Hello and welcome to 100 Climate Conversations at the Powerhouse museum. Today is number 24 of 100 conversations happening here every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re broadcasting in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. 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 right up until the 1960s. So it’s fitting that in this powerhouse museum we shift our focus forward to solutions to the climate crisis. I’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting on the Traditional Lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future.

My name is Marian Wilkinson and as a journalist I have written and broadcast many stories about climate change. My latest book, The Carbon Club, describes Australia’s fraught battles over climate policy, where too often our top scientists ended up as collateral damage. That’s why today I’m delighted to bring you a conversation with Professor Mark Howden, who has worked for over three decades with the world’s leading climate change advisory body, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Mark Howden is director of the Australian National University’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions. He is also a Vice Chair of the IPCC and Chair of the ACT’s Climate Change Council. For many years, Mark was also a senior scientist with the CSIRO working on how Australian agriculture can adapt to global warming. Welcome Mark Howden.

So Mark, you have been charting the advance of climate change much of your adult life. I know you worry a lot about our future. Looking ahead, I wonder 50 years from now, do you think our planet will still support the civilisation we have today?

I’m hopeful it will actually support a better one. I think one that which is more sensitive to the environment and more sensitive to our fellow human beings. And so, I think we could learn from this process to actually generate new options and better ways of doing things, better governance systems and also improved equity across the globe, because at the moment we’re a pretty inequitable globe.

So that will mean a lot of change. And I want to find out how you got to this point. You spent more than three decades working with some of the best scientists in the world, advising the governments of the world on climate change. But how did a boy from Sydney’s Northern Beaches first get attracted to the idea of environmental science when in those days it was still a really fringe issue?

Great question. I guess it starts with just your experience as a kid and I spent virtually all my life outdoors, that was just what I did. And so, I developed a passion for understanding how our systems worked and that then took me through when I was at university to undertake environmental science. And the reason why I did that was I sort of looked forward essentially to the end of my career and said, ‘There’s going to be some real big problems here between human desires and environmental capacity to meet those.’ And I wanted to be in that space towards the end of my career and that’s why I went and did environmental science and then moved into working within fairly conservative industries to bring in new thinking into those industries as ways of doing things better.

There was a very significant event that occurred both globally and particularly in the United States, climate change burst into the public consciousness. And in 1988, I think when you were still in Queensland, the great climate scientist James Hansen addressed the US Congress with a warning that America and the world needed to act on global warming. Now, just three years later, in 1991, as a young scientist, you were among the first Australians to work with the new UN climate change advisory body, the IPCC. That must have been extraordinary for a young scientist. How did it happen and were you excited about it?

Well, back in those days it was by far from clear, is that the IPCC wouldn’t be such a significant institution as it has been these days and so that reduced the fear factor of engaging a little bit. But what happened was I’d actually moved down to Canberra, I was working in the Bureau of Resource Sciences in Science Policy and one of the big gaps that I observed was effective mechanisms to deal with climate change both on the greenhouse gas inventory side, as well as emission reductions and adaptation. So, I set about putting together the first Australian inventories, particularly for agriculture and from that what we were doing here in Australia got picked up internationally and I got involved in the international inventory development. And my first sort of big gig overseas was in Holland, in the Netherlands and I was co-chairing an inventory development, a meeting where we did some really formative work which still lasts these days.

And a lot of people don’t understand why this was important. So maybe you could tell us just simply what were you trying to measure and why did this end up being so important in the global climate change negotiations?

Even in those days, Australia had made commitments to reduce emissions and so the first step, you’ve got to know what emissions you’re producing and how much you’ve reduced them by and these debates are still going on in Parliament just yesterday. So, we needed to have a greenhouse gas inventory and we needed to use the information that was available because you didn’t have a big budget to actually construct that inventory. So, we knew what sectors were producing what greenhouse gases and how they added up to a total footprint in terms of our emissions.

And this would cover everything from coal mines through to cattle?

Indeed. And so, the scope of the inventory has expanded a little bit over the years but from the very start, it covered all of the key sectors of greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, you went on to continue working with the IPCC as the global advisory body that it became, especially to all the future climate negotiations that the UN helped conduct. So, it became a very important body. But as a result of that, the scientists like you who worked for it came under attack by a number of big climate skeptic lobbies, sometimes funded by the fossil fuel industry. I wonder, at times it got pretty heated. Did you ever think about throwing in the towel and how heated did it get?

I never thought of throwing in the towel. In fact, the harder that they pushed, I think the harder that we as a science community pushed back. And the evidence base that we were using to make assessments of what we should be doing was growing stronger and stronger day by day and so we felt we were on the right side of history, and it’s turned out to be that way.

Now, despite all those attacks, as you say, the science of global warming, the reality of that science still pushed through and there was a bit of a turning point in late 2007 when you and your fellow scientists who worked with the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Al Gore. And I wonder what that meant to you at the time as a vindication of the science that you had pushed?

Well, it was a really great surprise. I had no expectation ever of getting that. So, look I was actually really pleased, in part from my colleagues in the science community generally who had got acknowledged through that award. But I was actually particularly pleased because it essentially legitimised the perspectives that we’d been taking into policy and taking into the community for a long time. And so, I think it was helpful in that it actually did allow us to further progress the agenda for a little while but then some of the political headwinds started to cut in and some of that momentum was lost.

Well, as you say, it was a very good time for climate science and especially in Australia. There was a new government of Kevin Rudd’s, elected on a platform of tackling climate change and your work really ramped up. I wanted to go back to those days. How optimistic were you at that point that Australia could really rise to the challenge of climate change?

Well, at the time we were world leading, we were world leading politically in terms of community support and also scientifically, so we were massively sort of overrepresented in the science literature, in IPCC and similar entities. And that reflected, I think, that Australia particularly not only has a lot of capability, scientific and other capability, but also climate is so important to Australia. We see what’s just happened in southern Australia with the big storms or the floods in Lismore or those fires in Black Summer. You know, climate related things are so crucial to Australia, in Australia’s, Australians livelihoods and Australia’s environment. So, it was always I think a, an area where Australia could have a very strong influence and when we’ve got political support for that you can magnify that influence. And so, I think it was a great period where we had lots of things lining up to generate significant influence.

Some of the most interesting work you did at that time, you were with CSIRO. There was a mandate on climate change and you, very early on, were talking the language of adaptation that we, especially in agriculture, would have to learn to adapt to climate change. What were you most worried about for Australian agriculture at that time and what were you really trying to push in those years?

I think the first point I’d make is that when we’re dealing with decision makers, they actually want to make decisions and they want to act. And so having science, which looks just at greenhouse gas emissions or having science which just looks at climate impacts, does not actually do the necessary step, which is actually informing action. So, changing the world – we change the world by taking action. And so, what we needed to do in terms of greenhouse emissions is we needed to find effective, cost effective, sensible, sustainable ways of reducing those emissions. And similarly with climate impacts, we needed to find effective ways of reducing those impacts where they’re negative or increasing them where they’re positive and so we needed to make that move into that more action-based research.

And so, when I did that within CSIRO, I was part of the Climate Adaptation Flagship, where as a significant team of scientists, we were working with stakeholders to actually bridge that sort of knowledge to action gap. And I think we did a lot of pioneering work in those days and we did that in partnership with individual farmers, farmer groups, communities and the government. And it was a great time because we had so many different perspectives, so many great minds focusing on this topic and I think we did some world leading and very effective work then.

What do you think were the most practical ideas that you worked on that still resonate today for you?

Some of the work that I did in the early 90s looked at systems level greenhouse gas emissions. So instead of just, say, looking at the animal emissions in a farming system, it also looked at the nitrous oxide emissions and the carbon sequestration in trees and soils and even things like how burning farm territory could actually generate greenhouse emissions or the termites that are in tropical grasslands and looking at how they interacted with each other. So, getting a systems view of greenhouse gas emissions because then that actually tells you where your leverage points are for action. And so that systems view which I brought into the greenhouse gas emission reduction side of things translates across sectors and also that systems view in terms of adaptation translates across sectors. So, I think one of the big contributions was getting systems views which could be used in specific contexts, so as a general tool which could be used for specific circumstances.

Not so long after that, your world though completely changed because there was a change of government in 2013 and a climate skeptic was elected prime minister. Your work with government would change very soon after that. What happened?

Well, there was a whole range of things that happened at the time, and sometimes it’s hard to ascribe specific and direct cause and effect. But what did happen was the CSIRO disbanded its Climate Adaptation Flagship as well as all the other CSIRO flagships at the same time. And with the sort of ending of the National Climate Adaptation Research Facility, essentially the bottom fell out of climate adaptation work nationally. And so, we did an analysis of activity in that space a couple of years ago, and we’re now about 75 per cent below trend where we otherwise would have been. So, massive reduction in activity in terms of climate adaptation, exactly at the time we actually need more of it. And so, I think that was, it was profoundly disturbing that those sets of decisions were made and it’s cost us dearly as a nation. So, with the reduction of those flagships essentially my job at CSIRO disappeared and so I was, increasingly looked at activities overseas where there was, I guess a more positive attitude to sort of climate change research and I worked significantly into advisory and other groups overseas.

Well, indeed you did and you kept working with the IPCC. So, as Australia was turning away from doing work on adaptation, you maintained your scientific interest in that. You were part of a very important series of reports that the IPCC brought down in 2014. It was probably the strongest warning to date that happened at that time from the IPCC about the risks from climate change. The report was absolutely crucial because it informed the Paris Agreement, which was a big turning point and the work that scientists, like you did, helped that change. When the Paris Agreement was finally signed, for the first time we began talking about a new aim of 1.5 degrees. Were you on board with that and how important was that as a breakthrough in how we saw controlling climate change as well as adapting to it?

I think it was a breakthrough. And prior to that, the conversations really started at two degrees and up. So, sort of two degrees was broadly viewed, particularly within the political circles, as being an acceptable level of climate change, which in UN Framework Convention terms avoided fundamental human interference with the climate system. And yet the evidence was starting to mount that that was not the case and particularly in Paris, the small island nations came in and said, ‘Look, two degrees is the end of our nations in many cases. We need to have a much stricter target.’ And that’s where the 1.5 came in.

Interestingly, there was not a huge amount of scientific assessment of what the world would look like at 1.5 degrees or what we had to do to keep temperatures down to 1.5 degrees. A lot of that literature was developed for the 1.5 degrees report that came in the next cycle after Paris. But it did set the stage for having significant debates about keeping temperatures below two degrees and increasing the concern about temperatures. What would happen if temperatures went to three or four degrees?

I know you worked as an advisor on the report on about keeping temperatures to 1.5 degrees. You said later that, I think it was, ‘Every half degree matters and every year that we don’t act matters.’ What did you mean by that? And what led you to this feeling that we really had to ramp up our efforts?

There’s actually a third one there and that’s every choice matters. And that sort of triptych of sentences, a colleague of mine, Rebecca Colvin, Bec Colvin and I worked on that to make a very pithy summary of several thousand pages of report. And so, every year matters because every year we delay ramps up our impacts from climate change, it increases the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it reduces the amount of greenhouse gases we can emit and still stay below any given temperature.

So right at the moment, we’ve got about nine years at current rates of emissions before we completely blow our chance of staying below 1.5 degrees, so every year does count. And this comes with, just in yesterday’s legislation, the minister was pointing out that we’ve only got 80 something months before 2030. It’s not a lot of time to make huge changes. The other comments were, every half a degree matters. So, the evidence is what sound like small increments of temperature, have very, very large consequences. And so, every fraction of a degree, every half a degree really makes a big difference in terms of the outcomes. And the ‘every choice matters’ is because ultimately greenhouse gas emissions arise from human choices and so, we need to be very aware of what the consequences are of the choices we make as individuals, as governments and as at a global level.

I want to go back to when you left government and went to ANU, you went to the Climate Change Institute there. So, many things have happened since you moved there, which basically reinforces, sadly, some of the worst aspects of our concerns about climate change, the big drought in 2017 to 2019, and then, of course, the bushfires. Now, some time after that, your institute changed and it became the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions. Why was that? Why was that move important for you?

Well, it was part of a, just an end of phase change. So, we ended the phase for the Climate Change Institute and as part of that, we looked at ANU and said, across our different portfolios, energy and climate and disaster risk, there were opportunities to work together, partly because there were some efficiencies that arose from that, but mostly because it’s very clear now that climate affects our energy systems and our energy systems affect climate and climate affects disasters and disasters affect energy. So, there’s arrows between all three of those things and so, we wanted to look particularly at the intersections between those things rather than sort of have a siloed orientation. So, putting them all into one institution is helping that sort of interaction that more focus on the systems views that I talked about earlier.

The Black Summer bushfires obviously had a huge impact in Australia and in Canberra as well. I’m wondering whether you think that that was what finally cut through with Australians about the need for more urgent action on climate change?

I think there’s a lot of expectation that that’s the case, that that was a step change. But when we actually look at long running polls like the Lowy Institute poll, we actually see that the level of concern about climate change was the same before the Black Summer fires as it was subsequent to them. And so, consistently across multiple years now, about seven years, we’ve seen 90 per cent of Australians want more action on climate change, so about 60 per cent want it right now, even if it costs them a lot. Another 30 per cent want it even in a somewhat slower and [are a] bit concerned about the costs involved. And so, but it’s been really, really consistent and so there was no really big uptick associated with the Black Summer and I think that’s because most Australians get climate change and they got it well before Black Summer, but Black Summer just raised the level of concern significantly.

So maybe do you think it was the politicians who changed after Black Summer?

I think so. And again, the sort of human and other costs of that was such that politicians could no longer ignore it. They could no longer deny some of the things that people were experiencing and the level of public concern that was being expressed to them, I think forced them to sort of just change some of the rhetoric. It didn’t necessarily change much of the policy though.

One of the things about the policy is, of course, the planning for these disasters and which is part of what your institute is looking at. We saw there was a royal commission into the bushfires which showed something of the chaos and the lack of preparedness when the bushfires occurred. We actually saw that just recently repeated in the Lismore floods. Lack of preparedness. Why do you think we still have not come to grips with how important preparedness is?

I think there’s a tendency with humans to respond rather than be proactive. And because proactive activity takes upfront costs and investment, which people may see, they’ve got time or money to spend better, than sort of being sort of proactive. But I think, what we’re seeing now internationally as well as nationally, is that a view that advance preparedness actually does pay in so many different ways. And to do that effectively, it’s not just about a top-down governmental approach, but it actually has to have bottom-up elements. And so, we have to have a community engagement and volunteers to help deliver systems and the speedboats in the Lismore flood sort of thing, where people just piled in to help. And I think that some send some really good messages about how we can all contribute to responding, but particularly being proactive actually means the local people have to engage in the preparation because you can’t expect someone from well outside your area to actually be part of that unless they’re part of some sort of institution.

So, I think what we’re seeing is a greater interest in being proactive and the preparation side of things as well as a greater immediacy of response, we’re expecting a more rapid response. And that’s reflected in the international domain with the Sendai Framework, which really does try to focus people on preparation rather than just recovery. So, I think there’s that element of it.

But there’s also the element, I think, with a lot of these events are now starting to demonstrate we’ve got a failure of imagination. So, Black Summer was largely unprepared and unpreparable in some ways because we never thought it could get that bad. And if you actually look at the area burnt under Black Summer, it is such an outlier from anything previously, it’s phenomenal. So, an area six times the area of Belgium was burnt in the Black Summer. And so, if you can imagine the European fires, which are quite concerning but imagine what would the outcry be in Europe about proactive responses if six Belgiums had burnt and it would be world changing in some ways. So, that’s the scale of what we had to deal with in those years and it is extraordinary. And so, I think we need to learn from that and actually imagine those consequences of future change if we don’t take our foot off the climate change accelerator. We no longer can afford failures of the imagination.

You’ve also had to have a role in very practical action as well because you are on the ACT Climate Council, which helps advise the government there. We have seen some remarkable things from the ACT Government, especially on pushing down on greenhouse gas emissions. What do you think are the most important things that is, that has happened recently in the ACT on that front?

The ACT was one of the first jurisdictions globally to have a net zero by 2045 target. And so, we did that almost the same time as California did it and together, we were essentially world leaders. To put that into reality, one of the things that the government did, was to essentially go renewable electricity in the ACT and ramp that up really quickly and so we’re now 100 per cent renewables through development of wind and solar activities both within the Territory and outside the Territory. And strategically, that’s a really important thing because once you have 100 per cent renewable electricity, it means you can electrify other things so that they go zero emissions. So, we can put in the light tram, the light rail, and that’s because it’s run by electricity, which is zero emissions, that becomes zero emissions when we go EVs, to a larger extent, that’s going to mean their zero emissions. Whereas, if you have that electricity being provided by a coal fired power station, you can’t claim that.

So, what it did was a fundamental building block that allows us to sort of push zero emissions into other parts of the economy, not just turning the lights on, sort of thing. The ACT government’s also got some very leading electric vehicle policies in terms of free registration, no stamp duty, etc, and also rolling out the electric vehicle infrastructure. Also, they’ve got a strong focus on getting their own act together, so ensuring that their own emissions from their own buildings and vehicle fleet, etc, are all pushed down. So, there’s a fairly comprehensive approach there and just yesterday, they announced a discussion paper about going to zero gas. And so, taking gas out of the ACT over a period of time, so a long-phased out approach. But taking gas, which is a significant part of our remaining greenhouse gas inventory, and taking that out of the picture. And so, the first zero gas suburb is now happening in the ACT. So, instead of the traditional thing, you had to put gas pipes into every house in the suburbs so people could lock onto gas for their cooking and heating, now that’s stopped and so everyone’s moving to electricity.

Do you think examples like the ACT can lower the fear among some people that going renewable will mean blackouts, will mean higher prices?

Absolutely. And so, it demonstrates feasibility, but it also demonstrates the benefits from doing that and so right now, the ACT has cheaper electricity than most other jurisdictions in Australia because of that investment in renewables and because of the contracts that the government set up in relation to the electricity supply. And so, a great example of how going green actually saves you money, it doesn’t cost you money. And there’s a much bigger conversation which is about how, ‘Oh we can’t go, can’t afford to go environmental.’ Well, these days that conversation is actually flipping around because of examples like this and we can’t afford not to go green.

I want to go back to the big picture here. The most recent IPCC report that you worked on was a rather startling report. I think combined with the other reports that came out from the IPCC this year, probably the most disturbing was this thing you alluded to before that we may not get to holding global temperatures to 1.5, we may overshoot it, it may be gone as a target. How pessimistic are you about that?

Well, the timeframes for exceeding 1.5 degrees are very short. We’re likely to exceed that early in the 2030s and possibly even at the end of this decade if we keep on emitting high levels of greenhouse gas and depending on other parts of the climate system. And the best we could hope for in that case is temporarily going over 1.5 and then bringing it back down. But the bringing it back down will take decades to do, it won’t be quick. But at the moment where we’re heading with our emissions is much closer to three degrees than it is to 1.5 degrees, so we’re on the wrong trajectory, we’re still going up when we should be going down.

Now, there’s been a lot of talk in Australia, but elsewhere as well, that we can come up with solutions, as you say, to bring it down. How difficult is it to draw these emissions, on this scale, out of the atmosphere?

Well, there’s two things. One is reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, so reducing say our fossil fuel emissions. And the other is removing those emissions from the atmosphere. And they’re quite different in policies and mechanisms and similar things. So, when we look at our greenhouse gas emissions side of things, there are some sectors, electricity and transport, where we have the solutions. We’ve got good electric vehicles, getting better almost day by day. We have got good solutions in terms of renewable electricity, again, getting better and cheaper, almost day by day.

We know pretty much now, how to electrify our grid, take it completely renewable, and reduce the cost to consumers and improve the reliability and quality of the electricity supply at the same time and democratise the electricity system, so we’re all producers as well as consumers of electricity. A whole series of really significant changes that can happen there. And we know how to do it, we’ve got the technology and increasingly, that technology will be better and better over the years. And so, when we compare it to alternative technologies, there’s been some discussion about nuclear here in Australia just in the last weeks, it regularly pops up, nuclear is actually getting more expensive over time. But renewables are getting much, much cheaper over time.

The logic of going renewables is really strong and it gets stronger as we go. In terms of other sectors, there are some sectors like electric vehicles, which we pretty much know how to do it, still a price-point problem there, but that will be resolved, I think is as we progress there. But for heavy trucks, it’s not quite as simple and for shipping, there’s difficulties in just making the shipping lines go green, although there is now an international agreement to that. If we move on to, say, agriculture, there’s a whole stack of hard to abate emissions in agriculture. We haven’t been putting the research and development into give good technologies which can reduce those, so we do have some management technologies to reduce emissions they’re partial reductions rather than significant reductions. And then we look at other sectors, industry and leakage from coal and gas mines and similar things. And some of them have good solutions and some of them don’t.

So, at the moment, almost all of the policy attention is on 30 per cent of our emissions, which is from the electricity system. We need to be paying attention to the other 70 per cent because there’s really good opportunities there which don’t cost a lot and will bring other benefits at the same time.

And when we talk about technologies to draw down greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, do you think they’re a bit further down the track?

Well, we’ve got a big one, and that’s natural systems. So, terrestrial and marine systems, we know how if we look after them, they can absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide. But that’s not limitless and we’re producing far, far more greenhouse gases that can be absorbed by our biosphere. So, there’ll never be enough trees on Earth to offset the emissions that we’re producing through our activities. So, we know how to do that. We know how to grow trees, we know how to store a bit of extra carbon in our soils, we know how to look after our estuarine areas, the mangroves and similar things to store some carbon.

But they’re not the silver bullet.

They’re not the silver bullet. And so, even if we move into more technological solutions, like what we call direct air capture, so where we suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with machines and we put it somewhere safe or we make useful products out of it, we again, know how to do that but it’s a little bit expensive at the moment, and it probably will never do more than a few billion tons a year of carbon dioxide. At the moment we’re producing like 36 billion tons a year from industrial and electricity systems. So, there’s a whole series of small contributions which can be made in terms of carbon dioxide removal, but it still means the big task is actually reducing the bulk of our greenhouse gas emissions and then using those sorts of carbon dioxide removal to clean up the residue.

Well, this is probably a difficult question for a scientist, but I’ll ask it anyway. I’m wondering if these emissions from fossil fuels continue apace and as the IPCC report says, we stay on the trajectory for three degrees. Do you think we will see impacts within our society as the social license for fossil fuel companies continues to fray and the impacts of climate change continue to grow?

Well, I think the pressure on fossil fuel companies and other big companies is already there. So, if you look at the sort of decision landscape, the banks are on to this, the investors are saying reduce your emissions and adapt to climate change, these are the big investors. The insurance companies saying the same thing, their shareholders are saying the same thing, their consumers, their customers are saying the same thing and governments are saying the same thing. The regulators are saying, ‘We’re watching you. You need to be taking action on climate change and reporting on that action.’ So, those messages are coming from every possible direction into business and it would be a very brave business that would completely ignore that. They’d be adopting additional risk, including social license and missing out on opportunities and I just don’t think that’s a viable proposition.

I have to ask you, when you’re talking to young students, how do you give them some optimism for the future that we can turn this around?

I first acknowledge their concerns. I think it’s really important to say, ‘You are right to be worried about this topic.’ I think it’s really important to say, ‘The evidence that you’re looking at is rationally interpreted as being concern about climate change in amongst all of the other things that are happening to young people these days.’ So, I think acknowledgment is the first point. Secondly, I think you do have to give people hope. Hope that we can actually turn this around and make it better. And it’s the combination of concern and hope that actually generates action, one by itself doesn’t generate much action. So, it’s actually having those conversations which acknowledge and also takes them into pathways which are hopeful.

I also emphasise that being informed and better informed than those people you may be debating with, is a really good strategy. I also try to tell them, when you’re thinking climate change, think big, think positive, think systems and think equity and inclusion. But if we actually make progress on all of those things, we actually will be able to reduce the hazards of climate change and start to push forward into a more equitable, just sort of conditions that we, I think we do want as a human species. We actually want, generally speaking, a peaceful environment, a sort of a certain environment, stability in our environment where we are treated well and where we treat other people well, and where we have an environment which supports us as well as us supporting the environment. So, I think what we want to do is just to emphasise that duality element that enables a richer human experience.

Well, that was a fascinating conversation, Mark, and I really appreciate your time today. Can we give a little round of applause to Professor Mark Howden? To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for 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.