Welcome everyone to 100 Climate Conversations thank you so much for joining us. Yiradhumarang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo. Hello, friends. My name is Rae Johnston. I’m we’re a Wiradjuri woman, but I was born and raised on Dharug and Gundungurra Country and that’s where I have responsibilities to community and Country. And it’s also where I still live today. And I just wanted to start by saying that it is an honour to be working here today and to be seeing you all and chatting with you on the Unceded land of the Gadigal and I wish to pay my deepest respects to their Elders, past and present, for the great sacrifices they have made so that we can be here today. And I think it’s important to remember that when we have these discussions that the First Nations peoples of this continent are the world’s first innovators, scientists, technologists.

So, I think it’s important to keep that in mind as we continue these discussions today that that knowledge is something that has been passed on for generations and kept safe despite all attempts to erase it. And it’s something that we can all benefit from having in our knowledge banks today as we tackle some of the biggest challenges that we have ever faced on this planet.

Today is number 66 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum, and before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system all the way up into the 1960s. And in the context of this architectural artefact, we are now shifting our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Now Brendan Condon runs a number of sustainability-focussed businesses and recently launched the Cape, a super sustainable housing community at Cape Paterson near Phillip Island in South Gippsland in Victoria. Now since 1998, Brendan’s has been involved with the seed collection, propagation, planting and maintenance to maturity of over 30 million Indigenous plants across Victoria. He is one of the collaborators behind Melbourne SkyFarm, which has transformed a 2000 square metre rooftop car park overlooking the Yarra River and the Melbourne Convention Centre into this incredible urban farm and environmental oasis. Now we are so thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming Brendan. Thanks for joining us.

So, Brendan, you founded Australian Ecosystems as a native nursery back in 1997. That’s now expanded to landscaping and environmental restoration services as well. But what led you to want to start a nursery and start working that closely with the environment?

I think it goes back to my childhood where I was one of six brothers growing up in the high country in Victoria up at Corryong, and I had an absolute fascination with the natural world. I was transfixed with the natural world around me and very young I worked out that we’re not doing a great job looking after the planet. I was articulating that I wanted to work with conservation and the environment from a very young age.

I studied criminology at Melbourne University and then I set up programs with young offenders and replanting rivers, creeks, waterways around Melbourne, and from there saw a big opportunity to build a nursery and start supplying plants into Melbourne, where there was a requirement to build big wetlands associated with housing estates. So, groups like Melbourne Water put in place requirements that housing estates needed to build big stormwater wetlands based on protecting the health of Port Phillip Bay. And I saw there was an opportunity and a big market coming in water plants and Indigenous plants. So, I went to the eastern treatment plant in Melbourne, one of the big sewage treatment plants, and we built a nursery using the recycled water, started growing plants. In year one, we grew 60,000 plants, year two 600,000.

Wow.

Every year since in the millions. Now we have 100 staff going right around the greater Melbourne region every year, collecting seed from woodlands and wetlands and grasslands and salt marshes. We have this sort of amazing genetic resource at the nursery, and we grow plants in the millions to help restore waterways and biological corridors through our urban form, helping with urban cooling, stormwater treatment. But they’re also fantastic for mental health and we saw that during the pandemic where people were looking for those green spaces in their cities.

I know that it seems like it’s an obvious thing, but could you take me through what the actual benefits are for climate change to restore these ecosystems back to their functioning form?

You know, we’ve cleared a lot of country and they were carbon rich ecosystems. You know, they were stored carbon in soil, root mass and in above ground biomass. So, straightaway you’re drawing down carbon and pulling that back out of the atmosphere and putting it back into a safer form of storage. You’re also layering up the substrate for biodiversity and, you know, biodiversity Australia, the climate [and] biodiversity crisis are hand in hand. So, there’s huge benefits in cities to restore waterways and creek lines as ecological and biological corridors.

A lot of these wetlands in the urban environment stay wet during droughts because they harvest water off hard surface. So, they’re actually important as refugia for a lot of animals that may see increased drying of the remnant wetlands out in the environment. They’re also important as urban cooling areas. So, we’re building suburbs that are very – they’re not really well adapted to climate change, lots of hard surface and heat bank, urban heat island. But then you have these corridors of urban cooling. They evapotranspire during heatwaves and help cool the urban form. So, there’s a whole range of reasons.

So, with all of this work to restore these different types of ecosystems as well, is there one in particular that stands out to you?

Yes, we recently, in the last four or five years, planted hundreds of thousands of plants on what was a dairy farm up in the Yarra Valley, which was identified as the former habitat area for two of Victoria’s state faunal emblems that are endangered, the helmeted honeyeater and the leadbeater’s possum. So, this had been a dairy farm for 100 years it was gifted by the owners to conservation.

So, we worked with Greening Australia, Zoos Victoria, the Victorian Government scientists and we collected a very wide variety of the pre-existing vegetation types that would have been there and planted it. And because it’s alluvium on the river flats, that’s one of the reasons why those habitats were so sought after by farming and agriculture and why those animals are in a difficult position. But because of its alluvium, the plant growth was so phenomenally fast, and this shows the regenerative – I think this is a big, one of the big things we’ve got that’s a big positive in our corner with climate change is the rebound and regenerative capacity of the planet. If we can just manage landforms more sympathetically and empathetically.

So, we replanted this, and it’s just rebounded, and the trees are, you know, 12-15 metres high after a few years and it’s incredibly ecologically productive. They’re looking at it as an alternative release site for these endangered species, hopefully in about year ten. But they think that they might be able to dial it back a few years because it’s just so productive. And it already has resource for those species.

When you’re coming into an area of land that has been used for farming for over a hundred years. What work do you do to identify what species are endemic to that area and what will grow in those spaces?

So, we work with terrific ecologists who understand the soil types, the aspect, the rainfall, and then they do a bit of sort of forensic botany really, and they look at remnant patches of vegetation, the historical records, even looking back at things like oil paintings in museums of those landscapes. And you’ll be able to actually tell some of the dominant plant forms and then you go and you collect as much diversity as possible to build in that diversity. From overstory to middle story to understory. And I think going forward, we also need to also put climate adapted plantings in. So, we need to allow for future climate as well. So, in some of the species we put in, they need to be a bit more resilient in lower rainfall and heating temperatures. So, I think we need to adapt ecological restoration for future climate.

So Brendan, you’ve founded several more companies since that first one, which we will talk through, but how does climate change thread through all of your work?

It’s interesting with climate change, you know, 15-20 years ago I was thinking, Oh, here’s another issue we need to deal with in terms of environmental stress. And I was thinking, Is it as bad as people say it is? Is it really happening to these extents? And then I deep dived into it and realise we really need to move quickly to decarbonise, rebuild carbon sinks. And my belief is that we’ve got so much carbon now in the atmosphere, we need to treat it as a resource, we need to reverse mine it and we need to put it into soils back into forests. We need to work out ways to build cities with it. We need to lock it down and use it as a resource. So, I think that’s where the great innovations need now to come so we can treat that as a resource and pull it down and use it.

I just saw it as a big stressor and each business has been used as a springboard for the next where I think, Okay, we’ve worked out how to do ecological restoration on a large scale. Let’s now move into other areas to tackle some of these big challenges. So, it’s been a thread all the way through.

I want to jump to one of the more exciting projects to me personally that you’re working on, which is the Cape Sustainability Community that you’ve built in Cape Paterson in Victoria. So, the Cape, it’s been described as super sustainable and it’s won many awards, but also the Victorian Premier’s Sustainability Award for Climate Action. What is it exactly that makes the Cape super sustainable?

So, I found that site when I went for a run at Cape Paterson, which is my family beach 20 years ago, and it’s a cattle farm looking over the ocean, amazing views, and it was largely cleared, and it had an incredible undulations and landform and topography. I thought this could be a terrific place for a sustainable community built into this landscape where we could model some of the solutions to climate change. Let’s build a more sustainable community. So, the things that make it sustainable are that we aim to make it carbon neutral. So, we worked with really good architects and designers. We set design guidelines. We trained our builders and designers in how to build energy efficient passive solar homes. So, we went through this training process, we started building, we’ve built about 110 so far. They’re averaging eight-star energy efficiency.

Wow.

So, they heat and cool naturally, they’ve got good orientation. They invite the winter sun into the living areas where it makes contact with thermal mass, warms up during the day, re-releases that warmth during the night where it’s retained in the house with good insulation and double glazing.

So, it’s like living under a nice big doona during the winter on the cold coast. And then in the summer when the sun’s up higher in the sky, we have shade structures that block out the hot summer sun. So, it’s like a wine cellar during the summer. So, they sit naturally between 18 to 25 degrees year-round with minimal heating and cooling. Then we have efficient all electric heating and cooling systems, heat pump heating and cooling systems that are very, very efficient. We’ve designed out the use of gas, so we use induction cooktops, heat pump, hot water. All the home’ have solar, all the homes have provision for electric vehicle charging.

So, when you layer all that up, it means that the houses are generating a surplus of energy, the estate’s generating a surplus of energy, the electrons are going into the existing township next door. So, it’s a clean energy power station and we’re also eliminating gas bills altogether. Tiny electricity bills. 25 per cent of homes now have no petrol bill because they’re using electric cars. So, they’re saving a huge amount of money by being carbon neutral. So, houses are saving around $5,000. If they do the full the tri trifecta, they’re saving $5,000 to $7,000 a year in avoiding gas, electricity and petrol spend. And over the whole estate that will add up eventually to about $1,000,000 a year of savings across 230 homes by decoupling from fossil fuels and the costs of fossil fuels.

So, I think it’s really powerful economics around decarbonisation. Ten years ago, it was more expensive to do that, but over the last ten years, the cost of solar has come down so rapidly and the efficiency of these operating systems have improved, that there’s now a big performance gap opening up between integrated sustainability and older practice in favour of sustainability. And that’s only getting bigger. And we’re seeing that at the Cape.

And this is a community that it’s really working with the environment around it as well, isn’t it? So, tell me a bit about what you’ve done with banning cats.

So, it was an existing mostly cleared cattle station and we also looked at restoring waterways and habitat and biodiversity. So, we planted hundreds of thousands of local Indigenous tube stock and restored waterways and wildlife corridors. We’re in a part of the world where we’re on the coast, we have some vulnerable bird species. And we’ve also created all of this amazing habitat for birds to move into.

One of our residents, David Hartney, is a keen observer of the natural world who’s documenting biodiversity on site. We’re now at 128 bird species living on or moving through our site and the coast. So, we also have – we’re watching the mammals on site and the marsupials. So, we have koalas, kangaroos, wombats, but we also have a lot of pretty interesting smaller animals, little marsupial mice and so on, seven species of frogs. So, we just thought we needed to protect that. So, we said it’s just not a place for cats with that amount of biodiversity layering up, it’s just not a place for cats. And by not having that cat pressure, it’s exploded with biodiversity and people really love that.

Yes. Fantastic. So is this kind of community, would it be fair to say that it’s a bit of a first. How different is it from your standard housing developments that exist elsewhere?

It is a first in terms of we set a high bar in terms of the energy efficiency and efficient all electric and decarbonisation. We’ve sort of hit that out of the park. We’ve also layered up things like urban food and urban farming. So, we’ve built a multimillion-dollar community farm. We’re about to build the farmhouse and other buildings to finish, so we’re growing a lot of food on site. We have large scale urban farming as well. So, we’re using advanced wicking beds and we’ve got a lot of food growing at household level. So, I think that’s pretty interesting the way we are tackling food security, being a model for food security.

We did other things like limit the size of the houses you can build with. So, a lot of Australian housing states have oversized houses. We said let’s limit the footprint to 200 square metres of living area and the average at the Cape would probably be about 150-160 square metres and repurpose that investment that you might have put into a bigger house, put it into the good stuff. I think the way we’ve trained the builders and brought the local trades along for the ride, all those things, the stuff we’re doing, biodiversity and also social design, lots of walking tracks, pocket parks and so on. I think all that layers up to be pretty unique.

Is there a particular area within the community that’s your favourite?

I think the community farm is becoming the social heartbeat of the community where people come down and they’ve got access to big areas of food production and that’s where we see a lot of good social interaction. So, I think when we’ve finished the farmhouse buildings and we’re looking to 3D print those, I think it’ll just have this great all-weather resource where people can come and come together around food, food production, food preserving, cooking, learning. So, I think it’ll go next level when we do that.

Sounds good. I do love food. So, it’s not just environmental benefits and cost saving benefits from the renewable energy here at that community. It’s the houses themselves as well. They were a bit aesthetically different to other housing communities that you might see. What are the architectural considerations that are at play in the Cape and how do they benefit the community and those environmental aspirations that you had when you first saw that piece of land?

All the houses, there’s a great amount of customisation and difference between the homes. It’s not like the Truman Show where they’re all very similar and people get to express themselves within the guidelines. So, there’s guidelines that set out the size. So, we have some hard and fast rules around different front fences, so open streetscapes, verandah culture, so people address the street, and the street is a social domain and that helps with terrific connectivity.

People still have back fences and have private zones. But the streets are very, very social and walkable. So, there’s a lot of incidental contact with your neighbours built into the urban landscape architecture with the streets, pocket parks, walking tracks and wetlands and so on. You know, you’ve got your private spaces, but then if you want to walk out and dip into a vibrant community, there’s lots going on. From the urban farming group to book clubs to the swimming, the icebergers who swim down in the ocean, the Koala micro forests group and so on. And I think in three or four years there’ll be even more social groups.

It has local tradies and families. We worked really hard on affordability. In the first three or four stages you could buy a block of land with a two in front of it or a one in front of it, and we had lots of house and land packages under half a million dollars. It’s interesting now because the whole industry has really got this big issue with affordability and the cost of construction. So, in the later stages of houses, we’re seeing that affordability challenge. But we did – I think we’ve carried affordability well right through the estate. And we do have families, local workers, active retirees. We have “e-changers”, people working on the coast and being connected with their Melbourne businesses as well.

What learnings would you build on for your next development project? I’m assuming there’s going to be one. Is there anything that you’d do differently and how would accounting for climate change continue to factor in?

We’ve pioneered a whole range of things, particularly around food and sustainable construction, but I’m now doing some master planning on another larger community in Victoria. We’re going to be looking at new emerging construction techniques like 3D construction.

At the moment we’re seeing this this big spike in the cost to build homes nationally. And it’s been impacted by things like the Ukraine crisis where we used to get a lot of the Baltic pine from Russia. So, we don’t have access to some of those resources. The cost of timber has gone up. I think we’re now in a period where timber is going to become more difficult to rely on because of climate change. We’re in this era called the pyrocene now where we have much more frequent fire and we saw that three summers ago where we lost millions of hectares of native forest and plantations. The costs of plantation insurance is on the increase.

So, I think we going to have to pivot in construction and I think 3D construction printing is of great interest. I think it’s a really interesting technology. You still need your trades to do the fit out, internal fit out, doors, windows, electricians, plumbers and so on, but it allows us to speed up construction. It also potentially allows us to use recycled feedstocks so we can use pulverised glass. If we have a bottle of wine, we could then be pulverising that and printing with it. We can use things like recycled concrete, we can use biomass. So, we have some hemp growers in the hills around Bass Coast.

We’re experimenting with hemp finds into 3D construction mixed, so you get carbon into the mix. I think we’ve got to bump concrete, concrete is eight per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. If concrete was a country, they’d be China, then the US and then concrete in terms of emissions profile, about eight per cent of the world’s carbon. We need to pivot on to using biomass recycled content. And we also need, I think, to harness some of the expertise of previous speakers here, synthetic biologists, and produce bio cements to bind the mix. And I just saw the University of Maine printed a house out of wood dust with a bio cement and they printed the whole house.

So, I think the whole industry now needs to pivot onto rapid growing biomass, recycled content so we can rapidly print affordable homes and we can also come in and print back better after climate events like big bushfires or floods, communities are going to have to move. They are going to have to move from advancing sea level, they are going to have to move off flood plains, they are going to have to move out of fire zones and the ability to go in and print back better, precision built energy efficient homes out of circular economy, low carbon or carbon sinking materials, I think is the next frontier.

So, there’s big gantry printers and there’s also little crawling robotic printers that can crawl into tight spaces and precision print a dwelling. I think that’s really interesting in terms of urban densification potential. If you look at Australian neighbourhoods in our sprawled cities, we have a huge amount of space with lots of abilities to infill print a second dwelling as a way of increasing – tackling homelessness and increasing available housing stocks. And I think 3D printing allows you to nimbly work with constrained spaces to be able to densify neighbourhoods, which is also an important solution to climate change.

You are very passionate about increasing the capacity of our cities to grow food, both our current cities and our future cities. What is the opportunity there exactly?

So, if you look at cities through an architectural and a horticultural lens and an engineering lens, we have huge amounts of resources that could be diverted into urban food production. So, our cities harvest enormous biological resource from our regions. We bring it in, we consume it, and then we send off the waste products, which is organic resource food and green waste. And historically, a lot of that has gone to the landfill where it’s broken down anaerobically creating methane. And it’s about 3 per cent of our national carbon footprint. To me, that is the biggest free kick because that is incredibly valuable resource that could be composted locally and folded back into productive urban farms.

The other thing we have is huge amounts of rainwater sheeting off hard surfaces. Rooves in particular is where you want to capture that in the water cycle. As electric vehicles become more common, the air quality in cities is going to clean up as well, which favours urban farming. And we have the spaces, we have car parks, rooftops, courtyards, schools, backyards. So, we have all this ability to combine those things.

The thing we’ve missed is food growing architecture. So, that’s a challenge we took on. We’ve looked at Australian wicking beds, which are a fantastic water efficient food growing system, very old invention, drought proof, where you have raised beds with a water reservoir in the base and they water out through capillary action, nice big deep soil profile. You can grow a really wide range of plants, including root vegetables, that the only water loss is evapotranspiration of our foliage. So, we only need to water them maybe once a week during summer, once a month during winter. So, it’s very good for busy urbanites who don’t want to be wed to the end of a hose every day.

I have them in my backyard. I can vouch for them. Yes, they’re fantastic.

Wicking beds are fantastic invention, but we then started making them and finding they quite difficult to make. Often you fill them up with a scoria and then they leak. So, we thought we should invest in advanced wicking beds. So, we’ve developed an advanced wicking bed called Foodcube we make in Melbourne out of 80 per cent recycled plastic and we can clip these together into pop up urban farms really quickly and build them together in days and be growing food in weeks. And we have that nice deep soil profile.

We can capture organic resource and we’re also putting in in situ worm farms so that we can take organic fogo – food and organic and garden organic waste – and we can put that straight into worm farms where worms are in the plant as they come in and they help break that material down, microbes help break that material down, and plants put their roots straight into and feed from the resource. So, that we can flip this equation with these millions of tonnes of food waste. So, we’re sending out often – well you hear of food miles well, there’s waste miles where we ship this stuff a long way as well to deal with it. I think we can actually capture that and use it in a very local way and spend a huge amount of food out of that urban form.

So, that is another one of the businesses that you’ve founded, Biofilta, that is. And that was along with a water engineer, Marc Noyce. And that’s going to transform cities into urban farms. That’s the whole plan there.

Well, we think that there’s potential to fundamentally change the way material flow and organics flow through cities and any space can really become a productive, water efficient urban farm. And we’re doing it. So, we’re already building rooftop farms, school farms, community farms, backyard farms. This summer, we had four farms that we’re diverting food out of for charity Oz Harvest. And I see Ronni Khan has been one of the previous speakers on this series. And these are spaces that, you know, a year before or months before where just bare concrete pads.

Dressing our spaces with urban farms also helps with urban biodiversity and urban cooling. These big wicking beds are evaporative air conditioners. During heatwaves, they evaporate, transpire and cool the urban form. They recycle nutrients, they reduce food miles to food metres, they improve nutrition, they’re social hubs where people come together and grow a surplus of food and give that to their neighbours. They get gentle exercise, people get their hands in a healthy soil. There’s all sorts of science now showing us about these clever little microbes that actually help with positive mood regulation.

The opportunity is enormous to turn our food and organic “waste”, I call it a resource, back into urban farming and grow a lot of food out of urban form. I’m just going to qualify it by saying it’s not going to replace the work done by food growing experts, our farmers and our farming sector. We need to support our farmers, take action on climate change. But urban farming can actually really spin a huge amount of volume of food out of our cities.

Yes, let’s talk about that volume of food, because when you were first beginning to explore the growing capacity of these smaller areas in urban environments, you did a test using a spare car park space just to see how much food you could grow. What happened there?

So, we actually used two car spaces in our headquarters in Port Melbourne and we had a chat to staff and said, ‘Let’s get on the bikes and free up some car spaces.’ And then we built these pop-up wicking bed farms using the Biofilta food systems. And then we took organic resource from our coffee roastery in our staff kitchen, and we went to the South Melbourne market where they have a whole lot of really nutrient rich material with quite a bit of sort of fish material in it that they were putting through their rapid composter. We took that and we combined it all and grew food in our carpark.

We set a target of around 140 kilos, or 150 kilos per annum. The World Health Organisation had a report that said that a healthy adult needs about 140-150 kilos of fresh produce per annum to have a healthy diet. So, we thought there’s our target. Let’s see if we can grow 140 kilos of produce within one year out of one car space, everyone understands how big car space is. So, we planted it, we then harvested, we captured everything and weighed it to the gram and it took seven months to hit 140 kilos out of one car space. So, that was very instructive because there’s lots of car spaces in cities and other spaces. Again, I’ve got to qualify, you can’t grow the diverse range of food types of the modern diet, but in terms of leafy greens, root vegetables, a wide range of plants, in these deep soil profiles, you can certainly grow a lot in small spaces.

So, in partnership with the City of Melbourne and the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre, the Sustainable Landscape Company, another project of yours, you launched the SkyFarm on that Melbourne car park roof in 2021. How has it been going? What’s the reception been like from the community?

So, Melbourne SkyFarm is sited on a car park overlooking the Yarra, the Melbourne Convention Centre, 2000 square metre car park. I found it on Google Maps. So, I was thinking, Where can we grow some really cool demonstration farms in our cities and that looks bare. Chased it up and found that it was not being used. So, it’s a big concrete slab that heats up during summer, adds to urban heat Island. It was a great site for seagulls, like an Alfred Hitchcock film when you went out there. And we approached the Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre and said, could we use that to build a farm?

So, SkyFarm, we’ve built the urban farming component, a SkyFarm. That’s been running for about 14, 15 months. We’re capturing our data from the rooftop and we’re comparing our food value donated to Oz Harvest, our food charity against supermarket prices. We’re at about $85,000 worth of food value donated to Oz Harvest so far. It’s a great working farm, and in the next year we’ve now finally got our permits to build a rooftop nursery, rooftop event space and a rooftop classroom. So, it’ll become this sort of hub of urban farming and events and sustainability and circular economy. It’s been a fun project too, just working our way through building a load bearing farm on a rooftop we had two x-ray concrete columns, a lot of engineering, so it’s been slower to finish the whole project. The farm’s up and running really well and we’re getting good results.

Do you think the people on the outside of this project just kind of watching it happen in their space, are surprised at how well it’s going?

Yes, well, I think it’s got a great following. We have lots of people going through. We’ve had international delegations going through, the Bangladeshi government sent a group. They’ve just built a rooftop farm on a building in Dhaka using the Foodcube system. It’s got a big following and I think it will only grow.

And these wicking beds, they’re now being used in areas of the world that have already been the hardest hit by climate change, islands in the Pacific in particular. Can you tell me a bit about how they’re being used there and what the community response has been?

Yes, so we’re sending the food cubes out through aid projects with the Australian and New Zealand government to the Atoll nations in the Pacific. These Atoll nations are places like Tuvalu, average height above sea level, less than two metres. Traditionally they’ve had a stable, resilient, thriving community there for thousands and thousands of years, but they’re very low to the waterline and they grow a lot of food in taro pits where they grow their root vegetables and so on.

Historically, you would have a king tide, maybe daylight through the coral screen once or twice a year. Then it would be washed back through by tropical rain. But with climate change and sea level rise, they’re now seeing those king tide events daylighting through the coral screen and the soil much more regularly. So, they’re getting saltwater contamination in their traditional food growing areas. So, they’re having to adapt their food growing and get it up off the ground. And we’ve been sending the Foodcubes across, and they’re being used. We have a thousand on Tuvalu at the moment and they’ve been working on identifying their organic resource.

So, things like jungle biomass, seaweed, even pig manure from village piggeries, they’re hot composting that and they’ve developed this fantastic soil mix with the help of Australian Universities. And they growing food really effectively now. So, we have Foodcube farms out in Tuvalu, Tonga after the volcanic eruptions wiped a lot of food production. Through the New Zealand government, we sent over container loads of Foodcubes. Just to get the food growing up and happening more rapidly.

So, they are right through the Pacific and they’re having a really great impact. It’s a really inspiring story of those communities coming together, and they have necessity as the driver and that’s why they’ve embraced it and they’ve worked out their soil mixes and they’ve just got these things pumping so effectively. I think it is an inspirational story, but I think that these approaches are also able to be moved to in that growing lens of climate vulnerable communities, including Australian Indigenous communities who are often very heat stressed. So, you know, there’s a community, Walgett in inland New South Wales, they’ve adapted a Foodcube farm out there. I think it’s got great opportunities in Indigenous Australia but also right across our cities.

Fantastic. So, with all that you’ve done and all that you’ve seen, where do you see sustainability and innovation moving in the next few years, particularly when it comes to those innovations that are addressing climate change?

Well, I think in a time where, you know, we need to bring our A-game to everything, and it’s a time in history where the biggest risk is we keep doing the same because we’re sort of digging ourselves into a deeper hole. So, every single industrial process or design or process needs to be evaluated so that we can move it on to more efficient clean energy sources. And hopefully, I think the solution to climate change is if we can re-engineer processes so, that they meet human need and they create value, create employment. But when they are reset in a new mode, they’re actually either zero carbon or actually carbon negative. They’re drawing down carbon and using that for useful things.

So, I think, you know, we’ve got to sort of power our way back out of climate change. We need to work much more sympathetically with the natural world. There’s a huge opportunity to harness the regenerative power of nature by using land more sympathetically. I think we need to shift farming from being a carbon intensive activity to where we’re farming, not just a food type but farmers are farming food, fibre, carbon and biodiversity. We’ve just got to move quickly, and we need to be putting a lot of research money into these climate solutions. And I’d really like to see Australia putting, you know, billions of dollars into accelerating the most promising climate solutions and scaling them. And we’ve heard a lot of them in this series, but there needs to be serious research money going into that.

What upcoming innovations addressing climate change have you really excited?

Renewable energies and energy efficiency that’s proven and scaling. Electrification of transport that’s going to win on performance and economics as well as carbon footprint. Probably the ones that most excite me are food because we have fossil fuel use – driver climate change, we have land use – driver of climate change. So, I’m very interested in sustainable alternative proteins that can be – and there’s a whole raft of them coming through. Things like sophisticated plant-based proteins, even cultured or cultivated alternatives to meat, but also precision fermentation.

One of the really exciting things that we can harness is emerging sustainable forms of protein that have a far smaller environmental footprint than conventional ways of producing protein. And I think that’s a terrific potential disrupter that can really reduce the carbon emissions coming out of production of food. And I think these new things, we need to look very carefully then at how farmers can engage with and generate livelihoods out of these new technologies and opportunities, because we’re still going to need the feedstocks that feed the production of these new proteins, and we’re going to need feedstocks such as biomass coming into new industries, around 3D construction printing. So, I think some really clever work around policy and support and education and training needs to be made available to our farming sectors who are becoming very vulnerable to climate change. How can they transition onto a low carbon footprint while feeding Australia and having a future on the land.

Are you hopeful for the future that we can reverse the damage being done?

I think that the human mind is very good at moving fast when it sees a fast-moving threat. It’s sort of not that well designed to cope with the slow burn of climate change. But if you look at the way we responded during Covid, we can move and innovate and direct resources and investment and come up with solutions very quickly.

I think the world hangs in the balance. I think if humans get there and rub together as neurons and get going with a sense of urgency, then we can do incredible things really quickly and the solutions are coming through so quickly. If we had this exhibition in five years time, there’ll be a whole raft of new solutions and innovations coming through, millions of people are going to work every day just trying to solve these big issues, movement of capital happening. But we need to move quickly. We’re on the clock.

Fantastic speaking to you, Brendan. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.