Running to save the world: the campaigners pushing their bodies to the limit for the environment

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Mina Guli: It's really funny when people ask me what I'm doing and I have to explain that I'm running 200 marathons in a year. Even when I say it, it sounds completely ridiculous.

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week, we hear from people driving their bodies to the limit in the hope of changing the world.

Mina Guli: I'm running 200 marathons this year to do three things, raise awareness of the problem, show the urgency of the crisis that we're facing, and to drive action.

Robin Pomeroy: Mina Guli doesn't even like running. So what keeps her doing it?

Mina Guli: Purpose is about something so much bigger than me. It's so much bigger than one marathon, 10 marathons, 100 marathons. Purpose is about something that's a far bigger goal, an objective. And mine's water. Not just water. I want to solve this water crisis.

Robin Pomeroy: What about swimming? This man has swum in the freezing Arctic to raise awareness of climate change, and he's just swum across the Red Sea.

Lewis Pugh: I got these two container ships coming either side of me. As this was happening, a shark came underneath us and it was just like 'this, this is too much!'

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, please leave us a rating and a review and join us on the World Economic Forum Podcast Club on Facebook. I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at what drives campaigners to push themselves to the limit, including some practical advice for would be adventurers...

Lewis Pugh: Be damn careful you don't put your hand inside the mouth of the shark when you push it away. That's my advice for anybody who wants to swim across the Red Sea.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos.

COP27 recently ended in Sharm el-Sheikh. You can catch up on what happened there on our sister podcast Agenda Dialogues.

In this episode of Radio Davos, we're moving away from the negotiating rooms but for a moment, staying in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is a seaside resort on the coast of the Red Sea, a place where most tourists would consider a dip in the water a pleasure. But for endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh, it was anything but. Lewis has featured before on Radio Davos when he recounted his experience of swimming in Arctic waters of zero degrees Celsius. Later in the show, he tells us why the warmer waters of the Red Sea are no holiday. Not when you're weaving between giant container ships on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and facing off against sharks.

Like Lewis Pugh. Mina Guli chooses to put her body through torment to raise awareness of the environment. She's running. 200 marathon-length runs in a year to campaign for action on freshwater, and she doesn't even like running.

They are both extraordinary characters and both spoke to my colleague Anna Bruce-Lockhart about why they do what they do. Anna put that question first to marathon woman Mina Guli.

Mina Guli: It's really funny when people ask me what I'm doing and I have to explain that I'm running 200 marathons in a year. Even when I say it, it sounds completely ridiculous. Even more ridiculous because I have to explain to people I'm not doing it because I like running or because I'm naturally gifted at running, or I'm a natural athlete or I grew up running. I'm doing it because I want to create change in the world. I want to see a world where there's enough water for everyone forever. And this is my way. Not only of going to the places that are suffering from the water crisis and showing what it means to be stricken by water problems, by droughts, by not having access to clean water and sanitation, by being subject to areas where we've managed water so badly that there are water challenges, dried up lakes and dried riverbeds, but actually also to show that there are solutions.

But this is about more than problems and solutions. Those exist. This is about demonstrating the power of what's possible when we put our minds to something, whether it's something we want to do or whether it's something we feel we need to do.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: According to U.N. data, demand for water will outstrip supply by 40% by 2030. That's in the next seven years. That is a very alarming prediction. But why is water specifically, out of all the things that are happening related to climate change, is such an important issue for you?

Mina Guli: I don't think that this is a competition between water and climate change or water in the economy or water and everything else. Because water needs to be mainstreamed. We need to understand that water goes into everything we use. We buy and consume every single day, whether it's the power that goes into the technology that we're speaking on today. Just clothing as an example: what I'm wearing today, just this one outfit, the shoes, the pants, the shirt, the mobile phone in my pocket, all of those things took more water to make than all the water I use before a drink before I'm 40 years old. Just one outfit. This is a mind boggling statistic made even worse when you think about the fact that this is just one outfit and I'm just one person. When you multiply that by the number of outfits most of us have by the number of people on the planet, these become much more than just statistics. They become really meaningful indicators of our water use.

We take water for granted. Most of us live in communities in towns where we turn on the tap and water flows out. What we forget is that water doesn't come from a tap. Water comes from healthy ecosystems. And we need those healthy ecosystems not only because we need to drink the water, but we need those ecosystems to be healthy because we rely on them.

It's beyond an important cause. Water is everything. I think that often we treat it as if it's nothing. And the reality is that needs to change. And that needs to change not because we want it to change. It needs to change because it truly needs to change. If we want to leave a planet where we provide for the next generation, water is integral. It's not 'something else'. It's not something. It's everything.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: What woke you up to the problem of water scarcity in the first place?

Mina Guli: The first one is when I was a kid. I grew up through 10 years of drought in Australia, so we used to put buckets under our showers, turn off the tap when we brushed our teeth and we used to figure out ways to recycle our greywater.

So I knew that water was incredibly important and valuable. When I didn't fully appreciate it until much later was the importance of water throughout our entire economic structure. That water is so much more than just the water that comes out of the tap and the water that we drink. In fact, only 10% of the water I use every day is the water that I can see. The vast majority of it is invisible.

And so at the time I realised this, I was running an investment fund. I was here at the World Economic Forum and we were talking about water, not in the context of drinking water and sanitation, but in the context of its importance to the future of companies and its importance and its risk. And when I started to understand this concept of water risk and realised that I had done due diligence on companies looking at investments and looking at opportunities in so many years and I'd completely ignored this absolutely massive risk that was sitting there right in front of me, I realised that I had to do something about it, because if I had grown up through drought, I knew the importance and value of water and yet I still wasn't factoring it into these decisions. I needed to do something to put it onto the map and to try to start to engage in conversations where we did move water from the back room and the back page to the front room and the front pages.

And so that's what started me truly on this journey for water and started me on this running journey. First, we started educating kids in China, trying to move the next generation, which was great until I realised that we're actually running out of runway. We don't have time for the next generation to get old enough to be in positions of power or to be able to spend their consumer dollar or their consumer vote, how I like to think of it, in terms of giving reward to the companies that do better.

We needed to do something bigger, bolder and more ambitious to grab media attention and use the media to distribute our messages. And so I, through the encouragement of my fellow Young Global Leaders at the time, we came up with a plan that I would do something completely bold and audacious, completely outside my comfort zone. So we came up with a plan that I would run in some crazy places, some of the most extreme places on the planet - deserts, rivers, would show the problem, the solutions and the power of what's possible.

Even at those moments when I was running ridiculous numbers of distances in extreme places on the planet. I still, in the back of my mind, thought that I would go back to my investment career, until I stood on the bank of the Orange River, which is a river that goes between Namibia and South Africa. Desert number five in my quest to run across seven deserts on seven continents in seven weeks. Even just thinking about it and saying it out loud just sounds ridiculous. And we were talking to the local rangers in the local community who said to me, this river has decreased in volume hugely, not because of drought, but because of poor management, poor oversight of water resources and massive over withdrawals, because we're growing grapes in the middle of the desert. And we stood on the bank of that river and I thought to myself, how many times have I looked at the bottom of a bag of grapes and thrown out the old brown, soggy ones? Too many times, and too many times have I not not fully appreciated the value of what nature has given us or the value of what nature has put into our supply chains.

And at that point, I thought this is crazy. I need to do something about it. And if not me, then who? And if not now, then when? And at exactly that point in time, I knew that this is what I was going to do for the rest of my life. That we need a better. We need a better planet. And there was absolutely no turning back.

Every person, every step has demonstrated to me that the water crisis is far bigger than anything even I had imagined. And that is a very scary prospect.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: When you're talking about the power of people working together and you're talking about raising awareness, who is it that you have in your mind? Is there a particular sector? Is it the private sector? Is it governments, policy makers? Is it individuals? Who do you hope hears this message most loudly?

Mina Guli: I'm running 200 marathons this year to do three things: raise awareness of the problem, show the urgency of the crisis that we're facing, and to drive action, action from governments. Governments have the capacity to set the agenda and drive change. Action from companies. Companies represent almost 90% of global freshwater use, either directly or indirectly. And ultimately it's action from all of us as individuals, because at the end of the day, we all have a consumer voice and many of us have an actual vote at the ballot box. We also have a vote in how we behave in our daily lives.

So my philosophy is, it doesn't matter what you run in your life, your company, your household, or your daily decision. What I want is that we all put water front of mind and what we call 'run blue'.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: The Run Blue campaign. So you're doing it to gain publicity and raise awareness about water scarcity ahead of World Water Day. But you're asking companies to come on board or, as the campaign puts it, to run blue. So what does this mean and what kind of change are you hoping that companies will effect.

Mina Guli: To really create meaningful change in water, we need to drive impact and change not only at a government level but also at a corporate level. We need CEOs to understand that water is not something else. It's everything. And we need to figure out how to get these CEOs and people in the halls of power to realise that water is mainstreamed into their operations in every level.

So through the campaign, we're asking companies to do three things. The first is to understand water risk. Understand where your companies are exposed, how they're exposed, and why. Second, to make a plan to figure out what needs to be done to minimise and reduce that exposure. And the third is to implement that plan. There are a huge number of great organisations and great initiatives already out there. This is not about finding new solutions. This is not about finding or making new commitments or new pledges. This is about saying, how do we lift up all the other organisations, all the water initiatives, all the water work that is out there? And how do we get companies to support and reward those that are out there doing amazing things and do more of what's needed and less of what's not?

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: Businesses talk a big game when it comes to ESG and offsetting, but it's quite rare to come up with genuinely useful, tangible examples of how they can adapt their policies in manageable ways. Do you have any examples of what companies can do to be more water conscious?

Mina Guli: First thing is, one of my big fears about this campaign, about all campaigns, is that we end up with a lot of hollow commitments. I'm not doing one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life to create a set of hollow commitments and empty promises. This has to be about much more than that. Not only because I want it to be that, because it needs to be.

We need not only policy makers, we need heads of state, and we need CEOs to step up to this challenge and say, we've got this. Not just because they want to get a sound grab or media exposure, but because they really mean us. For a company to say this is too big of an issue to transform my supply chain or I've got too many things on my plate, I don't have space for water or for one more thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. We can find solutions. We can transform our supply chain. Sometimes it's not even about deploying significant amounts of capital. It can be easy behaviour change solutions.

When I ran in Turkey, we ran beside these massive sinkholes that had opened up - huge parts of the top level of the ground that had literally collapsed because of over withdrawal of groundwater. These are so massive. They're the size of football pitches. It's horrifying to see the damage that we've done. Even more so because a couple of kilometres further on, there were fields of sunflowers, animal feed and other crops. We're in the middle of the day. We were still seeing them being watered, sprinklers spraying so much water into the air, it looks like it was a whole cloud forming over the top of these crops. It was over 30 degrees. The sun was beaming and the amount of evaporation was huge. Even if we just moved that watering to early morning or late in the evening, we would have dramatically decreased the amount of evaporation and the amount of water that was used.

So this sometimes is not just about deploying sensors and robots and high tech solutions. Sometimes this is about deploying behaviour change. There are more technological solutions, if you like to call them that. Moving to centre pivots in the agricultural space or deploying some of the technologies around filtration systems if you're in manufacturing. And from there, they're even higher tech solutions: drones, sensors. There is a whole raft of different solutions that are available. It's up to every company, every individual, every farmer, every CEO, every policymaker to figure out what solutions are most applicable.

What I don't want to happen is that we say 'I can't act because there's no solution that's appropriate to me', because in my view, that's a cop out.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: I'm going to take you back to 2019 when you were on your 62nd marathon in a campaign that saw you try to run 100 marathons in 100 days. Pressure was so great on your femur that it it splintered and you basically broke your leg. That must have been a really dark time for you, I'm sure you are quite familiar now with pushing yourself to a level of endurance and exhaustion, and yet that must have been quite a turning point for you. What got you through it?

Mina Guli: Being really honest, I almost didn't get through it.

At the time I broke my leg, my entire world had come crashing down around me, that everything was over, that we'd let down the communities that had begged us to make change on water. The people that had supported the campaign, the team that was with me that everything we had worked for was literally for nothing.

And the first glimmer of light that I saw was my team coming in that day and saying to me, this is about something more than you. This is about all of us. Let's take your miles for you. And that day they went out and they took my miles for me. And I sat in my wheelchair. And I watched as a group of people who didn't have any concept of what water had been before we set out on this adventure, went and ran the miles. They tweeted, they shared. And the next day, people across Cape Town, which is where we were, came and ran the miles with them. For water. They shared this story and they amplified it. They pushed it out through media.

The next day, people around the world started to join. And every day from marathon number 62, which was the last one I ran on my own, every single day from then on, more and more people joined. So by the time we got to marathon number 100, it wasn't about me running 100 marathons. It was about all of us around the world stepping up, contributing our steps and raising our voices for the one thing that unites all of us everywhere. And that's water.

The running part is really hard, and every day it terrifies me. Every day when I wake up and I think, I can't do this. I can't take another step. I get out of my tent and the first thing I think is, Oh, good, I'm still alive. But one of the biggest, scariest things is I see every day the enormity of this water crisis. I see the impact it has on people everywhere. It's bigger than anything I imagined, anything that I had thought of back in 2006 when I stood on the banks of that river. And it's getting worse, faster than I ever imagined.

What I'm terrified of is that we'll get to 2023 and a bunch of people sitting in the United Nations building will feel so divorced from the problem that they'll think it's okay to do nothing. Doing nothing is not an option anymore. Failure is not an option because when you see what I've seen and you realise the accelerant of climate change, there is no option. There is no plan B. This is it.

This year glaciers just in this country, Switzerland, melted 6%. The average is 0.1-0.5%. We can't ignore this anymore. And this is not just numbers on a page. This is not just reports. This is real people in real, real places that are suffering the consequences, not just here in Switzerland. In France, 100 cities are relying on water being trucked in.

It is personal because I've seen this. I've held the hands of people suffering, women and girls who risk their lives every day to go fetch water. Kids in Ghana scratching in the sand with their hands. Little kids. Is that the only water that they can get? People who spent years building their businesses, only to watch all the water that they've relied on dry up. At the Aral Sea, which used to be one of the biggest inland oceans in the world, women surrounded me and held my hand and said, we've seen, scientists for 30 years told us that this inland ocean would dry up. Now it has. There is no future here for our kids, for our communities, for anything.

This becomes so personal to me because I've seen it, seen and felt the despair that happens when we treat water as if it's nothing. We can't ignore this. And I'm terrified that no matter how far I run, no matter how loudly I speak about this, that there won't be the type of action that we need.

I broke my leg at 62. I was in a wheelchair and I couldn't keep going. Did I fail? Yeah. Failed in achieving my goal. But my goal is just to contribute to purpose. Purpose is about something so much bigger than me. So much bigger than one marathon. Ten marathons. 100 marathons. Purpose is about something that's a far bigger goal, an objective. And mine's water, not just water. I'm going to solve this water crisis, in my lifetime. I will solve this global water crisis, because we have to.

Anna Bruce-Lockhart: Do you think we're capable of turning the tide back and bringing back the way things were, our vanishing resources?

Mina Guli: There are three things I've learnt from this journey of running 200 marathons. The first is that the water crisis is far bigger and accelerating far more quickly than I had imagined, and that is terrifying.

The second is that the water crisis, whilst we think it's about local issues, is about global things. So the challenges that we see in the droughts in Central Europe and through the European countries over the summer, we also see in places like the United States, in Central Asia and other areas of the world like Australia.

The third is that there are solutions around the world that we could deploy and we can scale. And that leaves me with a huge amount of confidence that we can be part of the solution for water.

It's easy for us to think that water is too hard, too complicated, that these big challenges of far beyond our capability to solve. But the truth is, we can do hard things. When I set out to run 200 marathons in a year, at the outset, I didn't even know if I could do one marathon. But I started out with one step at a time and I think sometimes we need to realise that big things require simple steps. Sometimes it's not about looking at the whole journey, it's about looking at the next step. It's about breaking things down into manageable bite sized chunks. And then when we start thinking about these big journeys as simple steps forward, one marathon made up of 45,000 steps in a day, all of a sudden it becomes achievable. And we realise that when we get to the end of that first marathon, the second, the third, my 104th marathon yesterday, my 105th marathon tomorrow, we realise that we can make these big changes happen, that when we focus on something bigger, bolder and more ambitious, we're capable of so much more than we realise whether it's running 200 marathons or whether it's solving the global water crisis.

We can do hard things. Anything is possible, even changing the world.

Robin Pomeroy: Mina Gully, her campaign is called Run Blue. You can find out more at minaguli.com.

If running's not your thing, what about swimming? Lewis Pugh is an endurance swimmer and United Nations patron of the oceans. If you're a regular listener to Radio Davos, you will have heard him on a previous episode describing his swims at the North Pole, where global warming has made swims possible in waters that would have been frozen solid before. With COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Lewis decided to swim across the Red Sea. Sounds much less extreme, right? Well, not necessarily.

Lewis Pugh: When I was swimming in the Arctic in Greenland, the water is zero degrees centigrade. It's unbelievably cold. And when you swim in the Red Sea, the water is incredibly hot. So the risks are very, very different.

The risks, obviously, in the Arctic are that you're going to get hypothermia and the risks in the Red Sea are you're going to get the complete opposite, you can get hypethermia. So that was the main danger.

When you're swimming in the Red Sea, you're swimming in very, very warm water, sometimes up to 30 degrees Centigrade. When you swim in very, very cold water, obviously you can only swim very, very short periods of time when you swim in warm water can swim for longer periods of time. But the warm water, it just saps you of all your strength and all your energy.

And so this swim was a very, very long swim, it was day after day after day, 16 days across the Red Sea. And so swimming in very, very warm water - it sounds like it's really great and the views are amazing, but it actually just saps you of everything.

When I'm swimming in the Arctic, I'm always facing two risks. I'm facing getting extremely cold because of water sometimes around zero degrees, and also predators. Up in the north it's polar bears, down in the south it's leopard seals.

This swim, though, the risks were even more. It sounds crazy, but not only were we dealing with very, very hot water, the water sometimes 30 degrees centigrade, also sharks, tankers. I had to cross a very, very busy shipping lane. There were tankers, there were container ships. There were so many ships just in front of us all the time.

And then lastly, was the wind unrelenting. Day after day after day, the wind was blowing and it wasn't blowing from behind, which is great because it pushes you forward. It wasn't coming from the front, it was coming from the side. And so day after day, these waves were hitting me from the side and it twists your body backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards like this. And after ten days of that, it's hard.

I do swims around the world in the most threatened environments. And then afterwards, I tried to take the message to world leaders and get them to protect these areas. And COP27 was such a great opportunity because now I could take world leaders to the scene of the crime.

My message to world leaders this week at COP has been, please leave the conference room, come down to the beach, put your heads in the water and just see what we risk if we carry on on the trajectory which we are going. These coral reefs are some of the most resilient in the world as some of the most incredible.

When I swam across the Red Sea, I'm looking down at some of the most amazing coral reefs in the world. And the fish, the colours of the fish and the colours of the coral and turtles and manta rays and sharks and small little goldfish and big parrotfish and coral, which is purple and green and yellow. It's amazing. But we run the risk now of losing all of this if we carry on the way we're going.

And the science is very, very stark. The science is that if we heat the planet by 1.5 degrees centigrade, we will lose 70% of the coral. If we heat the planet by 2 degrees centigrade, we lose 99% of the world's coral. And we're currently on track for way past that.

And so every single fraction of a degree now matters.

When you swim across the Red Sea, you're going to have to swim across a shipping lane. And that shipping lane takes all the ships to the Suez Canal and all the ships coming from the Suez Canal. And it's a very, very busy shipping lane. And what happens with the Suez Canal is all the ships come out of the Suez Canal in convoy and there's literally very little gap between all the ships.

And so I got to the shipping lane, now I've got to cross a shipping lane and I'm looking at all these ships coming towards me. And it's really difficult to judge the speed of a ship, especially in very rough water. And I thought, okay, I can get across here. So I say to my team, Let's go, let's go, let's go. And I swim as fast as I can and I can just see this big container ship coming towards us. Anyway, I got past it, not realising that on the other side of the boat there was another ship which was overtaking. And so suddenly I was caught in the middle and the waves are so big, I got these two container ships coming on either side of me. And as this was happening, a shark came underneath us, and it was just like, please, this, this is too much. Luckily, my team saw the shark. I jumped onto the boat and then these big container ships came pass me. And then afterwards we were able to start to swim again and then carry on. But it was it was one of those moments which you will never forget in your life.

And there always a few rules when you're swimming with these types of sharks. Number one, don't try and out-swim a shark. It's impossible. They're much faster than you. Number two, they're a predator. So you - actually it's counter-intuitive - you've got to turn and face them. They'll come from the side or they'll come from the back. And then as they're coming up towards you, you've got to have the courage to put your hand on their nose and then turn them and push them away.

And, you know, when you've got goggles on, often they magnify things. So be damn careful you don't put your hand inside, inside the mouth of the shark when you push it away. So that's my advice for anybody who wants to swim across the Red Sea.

Robin Pomeroy: Lewis Pugh, before him, you heard marathon woman Mina Guli. Both were speaking to my colleague Anna Bruce-Lockhart. You can read more about their exploits on our website, where you'll also find an article about Craig Cohon, an entrepreneur and climate change campaigner who plans to walk from London to Istanbul starting on 3 January, 2023. Find that and find all our podcasts at weforum.org.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a rating and a review, and join the conversation at the World Economic Forum Podcast Club on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan. We'll be back next week. But for now, thanks to you for listening and goodbye.