Welcome, everybody to 100 Climate Conversations. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 69 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 climate change. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum, an incredible building. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo power station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name is Pat Abboud, and sitting next to me is this wonderful human, Elizabeth Mossop, who I have the pleasure of speaking with today, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Dean of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology in Sydney. She’s a founding principal of Spackman Mossop and Michaels Landscape Architects, based in Sydney, New Orleans and Detroit. Her research and practice is concerned with landscape’s role in urban revitalisation and resilient communities and cities in the face of climate change. She has extensive experience in the recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast post-Hurricane Katrina and is currently developing the Northern Rivers Living Lab in Lismore. We are so thrilled to have her join us today. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth. You co-founded international landscape architecture and urban design firm Spackman Mossop and Michaels in 1994. You were living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana, when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Aside from being really scary, I imagine. What was it like for you to be in New Orleans at that time?

It was like nothing that I had ever experienced because I had never lived through any kind of a disaster on that sort of scale. And I should say my experience of it was a very privileged one. I evacuated from the city. I had an alternative place to live. My place in New Orleans was not badly affected. My job wasn’t affected, you know, so I was personally was insulated from much of what happened. But everybody around me, everything about the city was impacted. And I had evacuated to Baton Rouge. There were field hospitals set up on the university campus — you know, me from my privileged childhood growing up in happy Australia it was like living in a movie. I was staying in downtown Baton Rouge. I had an 18-month-old baby. And it seemed like a really big storm. But you’re sort of thinking like, well, should I be getting under the table or whatever? You know, you just don’t know how bad it is. I mean, I can remember living through earthquakes in Tokyo, and I’ll be in the office and everybody else will be working away at their desks. And I’m thinking, well, are we all going to die? Should I run screaming out into the street? And it was a bit the same kind of thing. And yes, I can remember standing with the baby on my front doorstep looking out over downtown Baton Rouge, all blacked out. What I didn’t realise at the time was all my neighbours had sent their wives and children away and they were all sitting in their living rooms with their shotguns. You know, waiting for the ravening hordes of evacuees to come and loot their houses or something. I mean, I would have been so much more terrified had I known what everybody else was doing.

So, you touched on this a second ago. How were the people of New Orleans impacted?

Well, what happens when a hurricane comes to New Orleans and certainly until Katrina, lots of people don’t evacuate because, you know, there’s only a certain chance that the hurricane is actually going to hit the city. And evacuation is a pain. Takes hours and hours and hours. You sit in traffic. You drive to Mississippi. You drive along the Gulf, whatever. All the hotels are full. There’s nowhere to go. You’re then stuck outside the city. So, lots of people don’t want to evacuate. Lots of people have hurricane parties. And so, that Sunday night, you’re just trying to see – find out what is going on. And I mean, everybody has been watching the sort of swirling aerial of the hurricane on the meteorological maps for days at this point. And it really does drive you absolutely crazy. And so, it was only quite gradually over the next day or so that we started to get more information and to find out that it really had absolutely hit the city.

And was climate change discussed in the context of this disaster at the time?

Not much. It’s much more about this kind of annual cycle of hurricane season. It was really only, I think, later on, sort of looking at this context of what that hurricane has meant — particularly in terms of things like coastal land loss and things like that — to then say, Well, we now have to look at this in the context that we think that we are going to see an increasing frequency of storms and we are also going to see an increasing intensity of storms. That’s the gift of climate change is the fact that you are now, you know, we started to think we’ve already entered this time of instability. And of course, for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast it poses particular hazards because of its geography and because of the way the Mississippi has been managed over the course of the 20th century.

So, there’s room for prediction and preparedness.

Well, interestingly, there was room for prediction and preparedness before Hurricane Katrina. I can remember reading a New York Times article a couple of years before that said what is going to happen when the next big hurricane hits New Orleans? That laid out many of the things that subsequently happened.

So, what were the other factors that contributed to the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina? Because it wasn’t just the actual weather event itself that was to blame for the devastation, right?

I think it’s really important that we understand that while there is a natural hazard event —n that case, [Hurricane Katrina] — that is not the disaster. The disaster is a human created thing. The disaster is something that was created in New Orleans over the decades before, the disaster was that the levee system failed catastrophically. Not just the levee system, but all of the associated water management infrastructure. All of the pumping infrastructure also failed. But what caused the greatest loss of life was the catastrophic failure of the levee system. That’s the actual disaster. That’s what killed people. The levees were not built as they were designed, and over decades they were not properly maintained. And so, that at the point when the hurricane hits and what you have is, you have this massive storm surge coming in from the eastern part of the city, from Lake Borgne. And that then is also coming from the northern part of the city from Lake Pontchartrain. And, as it is hitting these protective levees, they are collapsing catastrophically. So, you have what effectively are things like tidal waves coming across and smashing up people’s houses so that they look like piles of matchsticks. I mean, there was nothing left. You kind of think of a flood you think, you know, there’s water, we know about water, all of that kind of thing. The violence of the impact of this kind of catastrophic failure, you’ve got to see it to believe it. There’s just I mean, seriously, like a big pile of matchsticks.

Wow. So, in your profession as a landscape architect, an urban designer, you’re involved in, heavily involved in, the design and rebuild of parts of New Orleans. I mean, thinking about what you just described and getting a very clear visual on that, what a job. What a huge task to rebuild. What did you do and who did you work with?

For a long time, the city was shut down. You were not allowed to drive into it. So, it was very hard to find out what had happened, you know, and we found ways to get into the city and to have a look. And then this started to be more and more conversations. And the city actually convened a series of working groups. And I was – you know, the mayor had these various different task forces, and I was on the one for sort of urban design. And it was very, very slow for things to really build up momentum and to get going. And I was consumed with this idea that there’s going to have to be all of this rebuilding. But we can’t continue to put people in harm’s way because it was very, very clear from what happened in the hurricane — and what we already knew about various different neighbourhoods and their elevations below sea level — that some parts of the city were relatively resilient and other parts of the city were at huge risk. And so, I was consumed by this idea that you’ve got to build back better, you have to build back differently. But so, there would be these oh, you know, seminars and neighbourhood organisations and conversations and things like that. And certainly, in the first few months people were very much at cross-purposes. And I think, you know, and in part, I mean, I see just how naive I was about what was going on. Never having had an experience like this before.

How much did you know about what was beneath the surface before you actually went to New Orleans?

Oh, so little. And what did I know about disasters or floods or any of that kind of thing? Nothing much. I mean, I was a landscape architect I knew water flowed downhill. That’s not even true in New Orleans. And so, I’m a landscape architect. I think about cities. I think about building cities. And I was having that conversation with some of my colleagues. That was not the conversation that people in New Orleans were having. They were saying, Shut up. I need a roof. What am I supposed to do? I’ve got nowhere to live. There are no schools. You know, the hospital that was looking after my ancient grandmother is shut. You know, people were just dealing with these massive, life-consuming issues. And it was so frightening and disturbing how slow any kind of government response was. Both in the disaster and its immediate aftermath, but also sort of over the months and months after that, so that there were, you know, there was a real sort of disconnection in the various different conversations that were going on. And I think the whole effort was really stymied by an absolute failure of leadership in the city, and a failure of leadership at the state level, and a failure of leadership federally. And at the time, I can remember people, you know, people in the Lower Ninth Ward, for example, espousing all of these conspiracy theories about what the federal government was doing and all of that kind of thing. And then, you know, at the time you think, ‘Oh, well, that’s all so crazy. You know, it’s not a giant conspiracy’. But I have to say, over time, I came to think, ‘Hmm, it’s a giant conspiracy’. The federal government did not provide the necessary help and they conspired, I think, with the various other levels of government to keep people out of certain parts of the city for months and months and months. And what that meant was that people, perhaps who hadn’t evacuated immediately, were forced to go elsewhere so they could find somewhere to live. And the people who had evacuated to places like Houston or Florida or whatever, they couldn’t come back. And I came to believe that, in fact, it had been a very calculated move to try to break one of the last Democrat-voting blocks in the South. Because if you look at any of those electoral maps, New Orleans is a little blue circle in what is now an absolute sea of red across the south. It hasn’t quite done that, didn’t quite succeed. But there’s no question that the city of New Orleans is now older and whiter and richer than it was before the hurricane.

So, you’ve got all these contributing factors at play that you’re talking us through. I mean, it seems like an impossible mission. The way you describe it, if I was in your shoes, I would pack up and go home because how – where do you start? How do you work with these incredibly complex layers of people who all have an approach that is perhaps different to yours?

So, we started by thinking about ways of reorganising the city to try to de-risk it. And there were a whole range of political reasons why that was never going to happen. And through a combination of events and a certain kind of – you know we ended up with very sort of laissez faire picture whereby people, in the absence of any direction or any real help or anything, people came back and just rebuilt their houses wherever they were. And so, it became clear over time that we were going to end up with a sort of patchwork version of the city, as it had always been. Still, with a very uneven set of impacts in that the richer neighbourhoods did a whole lot better at coming back. And there are still, to this day, large parts of New Orleans that are vacant. But what it meant was that the work we were doing, gradually, you know, things gradually started to happen. After about five years, more money started coming into the city. And what happened in New Orleans was also that because you’ve got a big philanthropic culture in the US, there were a whole series of foundations that invested money in planning work in this city. So weirdly, a lot of that work was being funded privately. And so, we were involved with developing a water plan for New Orleans, with a big consortium of people. We were also funded to do various kind of drainage and flood mitigation plans for people at the neighbourhood level. And so, what it meant was that instead of thinking about this problem in a more holistic way, we were doing projects at the neighbourhood scale or even just at the site scale. And really being able to implement this sort of landscape approach to open space — but also to roads and neighbourhoods and things like that — that you have to design absolutely everything so that it holds water. Because the one thing that you can be absolutely certain of is that the city is going to flood again, and it is below sea level. So, it relies on a pumping system, which did get fixed and reorganised to make it more robust, but with low lying areas and areas that are going to flood, there’s nothing you can do about that. Floods are going to happen. The only thing you can do, is you can choose where that floodwater is going to go. You can choose whether it is going to go into somebody’s living room or whether it is going to go to a big park or a big greenway or something like that and sit there. And so, what you’re trying to do is you’re just trying to slow the water. So, the longer it takes for the water to get into the drainage system, the greater the capacity of the drainage system is. So that, you know, you’ve got a finite drainage system in New Orleans. So, the more you store and hold water in places before it gets into those pipes, the better the outcome is. And so, that a flood that might have been catastrophic does not have to be catastrophic. And we started to see – so this was a poor city before the hurricane loses most of its tax base, certainly for quite a while, very limited funds to do anything. We’re working very much in a developing world kind of context. And so, in a way that gave us more opportunity because there wasn’t the option to do some great big, wonderful fancy scheme where I’m just going to fix all this drainage and put in a whole new infrastructure and all of that kind of thing. So, people were more open to the sorts of ideas that are in fact more effective in the long term around these kind of nature-based solutions and these sorts of strategies that we’re using to try to work with natural processes rather than trying to really just control those natural processes. So, we were able to do more innovative and creative things in that environment than we would have been able to do in perhaps a more functional part of the country.

Yes, that makes sense. Let’s bring your expertise back home to Australia for a moment. As we continue to experience the impacts of climate change here and around the world, we can expect an increase in the frequency, duration and intensity of disasters like flooding and bushfires. What were your learnings from your experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina that you’ve been able to sort of apply to how we need to adapt and respond to the impacts of climate change? Two very different landscapes, two different sets of issues, but the solutions that you sort of plugged in and had to create, I imagine you learn a lot from to be able to adapt to similar problems that we might see here in Australia.

And when you move around the world and live in different countries, you can’t help seeing things in a comparative way. And as I was living through Katrina and its aftermath, nd I was thinking all of the time,’ Oh, well, this would never happen. This would never happen in Australia. In Australia we would you know, we wouldn’t be having people living in all these dangerous places because we’ve got planning and, you know, we would be managing these disasters better’. You know, and then I guess we come to last year and we look at those Lismore floods and you think, ‘Hmm, pretty clearly putting people in harm’s way and gee, we’re not really so terrific at responding–’

Building on top of the problem.

–to these things. And you start looking at Lismore and you think, ‘Oh yes, this is a problem that we have been creating for decades’. But, you know, I do see some really interesting parallels. What we saw in Lismore, as we saw in New Orleans, was we saw communities and individuals mobilising to rescue each other. We see these interesting, diverse communities, that have very strong social networks, that are being mobilised very effectively in a disaster. It would be great if it was the government, but you know, there was a very, very different outcome in Lismore in terms of the potential loss of life because of these strong social networks that are there. And we have been observing that in New Orleans post-Katrina ever since: the importance and the effectiveness and the agency of community organisations to push government to do the right thing. And I think that’s something we’ve got to be very focused on in Australia, in relation to climate change generally, but we are certainly starting to see that in the Northern Rivers to very effective community mobilisation. And in my view, one of the things we learnt from that post-hurricane environment was, you’ve got to be able to put experts together with communities to come up with the right kinds of solutions. Communities can’t do it on their own, experts and government can’t impose these things on communities. So, that’s the magical thing that you have to make happen — the role of government is to facilitate the experts and the communities working together on these solutions. And I think what that means is that we need different kinds of organisations and different sorts of structures to do that. And that’s what we’re trying to do with this Living Lab model in the Northern Rivers. And it’s based on something that we did post-Hurricane [Katrina], which is to use the university to create this trusted third space where you can bring together the best experts from wherever. In the Northern Rivers — we’re sort of operating here from UTS, but in partnership with Southern Cross University — local, regional, got lots of experts with deep, deep, long history in that region. We’re working with them. We’re working with the local communities. But we can also bring in the best experts from anywhere in the world. Whether you want to look at flood mitigation or whether you want to look at the provision of housing or whether you want to look at sort of resilience and supporting people in mental health after disasters. We can tap into people who have done this before. We can tap into the very, very best examples of this kind of work. And I mean, it’s crystal clear that these are complex and systemic problems that require extensive and unconventional combinations of expertise, and that’s really difficult for government to do because government is organised into, here’s the Department of Transport, here’s the Department of Planning, you know, here is this–

Quite siloed.

Quite siloed. Now in New South Wales, they’re trying to address that with the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation and the New Resilience Authority. But that’s a slow process and we just we don’t have time to wait for everybody to get everything perfectly organised.

What you have that’s incredibly interesting also, I suppose in terms of mobilising communities, when you really cut it back to Australia from New Orleans in 2016, you took up a position at University of Technology Sydney as the Dean of the School of Design, Architecture and Building, as you’re talking to at the moment. Reflecting on your own studies and career in the industry, how have the focuses of today’s students shifted to include adaptation and mitigation to climate change?

That’s our only hope really, is the push from these younger generations who, let’s face it, are going to be living in a variety of dystopian novel settings. And, you know, they’ve got no access to housing, they’re going to be experiencing floods, they’re going to be experiencing droughts, they’re going to be experiencing bushfires — they are coming in you know, these young people are coming into universities very passionate about these issues because they want answers, and they want agency, and they want to be able to make change. And I think that universities are struggling to respond quickly enough. I mean, if we just think about, if we think about architectural education, for example, we have a model that really comes to us from the Beaux-Arts, you know, and where we are thinking about architecture, formally. And we have currently a particular way of procuring and building buildings and all of that is changing so rapidly and has to change so quickly. The whole built-environment economy has to change to a circular economy. We have to change to a kind of a zero-waste paradigm. All of our education across all of these disciplines has got to respond to this, and I think that’s what young people are really, really hungry for. And we are all in this project together to make this very rapid transformation over the next five years, say.

You’ve said before that landscape architecture, well you see it is the greatest discipline, which is a big statement. I mean, listening to you speak today, I can see why because there’s real solutions there that can be mined and developed and made better and better and better as time goes on. But why do you say landscape architecture is the greatest discipline, particularly in relation to climate change?

Yes, and particularly in relation to climate change and particularly in relation to human inhabitation of the planet. Because as landscape architects we approach any place by starting with its deep nature and its deep ecology and an understanding of the systems that have shaped a particular place or a particular region. And these are the things that are most deep anywhere, and these are the things – these natural systems are going to continue to exist, whatever we do. The discipline approaches all of these questions through the understanding of all of these things in a systematic way. We’ve got to think about ecological systems and natural processes. We also think about sort of human inhabitation as a system. Communities, how do communities operate, how do we understand about the kind of infrastructure that we need to support human life? You know, the ecology is the deepest. The infrastructure is our biggest investment anywhere, you know, and then the sort of capital investment and the buildings themselves are in fact the sort of the most fleeting part of this and the shortest part of this. But we also now have to be very much thinking about towns and cities and anywhere that people live. You know, we already – we’ve got this investment, we’ve got this energy and carbon investment in the environments that exist. We have to be thinking very much about how are we going to adapt and change what we already have to make it more robust to the future and more resilient.

So, what I’m hearing there again is that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to incorporate existing infrastructure. Where do you see this sort of line between building the new and retrofitting what we already have?

Well, I think retrofitting has to be our starting point in a way that it has not been in the past. And we have to have a much more sophisticated approach to thinking about our built environment that is more complex than simply the financial equation. And so, we’ve got to be starting from this idea of what can we do with what already exists. And, you know, it perhaps requires different patterns of investment and a different paradigm for how we think about the built environment. But that’s where we have to go rather than, you know, the idea that it’s more important to build a new form that’s going to perform better in the future. You know, if you just destroyed all of the gains of that by destroying what was there and creating this massive waste problem, you know, and then kind of just moving on — which is the way that we have largely dealt with our cities and towns until now.

I imagine there’s a lot of interesting connections and points of difference between Hurricane Katrina and disasters happening here as we’ve touched on, example Lismore just last year. Firstly, how does the way water move in undisturbed environments compare to how it interacts with urban infrastructure, which hasn’t been designed with water in mind? It’s a big question I know, but I think it really talks to a lot of what you’ve raised today.

What we see in the natural environment is we see these extensive ecologies, we see mangroves or we see natural floodplains or we see forests and the rain falls in these areas and it passes through these natural systems and makes its way into rivers and streams and things like that. And, you know, in many instances seasonally there might be flooding or whatever, and then it eventually makes its way back into the river, those sorts of things. What happens with human settlements is that we have increasingly reduced the areas that we have available to deal with the water cycle. And so that, for example, what used to be hundreds of metres of mangroves is reduced to a floodwall. And the floodwall is a perfect way of dealing with floodwaters until it isn’t. And it fails and you’ve got a catastrophe or it’s overtopped and you’ve got a catastrophe. And so, that what we’ve done is we’ve taken these big, soft, expansive systems, and we have created this hard infrastructure that is incredibly effective until it fails. So, that we’ve built in this massive risk and fragility into the environment. What we’re trying to do with rain and where people live, all of our systems are to move this water away as quickly as we possibly can, get it off the road, get it into a pipe, you know, take it out to sea, do whatever, just take it through these systems as fast as we possibly can. And I think we’re really seeing the limits of that. And so, we now have to really rethink the approaches to this to think about, well, this area is going to continue to flood. So, what can we do to stop that? How can we manage the upper catchment differently to stop that? Or how can we redesign these channels to make that less? But then what is an acceptable level of risk where people live? Can we accommodate floodwaters differently? You know, we’ve seen in Brisbane there are certain areas where people have redesigned their houses so that the ground floor of the house is much more robust to a bit of seasonal flooding every couple of years. It’s got big wide doorways. It doesn’t have barriers, doesn’t have a whole lot of joinery down on the ground, doesn’t have electrical stuff. You know, you can hose it out and get on with your life. You know, so that there are – there’s a huge range of these different techniques from prevention through mitigation to adaptation. And in that whole chain, we are going to see a whole lot more techniques that are using natural systems and that are using what we understand about the natural communities that are adapted to these kinds of conditions. And, you know, we’re going to be combining that with conventional grey infrastructure and all of that kind of thing. But it just has to be way more sophisticated.

I mean, we are staring a problem in the face that has been there for a very long time. And it’s a recurring problem. We’ve got a prime case study, if you like, in Lismore. How do you build back better in an area like Lismore that has been, you know, heavily affected by flooding and is also built on a floodplain?

The conditions in Lismore are so extreme because of a series of underlying conditions that have been created over the last however many decades. A big part of the problem in Lismore is poverty. You’ve got a significant proportion of the population living below the poverty line before the floods and you’ve got a really, really acute housing shortage. We’ve got very – you know, we don’t need to labour the point. We’ve got incredibly dysfunctional housing system, whether it is about our lack of public housing, our lack of affordable housing, our lack of housing options. And in Lismore, there’s a total mismatch between the housing stock that is available, that is single family, three-bedroom houses and the sort of housing that people actually need, which is quite different. But in Lismore you’ve got this very, very acute set of conditions. Now you’ve got people that are living in tents, you’ve got people without access to secure housing, pre-dating the flood, all made much worse by the floods. What that means, I think, is that communities and government agencies are prepared to look more creatively at what the options might be. And I think that that’s what we’re going to see. I think we’re going to see, I hope we’re going to see, a range of really interesting housing pilots in this area that will canvass a much broader range of options than what the market would normally produce, which would be a bunch of greenfield single-family houses. I think we’re going to see housing that responds to that Northern Rivers vernacular. But we’re going to not just see single family houses, we are going to see other medium- and high-density options. And I think we are going to see some sort of socially creative housing options as well. I think we will potentially see versions of co-housing and other housing that is particularly appropriate for different population groups, whether it is students or whether it is single parents or whether it is Indigenous people or, you know, I think we are going to see a much, much greater range. And I think that’s incredibly hopeful.

And I wonder, with that thinking, why does development continue on flood-prone sites? Given what we know, given there are an incredible minds like yours who are telling everybody what the issue is, it’s sort of like they’re either ignoring, or they don’t want to understand the reality of the situation. Why do we keep building on flood-prone sites?

I think there’s two really important factors at play in this. One of them is that we seem to be unable to think of our cities and towns primarily as places to support and nurture life. We instead have adopted a very much a neoliberal model where economics and the profit motive really rules everything. And we can see the way in which development interests have distorted our conversations about, for example, flood-prone Western Sydney. And I think that there is plenty of money to be made in a new version of cities, which puts people and puts healthy ecology at the centre of that equation. And that’s a quite a profound paradigm shift. That’s one piece of it. The other piece of it is that we do a really bad job of understanding the consequences of our actions. And I think part of that is that we are not using the right communication tools. I think we’ve failed to communicate effectively with the population more broadly, because people talk about development and they talk about this building or that building, and we’re making these planning regulations, and everyone sits there like nodding along. No one’s got their first idea of what the implications are of those decisions for a future place or a future city. And I think we have got to have much better visualisation of future scenarios. We have to invest in the planning and the design so that everybody can be on the same page. Nobody can read plans and technical drawings. You’ve got to have all the stakeholders sitting around a three-dimensional model where everybody is looking at the same thing and you can say, Here’s option one with a 100-year flood. Here’s option two. These are the differences. This one costs a billion dollars, this one costs a hundred billion dollars, where are we going? So that we can actually have a genuine, much more genuine conversations about the future. And so, I think it’s these tools of communication are going to be so important for us to be able to make better decisions going forward.

Development can seem, again, you’ve touched on this, very static and permanent. How do we address this sort of infrastructure that won’t be able to support extreme weather we might face in the future?

So, I’m a landscape architect, so I’m interested in the physical environment, and I’m interested in the design of these systems and places and planting and all of these kinds of things. And I’m interested in the sort of technical solutions about like, how do I design a park that can hold floodwater and still be a great place to go and all of those kinds of things. And it’s the same kind of thing, you know, we can design these fantastic flood mitigation systems — that’s not the problem. That stuff is easy. We know how to do that. There are great traditions about how to address these questions from a design and a technical and a planning point of view — that isn’t the problem. The problem is cultural and political. And so, that that means that our local government and our state government and our federal government, these are the questions we have to use our votes, and we have to engage with these questions however you can. Whether you are going to get mobilised locally or whether these are things that you are going to do through your professional work. It’s a massive piece of social and cultural change that has to happen in the next five years. And so, it is a very different mindset. And I feel as though young people are all over this, but we’ve still got a bunch of other people, who are in positions of power and change has to happen throughout society. And I also think that what allows people to change is not somebody wagging a finger at them, saying you’ve got to be a vegan. It is when there is a better and more delicious option, a better attractive option sitting right in front of you. Like it’s not this don’t stop driving to work, no you’re so bad, stop driving to work. It’s when there’s a fantastic system of micro-mobility that is at my front door and I can get to work with the freedom of no car. And it’s going to be cheaper and it’s not going to be polluting and all of these other things. So, I think we’ve got to invest our money and our creativity and our ingenuity in what are the better solutions, because that’s what’s going to make the change.

Please join me in giving Elisabeth Mossop a huge round of applause. 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.