The four of us walked, on average, between 11,000 and 13,000 steps a day during our time at COP29. That works out to between eight and nine kilometres every day (because we don’t all take equally big steps).
About a third of our steps (translating to about 3km) was spent on walking to the train and bus that would take us to the stadium — the rest of the distance we covered in a day was from walking around at the conference to get to sessions, interview sources for stories, going to the bathroom or the coffee stalls for a break, or even just walking to the printers dotted around the media centre where we worked.
The point is, our calculations show we were about three times more active here at COP29 than what we usually are back at the Bhekisisa office.
And that’s a good thing.
The WHO says 150—300 minutes’ activity a week, depending on how vigorously you exercise, can significantly lower the chance of developing heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.
In South Africa, deaths from conditions like these, which are often seen in people who are inactive, have increased substantially in a decade: from about 46% in 2010 to about 57% in 2020.
Walking or cycling instead of driving will help to keep us healthy, not only because we’re more active but also because it will slow climate change — which is making us sick, the WHO said at the launch of the Lancet Countdown report in the first week of the conference.
And it works the other way too.
Because physical activity keeps us healthier, it means we’ll need to go to hospital or have to take medicine less often. And with about 5% of the world’s carbon emissions coming from the health sector, we’ll be doing our bit to help keep the air’s temperature rise within 1.5°C of what it was around 1850 by simply getting off our chairs, to keep life on Earth comfortable.
Additional reporting by Sipokazi Fokazi and Zano Kunene.