Can green development really bring us together?

This article comes from a podcast series I’ve been working on that looks at global governance through a simple but demanding idea: a shared future for humanity.Each episode focuses on one dimension of that question — security, development, cultural exchange, or, in this case, the environment — and tries to ground it in real places and real lives.

While preparing this episode, the images were hard to ignore. In the summer of 2025, record-breaking heat swept across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Europe, North America, parts of Asia.... Scientists warn that these kinds of heatwaves are no longer anomalies. They are previews.

Around the same time, UN Secretary-General AntónioGuterres spoke after the Leaders Meeting on Climate and the Just Transition. His words were blunt. Climate disasters, he said, are accelerating. No region is spared. And the consequences are not just environmental. They deepen poverty, displace communities, and fuel instability.

Listening to that speech, I kept thinking about how unevenly this crisis is felt. Rising seas threaten island nations first. Droughts hit fragile ecosystems before anyone else. And yet the causes, and the responsibility for solutions, are shared. That tension sits at the heart of this episode, and of the larger series it belongs to.

Climate change is contained by national borders

At international climate conferences, warnings often sound abstract until someone makes them personal. At the UN climate conference in 2021, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley did exactly that. She spoke of 1.5 degrees as survival, and 2 degrees as a death sentence for countries like Fiji, the Maldives, and Barbados itself.

Those words stayed with me while working on this story. Climate change isn’t a distant forecast. It’s already reshaping livelihoods, ecosystems, and national futures. Responding to it means rethinking how development happens.

This is where the idea of a “community with a shared future” shows up again, not as a slogan, but as a practical necessity. No country can opt out of environmental risk. No country can solve it alone.

A wind farm at the edge of the desert

To understand what green cooperation looks like on the ground, the podcast takes listeners to Zhanatas, a small and remote town in southern Kazakhstan. Getting there requires hours of train travel and long drives through desert landscapes where traffic is scarce and the horizon feels endless.

And then, suddenly, the wind turbines appear.

The Zhanatas wind farm is one of the largest in Kazakhstan and the first large-scale wind power project in Central Asia. Built through China–Kazakhstan cooperation, it now supplies electricity to around 160,000 households and cuts significant greenhouse gas emissions every year.

What interested me most, though, was not the scale of the project, but the people around it. YerkegaliBaktybayev grew up in Zhanatas, where power outages were common. As a child, he dreamed of becoming an engineer who could turn the region’s constant wind into something reliable. Today, he works at the wind farm, operating equipment he once only imagined.

He talked about learning new systems, new technologies, and seeing a future for himself in an industry that didn’t exist locally before. That’s what green development looks like when it works. Cleaner energy for sure, but it’s more about new skills, new jobs, and renewed confidence in a place that used to feel forgotten.

Protecting life that can’t speak for itself

The episode then shifts from turbines to wildlife, from electricity to survival of a very different kind.

The Gobi bear is Mongolia’s national treasure and one of the rarest bears on Earth. Fewer than 50 are believed to exist. Climate change has dried up water sources in the desert. Human activity has further shrunk their habitat. Extinction is not theoretical here. It’s imminent.

Since 2018, Chinese and Mongolian experts have worked together to study and protect the Gobi bear. They’ve crossed tens of thousands of kilometers of desert, collected DNA samples, installed infrared cameras, and shared technology and expertise. What they found was quietly hopeful: more bears than previously believed and better tools to protect them.

One Mongolian scientist spoke about how impressed he was by the dedication of his Chinese counterparts, working under the same brutal conditions. Another talked about how new equipment has completely changed monitoring efficiency. These details matter because they show how much we can achieve when we can work together.

Why this story matters

From wind farms in Kazakhstan to bear conservation in the Gobi Desert, what connects these stories is mindset. They reflect an approach that treats ecological protection and development as intertwined rather than competing goals.

President Xi Jinping has described this as building a “community of life on earth,” an ecological extension of the broader idea of “a shared future for humanity”. The logic is straightforward. A damaged ecosystem undermines civilization itself. Protecting nature is not charity. It’s self-preservation.

In the podcast, you can hear these stories among othersunfold through voices, pauses, wind sounds, and desert silence. That texture matters. It reminds us that climate policy is not just negotiated in conference rooms; it’s lived in remote towns, fragile habitats, and everyday decisions about how we produce energy and protect life. If this topic resonates with you, I’d recommend listening to the episode. The audio brings these places closer than words alone can.

At a moment when climate anxiety often leads to paralysis, these stories suggest another possibility: that cooperation, when grounded in real needs and shared responsibility, can still move us toward a cleaner and more beautiful world.

By: Niu Honglin

Niu Honglin is a producer and host with CGTN. She is also one of the editors of Stories of Xi Jinping.

×