Soda Stereo rocker Charly Alberti named UN environment ambassador

“The world is a climate mess,” says rocker Charly Alberti, the newly appointed ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Alberti, 61, says it is a responsibility from which he hopes to “activate people” during what is “a very complicated time” for the planet.

The drummer of legendary Argentine rock band Soda Stereo, which reached its heyday in the 1980s, is convinced that “art in all its forms has the power to mobilise the world and inspire badly-needed change.”

Announcing his appointment during a high-flying week at the UN General Assembly in New York, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen highlighted that Alberti’s "passion for the environment and capacity to connect with people through music makes him a powerful defender of environmental action.”

The musician will have to raise awareness, in particular among young people, of the urgent need to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change: the loss of nature and biodiversity, pollution and waste in the region.

Alberti is a long-standing climate activist. His charitable foundation, Revolución 21 - Latinoamérica Sustentable (“Revolution 21 - Sustainable Latin America”), already deals with environmental concerns in Argentina and Latin America.

The rocker’s band has also taken action. Soda Stereo planted 4,700 native trees to offset the carbon footprint of their “Gracias Totales” tour in 2020, one of the first Latin American large music tours to do so.

Alberti assured in an interview that, following his appointment, people would have to set aside the widespread recurrent excuse that “nothing I do individually will change anything.”

“We’re over eight billion people in the world thinking alike. It won’t change anything if I don’t do it. But the sum is what is causing the great disaster,” he noted.

That is why Alberti advocates “small changes” which end up generating “big positive changes.”

“The world you want to leave to your children is up to you,” he says.  

According to the musician, “it’s extremely important to continue developing, but this can be done in a context of a sustainable world.”

“The economy is no more important than the environment. Without an environment, without biodiversity, there’s no possible economy,” Alberti said, noting that “we’re all the problem and we’re all the solution individually.”

“Companies are responsible for what we ask them to do. Ultimately, if we continue to buy bad products, they will continue to produce them, but if people ask for products of better quality or that are more responsible, they will do it,” he argued. 

“You’re the problem and you’re the solution” warned the Buenos Aires-born activist.

Alberti, a former goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Argentina, believes that people’s pressure on companies and governments with a view to a change “is very, very important.”

Therein lies transformation, he said.