00:00In Freetown, what we've seen happening now with climate is what we saw happening during the war.
00:30Freetown's population went from 500,000 people to over a million when people were displaced
00:43because of the war.
00:44Today, as climate change continues, as weather and temperatures become more extreme, as water
00:54becomes less available to farmers, that same phenomena of displacement results in people
01:02moving into the cities, moving to Freetown.
01:06So the conversation about climate change, this question of, can we plant trees?
01:10Yes, we're planting a million trees in Freetown, but we want to plant millions of trees nationwide.
01:15We want to plant millions of trees continent-wide.
01:20We're not just about adapting to climate change.
01:24We've actually got to fight this.
01:26We've got to be about what we can do to stop the damage, to slow down the impact.
01:42In order for us to play our role in mitigating or reducing greenhouse emissions, we need
01:47to focus on the two areas where this is happening the most, that's sanitation and transport.
01:53So with sanitation, sadly, unfortunately, we have two dump sites which have been in
01:59place for 30 and 40 years respectively, and they are dump sites.
02:03They're open areas of 12, in one case 40, in the other case acres of land where waste
02:11has been accumulated over decades.
02:14The result of this is that they are full of methane, which is going up into the atmosphere.
02:19We're working on closing one of them down and building a waste park outside of the city
02:24that will have recycling, that will have wastewater treatment, as well as having a landfill.
02:30And then the other one is being converted into an engineered landfill.
02:34When you're moving from a base where only 6% of liquid waste and 21% of solid waste
02:42is being safely collected, you need to actually make sure that your starting point is to get
02:47waste collected.
02:48So you're changing mindsets, you're changing behaviours, and you're building infrastructure.
02:58We use currently a combination of very many and very old vehicles.
03:04So they're using diesel, they're using leaded petrol, and this of course is a major contributor
03:11to greenhouse gases from our perspective.
03:14Maybe not major in the world context, but major from our perspective.
03:17So what are we doing here?
03:18Here we're introducing mass transit.
03:20Our intervention for reducing emissions for transport is to introduce the cable cars,
03:26which will move 6,000 people per hour.
03:38I'm recommending to colleagues all around my country and on the continent that we need
03:44to be at the forefront.
03:45We need to bring these solutions, we need to make them real, because climate action
03:51has to start with each one of us.
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