'Game of Thrones' star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau tries to course correct climate action pessimism

While Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is best known as an actor, appearing in projects like Game of Thrones, now the UNDP Goodwill Ambassador has chronicled his journey to uncover the human-led ideas and innovations being made around the world for a sustainable future in An Optimist's Guide to the Planet (streaming on Crave in Canada).

As a starting point for this project is a particularly interesting, but upsetting statistic, that in the western world, 50 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 25 don't have hope for the future, because of climate change.

"For me, that was really a scary number, because if you don't believe in the future then why bother," Coster-Waldau told Yahoo Canada.

The six-part docuseries follows Coster-Waldau to Greenland, Australia, Mexico, Vietnam, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, St. Vincent, Kenya and the U.S., to add a bit of (as the title suggests) optimism to our fight against environmental threats.

In his capacity as a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador, Coster-Waldau shared he was "amazed" by the people he would meet, but was sometimes "frustrated" by the fact that the publicized story about climate action usually focused on the problem, not the solution, with fear-based messaging.

"I think that I felt, if there was a way to do a show, it's not about neglecting or ignoring the challenges, but actually saying, listen, we all know this, we know what's going on, but we need some positive stories," he said.

"Part of telling the story of the need for action sometimes has become a little too extreme. ... Obviously the challenge is real, it is gigantic, it threatens us in so many ways, but you also have to remember that there is real hope and we have solutions. They are being scaled up and actually. the politicians, ... we often feel they're not doing enough, they're not moving fast enough, which is probably true, ... but a lot of things have happened to us over the last 10, 15 years. Like, massive changes."

'We have created this mess'

As Coster-Waldau stressed, there's also an element of fear-centric messaging that leads humans to blaming one another or villainizing people about working toward a sustainable future.

"When you're afraid, that fear is very uncomfortable and you'd like to blame someone for making you feel this way, and I think that's where we are now, ... who is to blame for this? Who is the villain?" Coster-Waldau said. "I don't think that's very helpful because at the end of the day, this was a global thing, we're in this together. We have created this mess."

"There are no villains, as such. The reason is because we've been incredibly successful, we've been incredibly inventive. ... For me, it's just incredible what humans can achieve when we set our minds to it, which also should give you hope."

Coster-Waldau also found, through filming An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet, that when he left the western world, that "fear" element was not particularly present.

"When I asked young people in Kenya, like these engineers that we met that were working on this electric bike, and I talk to them about the future, they were like, holy sh-t, yes, the future is great and we're going to work our asses off to make it better. We want to make a better tomorrow. We believe in it. And that was the same everywhere," Coster-Waldau said.

What's particularly effective in An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet is that the solutions and innovations that Coster-Waldau features aren't all complex mechanisms. Some impactful changes are small, but powerful.

For example, a beekeeper noticed that worms had made holes in a plastic bag, and this led to the revelation that there are enzymes in the saliva of worms that can break down plastic.

But in terms of our everyday approach to creating a more sustainable future, Coster-Waldau is particularly against labelling someone as a "bad person," even though climate change is a massive threat with dire consequences.

"We're in this together and we cannot dictate how other people should live their lives," Coster-Waldau said. "It just doesn't work like that and we cannot police each other."

"If you point your finger at someone you don't know their circumstances. ... We have to accept that we're different. ... We have to demand a lot from our politicians, which we choose our decision makers, but also, we have to give each other a break."