showing the cost of inaction yet again.

Because if you talk to insurance companies today, if you just watch the news. Remember the last 12 months. From floods to forest fires to coastal erosion. In some parts of the world, not enough water for seven years - the drought in East Africa. Then suddenly floods, such as in Dubai - more than two and a half times the annual rainfall in less than 24 hours. This is the future that is neither manageable nor affordable if we don't act. And so in the end, I think we are seeing these reflexes to try and go back to yesterday's energy economy or economy still happening. But frankly, the journey forward is very clear, and I think it will happen faster and faster.

 

Melissa Fleming 13:33

And what does that vision look like? Like what would our Earth look like if we actually were able to make this transition fast enough?

 

Achim Steiner 13:43

For the first time in modern human history, we wouldn't actually have to worry about energy, oddly enough. And if we can transition our global infrastructure to the point where we harvest or harness the sun, wind, geothermal power, and the technological ingenuity that we see now are driving that renewable energy infrastructure, we will actually find ourselves, I think, by the middle of the century, where the idea that you have to go to war to protect your energy supply chain, sometimes 3000 miles away, will seem absurd. Because it's energy security.

And it is no coincidence that during the last few years energy security has been the greatest accelerator, particularly in regions such as Europe, to advance investments in renewable energy infrastructure. Today, there is virtually no country in the world where clean energy cost per kilowatt hour cannot outcompete or at least compete with oil, gas, and coal. So the economics has fallen into place. The technology is available and is evolving almost weekly in terms of, you know, electric vehicles, photovoltaic technology. Now we need to figure out the storage aspect. And I have every reason to be confident that over the next 25 years we will crack this. And then the world can produce energy where people live inside their national borders to power the 21st century digital modern economy.

Alongside that you will have solved problems such as air pollution. Few people know that in the name of development every year we still accept - these are WHO [World Health Organization] numbers - 7 million or more premature deaths due to air pollution. This is the price we basically ask people to pay in order to continue polluting from factories or indeed driving polluting cars.

Your question was - what would the world look like if we were to get there? So much cleaner, so much fairer, and so much more reliable and so much less driven by the geopolitics of, you know, whose oil and gas wells do I need to secure for my economy? What I think is so essential is that countries recognize that in our world of, you know, very different realities, we need multilateral platforms. We need development cooperation as the most intelligent form of saying, 'How do we invest in one another in order to solve the problem that none of us can solve on our own?' Development is not about one telling the other what to do or giving some money in solidarity. It is investing in one another. And we need it more than ever in the 21st century.

 

Melissa Fleming 16:32

And I mean we have always said the basis for that are the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. And yet we've been... We keep saying that they're off track and that they, you know, progress has gone backwards. And why is that? Why are we going backwards? And maybe just explain what are the Sustainable Development Goals for people who don't really know what they are?

 

 

Achim Steiner 16:59

What was unique about the SDGs at the time when they were adopted in the United Nations General Assembly were two things. One was what António Guterres' predecessor at the time referred to as, 'the SDGs are our declaration of interdependence'. It was the moment where the world no longer spoke about development or sustainable development as something that, you know, the Global South needs to catch up with the Global North. It basically put out an agenda and said, 'Here are the great risks of our time. We have reframed them in terms of a number of goals that allow us to tackle these problems together.' Because what happens in one part of the world will fundamentally change the prospects of what happens in another part of the world. And the line is no longer - developed, developing. It's the ability to act together.

So I think people often underestimate the 2030 Agenda, as it is also called. But particularly the Sustainable Development Goals are an extraordinarily pragmatic way of saying, 'We can agree that in these 17 areas some of our greatest risks lie if we don't solve problems - inequality, poverty, but also transition to clean energy. Addressing life on Earth and in the ocean, industrialization, gender equity.' I mean, these are things that will tear us apart and will destroy the foundations for life. So we have to find a way to come together and work on this. And remarkably in 2015, 193 Member States actually agreed on that. So that was the first part - a declaration of interdependence, extraordinary as an asset in our world today. Because tell me any other document right now that would speak so unequivocally to 'we depend on one another'.

The other part was a more smart way of taking the 1992 Rio Earth Summit logic and say, 'Look, you cannot advance economically if it is by either destroying the environment or creating such inequality and socially negative impacts that the very fabric of a society starts tearing apart.' So the Sustainable Development Goals say, 'Look, when you plan your development, your next big choices, think through the template of the 17 SDGs.' Doesn't give you a magic answer, but it makes sure that you don't make foolish errors. You don't overlook vital parts of your population because they don't matter perhaps in GDP terms. You have to leave no one behind if you're going to succeed in development. And so the SDGs in 2015 set the clearest lesson from, you know, 50 years of modern development thinking is don't try and just pick one aspect and put all your eggs in that basket. Societies are complex, development is about choices. And you will either get them right and succeed or you will fall apart.

 

Melissa Fleming 20:06

Your organization recently put out a report about the just scale that is probably unprecedented of destruction in Gaza. What did that report say? And what are you worried about? I mean, what's keeping you awake at night in terms of the situation there?

 

Achim Steiner 20:31

Well, first of all, I think to anybody who watches the news it will not come as a surprise that the extent and the level of destruction that has taken place in Gaza. [It] was never an enclave of great wealth, but it was where 2 million plus Palestinians survived, had in part a livelihood. Their children could go to school. There were hospitals. There was electricity. There was food. Again, I want to not let anybody say, 'Yes, but you didn't mention where it began.' Its beginnings are to many people many different places, many different timelines. But the 7th of October remains a brutal moment.

I think as a development problem, the United Nations, for us, what we see is a catastrophic development reality. It's a humanitarian crisis in every respect. But for years, if not in some respects, for decades, the people of Gaza and in part of the West Bank will not be able to recover to even where they were before. What will that do to society? I often think just now, 'If I'm a parent, my daughter, my son has not gone to school for six months. If they can't go to school for another six months, is their entire life's journey disrupted?' Many Palestinians have had schooling. They were able to graduate. They've gone to some of the best universities around the world. They have become assets to the global family of human beings. And here is an entire generation of school children that are on the verge of perhaps never regaining their momentum. And what will that do to a society, an economy, a community?

The simple fact - it's an extraordinary level of destruction unleashed on a people who had nowhere else to go. And I think in historical terms, this will one day be almost a defining feature of this particular moment because people could not escape, including our 57 staff members of UNDP who are in Gaza with their families, the people that they have lost, and so many others. But in particular, also the women, the children. Collateral damage, this is not collateral damage. This is a tragedy. A tragedy for Palestinians. A tragedy for Israel. And I think a tragedy for all of us who clearly are struggling to find a way out of this almost inevitable, tragic unraveling.

 

Melissa Fleming 23:18

And in other parts of the world your agency is also very active in war zones like in Ukraine. I know... I believe in other conflict areas like Sudan. What does this say about war and development and how much of a setback it is and how...? Yeah. How does it just make you feel as someone who is at the helm of the UN's development agency?

 

 

Achim Steiner 23:51

We have to overcome this notion that in a crisis, in a conflict, the UN and the international community for that matter, pivots towards a purely humanitarian response. We have to save lives. It's something that the United Nations together with many NGOs, international, national ones, do a heroic job every day across the planet and they don't get the credit nor adequate support.

But what we have also witnessed over the last, you know, one or two decades is that we have increasingly seen protracted crises, as we now call them, where people essentially are stuck almost in a Kafkaesque kind of reality in a refugee camp for ten years, sometimes for 20 years. You know that in some of the refugee camps, such as in Kenya, were Somalian refugees fled over a quarter of a century ago there are girls being born today to mothers who themselves were born in that refugee camp. Can you think of a greater nightmare, of being trapped in that no man's land of being a refugee, but with nowhere to go towards, nowhere to go back to?

And so I have increasingly with my colleagues - and as we have often analyzed, our engagement in many conflict countries - reached the conclusion, no, when there is a crisis, we need humanitarian response, but we also need the development response. Because it is that one that alongside saving lives, begins to save livelihoods. To rebuild ways in which people can either survive in that crisis or begin to build a pathway out of that crisis. And just in the last few years, UNDP has taken a very deliberate decision. Whether it is Sudan, whether it is Haiti right now, whether it is Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria. And I could go on sadly enough with Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso. In none of these countries have we suspended our operations because, in fact, alongside our humanitarian colleagues, we believe we can bring an enormously vital part of that development emergency response that begins to at least give some hope that there is a way out of this crisis.

Any crisis, conflict that is not resolved and where people don't have any hope of moving forward, produces the kind of people that later on become associated with the term "terrorists", "radicals". If you have nothing left, if you see your mother and your father starve in front of you, that is the desperation that drives so much of what is called political radicalization today.

So again, the reason why we stay so engaged in the Sahel, why we have also invested heavily in stabilization programmes, which is to basically rebuild fundamentals of where people can begin to see a school. Interesting enough, a police station and a court. Many people rate these almost as highly as anything else because security for local communities is one of the reasons why they will either flee or stay in a place. And that is part of UNDP's commitment together with many other partners that we work with in the UN, outside the UN. To not pack up and go.

 

Melissa Fleming 27:19  

Finally, I wonder if you could, in a few words, just what is the world that you would like to see?

 

 

Achim Steiner 27:30

I think we need a world in which we obviously always dream of leaders who will lead us into a better future. And yes, sometimes history will give us that gift, you know. Inspirational people - Václav Havel or Nelson Mandela or maybe, you know, President Gorbachev, Martin Luther King, Wangarĩ Maathai, the first Nobel Peace Prize winner, who brought peace and environment together. And I think, yes, we are in need of inspirational leaders like this. But frankly, these leaders are actually often the product of citizens saying, 'We need to do something differently.' My hope is that we are in an age where people know so much. They now need to believe in one another's ability to actually change what happens next. And then great leaders will stand on the shoulders of the many and perhaps give us the inspiration or the emotional excitement, but change starts with people.

 

Melissa Fleming 28:34

Change started with you as well. So it's been a real pleasure.

 

Achim Steiner 28:37

[Inaudible] of a horse.

 

Melissa Fleming 28:38

You did. You started on a horse. Thank you so much, Achim.

 

Achim Steiner 28:44

Thank you, Melissa.

 

Melissa Fleming 28:46

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Awake at Night. We'll be back soon with more incredible and inspiring stories from people working against huge challenges to make this world a better and safer place.

To find out more about the series and the extraordinary people featured, do visit un.org/awake-at-night. Do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please take the time to review us. It helps more people find the show.

Thanks to my editor Bethany Bell, to Adam Paylor, Josie Le Blond, and my colleagues at the UN: Katerina Kitidi, Roberta Politi, Geneva Damayanti, Tulin Battikhi, Bissera Kostova, Anzhelika Devis, and Carlos Macias. The original music for this podcast was written and performed by Nadine Shah and produced by Ben Hillier. Additional music was by Pascal Wyse.