Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations and thank you so much for joining us. I’d like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we are recording today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Now, today is number 83 of 100. Not ranked in any particular order. These conversations are happening every Friday, and this series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is of course, climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Now, before it was home to the museum, this building was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system that extended through into the 1960s. And in the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus now towards the innovations away from coal and to the net zero revolution. My name’s Nate Byrne, I am a meteorologist, oceanographer, science communicator, former naval officer and current ABC News Breakfast weather presenter. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is the chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland. Ove has spent four decades studying how ocean warming and acidification threaten marine ecosystems. He authored a landmark 1999 research paper predicting the loss of coral reefs globally by 2050, which is just around the corner. Since then, he has advocated for 50 global conservation areas to ensure the future of coral on our planet. His advocacy work also includes contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are so thrilled to have Ove with us this morning. Please make him feel very welcome. Ove, you have been involved over a long career with the Great Barrier Reef, we are going to talk about it. But I wonder where did that passion, that drive first begin?

I suppose there’s a picture that was taken of me on a reef in 1969. When humans were walking on the Moon, I was more fascinated by the reef. I mean, it looked great, and they had the colour print in the newspapers and so on of the Moon event. But for me, it’s hard to understand why, but I just fell in love with the sort of an ecosystem, in fact all marine ecosystems. But of course, the crème de la crème of course is the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs in general. And that then I think just led to, you know, I studied corals for my PhD and the whole guise was to get as much diving done with, ‘Oh, well, other people paid for it’. But then, I didn’t know about it, but when I started doing my PhD research in the early 1980s, corals are starting to die. They were starting to change. And of course, at first, we were very careful to say whether or not it’s climate or whatever, but it’s become extremely clear. And the events of the last five years have been truly shocking. We’ve gone from having a hesitancy about this, but this is now the number one threat to the Great Barrier Reef. In fact, coral reefs everywhere.

I wonder if it would be worth here explaining just actually what is coral? I mean, everybody knows what coral looks like. And I guess part of that, and it will probably fall out in your answer, why are coral reefs important? So, what are they?

Well, I think, you know, in their basic element, there is a plant, it lives inside the tissue of an anemone-like creature, a simple animal that together are able to precipitate calcium carbonate and build structures you can see from outer space. Animal, plant, rock, mineral, all of those things in one. And it’s been around for several hundred million years. So, it’s a really good plant. And of course, when you look at where coral reefs grow, it’s this sort of pristine, low nutrient waters and it’s that symbiosis between these tiny plants that make corals brown and these polyp-like organisms, that is the magic of a coral reef. Without it, they don’t exist. The reef doesn’t exist.

And why are reefs important?

Well, how much time do you have?

Well, yes, okay–

Well, let’s start with the headline. Half a billion people derive benefits from reefs on a daily basis. That’s food, income, cultural services and so on. So, they’re important from just that element. But they also protect coastlines. Break the energy of waves coming in. So, they’re really important in allowing humans to live comfortably along quiet coastlines that are not being pounded. But of course, that’s changing. We can talk about that in a while. But, you know, there’s those elements that you just can’t argue against. And then you’ve got the million species, many of which are not known to science. We just know that we’re discovering species at a certain rate. And of course, it’s tailing off a little bit, but we still have a lot of work to be done. So, you look at that and you look at, you know, 25% of all fish species live on coral reefs. Now, you might think, okay, that must be about 30% of the planet’s surface. It’s less 1%. So, there’s this sort of magic about the whole thing and of course, the importance culturally to First Australians, people across the planet and just the pure beauty. Someone said the other day that I concentrate too much on defining it in terms of economic terms. What about the beauty? And there’s a really good argument there. Like, my favourite fish is the orange spotted filefish, and it’s a bit like one of Picasso’s paintings. If you lose the reef, you lose this fish in the same way you would if you set fire to an Impressionist painting. So, there’s something there that you have to factor in, and that’s just basically invaluable. And you can’t do that without them.

I thought for half a second there you were going to say the fish looked like a Picasso?

Well, it does. I mean, really, it’s green with orange dots on it. A beautiful little beak. They are monogamous. They live together in coral. They eat coral. They have their babies that sort of go up to the plankton from coral. You know, it’s a unique partnership. Yes, so beat that.

Okay. Well, actually, I will. I’ll go to something even more impressive and your 1999 paper, actually. I’m a forecaster. I think about what’s going to happen in the weather maybe a week in advance. But here we’re talking a quarter of a century ago you were making– that is well beyond any of my abilities as a forecaster. So, I am very much in awe. But what did you find back then?

To give a bit of context to this, I had been working on the impacts of temperature on coral reefs because we had a suspicion that temperature was behind the problem. It turns out it’s a pretty simple relationship, and that is that if you heat corals up by a couple of degrees for a few weeks, you get to a point where the symbiosis falls apart and they bleach and die. You can do experiments in the lab to show this, right? But the real clincher was, of course, the satellites came online that could measure the skin temperature of the ocean, and those provided us the ability to predict what was going to happen to a patch of reef if it was exposed to this amount. The other part of that, though, was that once we had that mechanism between temperature and coral bleaching was, we could also look into the future. And at the time I started to do this work, there was sort of the first climate models or really reliable climate models were coming through and they were saying, ‘Look, there’s a baseline temperature change that we predict is going to happen’. And so, if you then draw the threshold at which bad things happen to corals, it turns out that those two curves — the background temperature and what corals can sustain — was reached around mid century. And I was a young academic guy, we were living in the Blue Mountains, going to the University of Sydney, and when I first did the calculation was like, ‘Oh no, I’ve obviously made a mistake. Go back, recalculate that’. I had very great collaborators in Europe, giving me really good data on the ocean temperature. But, whatever you did, it still came out with this, you will have more than one bleaching event a year by 2050. Now, a lot of these corals and things need a good 20 years to recover from a bleaching event. So, you can’t hit them every year and expect that they’re going to survive. And that then triggered sort of a seismic blast because it was– many scientists disputed it, said, ‘No, it can’t be like that. There’s no way this would be the case’. And so, I ended up in a way debating my colleagues, which is really healthy. But then it spread into wider society. And so, down the line, I start to get death threats and other bits and pieces going on, which were pretty unpleasant. But, you know, I’m a stubborn person.

So, at the time, you were essentially just told off? There was confusion and some people didn’t believe you. How does that sit now though, that we’re a quarter of a century later?

Well, I think one of the most stunning things is that however horrendous those initial predictions were, or projections were. Everything is happening faster than we anticipated. And so, you know, just if you go back just five years, we have sort of, you know, multiple bleaching events across the planet. That sort of was something that might have happened in 2040 and so on. I mean, I haven’t gone back and looked at the exact relationships. But it’s certainly, it’s in our face much sooner than I think we expected. And, of course, that comes with all the politics. I mean, I had wonderful exchanges with politicians, you know, who just thought it was bunkum, you know, and that was a convenient place to put it. But unfortunately, it’s borne out that it’s much more serious than we thought. And of course, we’re also learning enormous amounts of great work done across the field now where not only do the corals get impacted, of course, it’s the fish that live in the corals. It’s every part of the reef, the processes of bio mineralisation, the formation of skeletons. All this stuff is now being affected. And it doesn’t look good because we’ve even gone to the point where we’ve built mesocosms, which are these little, well, they’re not little, they’re the size of a Jacuzzi, on Heron Island and where our team has been able to show that there’s a lot more subtle things going on. In fact, I should mention that my wife led those experiments. So, it’s a bit of a family business. This was done some years ago where, if you go out into nature and you try to measure the impact of acidification as well as temperature, you sort of have to wait ’til the future comes before you actually can start to look at it. So, what Sophie [my wife] did was to create these mesocosms, they’re little worlds in which she would manipulate the temperature and manipulate the acidity and create the ocean of 2050 if you had high CO2 or not low CO2 and all those combinations. And what she found was that, yes, coral bleaching is important, but there are huge amounts of things going like sponges that bore into the skeletons of corals or in some sort of stasis normally, right. This particular type of sponge, it destroys the skeletons of corals, but it’s not too much so it’s in this sort of balance. But once you get to a world where it’s more acidic, those sponges can consume reefs at a rate which has been unmatched before. So, that is looking at getting that insight from the world and understanding the consequences of changing CO2 and thereby temperature and acidity and what that means in terms of that. And so, those papers went– well, the studies went for 18 months, quite long periods of time, and then yielded a lot of information. Things like, we had students working on sea cucumbers and they also, you know, become much more effective at chewing through gravel when it’s more acidic and so on. So, it’s about trying to get an idea that, well, you’ll never know whether exactly that thing was going to occur. But what we did know then was that ocean acidification was a really serious impact and it was synergistic with temperature. So, you’ve got high temperatures, you’ve got more acidic oceans and you’ve got a much greater impact on the reef system. So, not just about corals and bleaching, it’s a lot more things that are involved in almost everything, which is I think is the signature of climate change. You know, everywhere you look, it’s everything that’s changing.

Ove, as the inaugural director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, you were involved with a massive project, the 50 Reefs project in association with The Ocean Agency. What did that actually entail?

Well, the 50 Reefs project was the idea that things are happening so fast at a global scale to coral reefs that we need a better baseline than the one we’ve had in the past because people have been going out and making measurements on their reef, not in consistent ways where you could get a really good feeling for how fast things are changing. And so, we started this with a very generous help of a number of philanthropists to take a look at 24 countries across the planet to look at their four reef environments and make massive amounts of photographic evidence of these things and then use AI. And this is, you know — something we did sort of five years ago was to use AI to then quickly go through those and get an idea about how much coral was growing on reefs and so on, and then start to fill in as we got to the completion of certain areas. We would start and have a measurement, we’d go back, so we’ve gone back to the Maldives, for example, we’ve gone back to the Great Barrier Reef. And the idea is to get that picture of ten years of global change. What actually happened and is it as robust as we think? And then the second spin-off of that was that we also did a study where we looked at how exposed coral reefs were to climate change, with the idea that one of the best ways of dealing with climate change was to now, because things are happening so quickly, is to focus in on a significant portion of the world’s coral reefs that are less exposed to climate change than the average, with the idea that we can protect these reef systems from other changes like pollution and overfishing and all that sort of stuff. But we can get to a point where we understand these places, we protect them, and they become the source of baby corals for the future and so on, as we are mitigating heavily CO2 and other greenhouse gases. None of this works unless you flatten the curve of emissions and bring it, really, the whole system, to zero carbon as quickly as possible. And I say quickly as possible because we’ve sort of locked in on ‘Oh, 2050, that’s when we need to worry about it’. Well, no. Every little piece of CO2 coming from fossil fuels is deadly at a vast scale. And so, I think that was an interesting project to do because we suddenly saw reefs in 24 countries, and we were able to then identify these low vulnerability sites. And we’ve now got a project with seven countries that have 70% of the low-exposed coral reefs, which we’re now working with under a global environment facilities grant, which is a UN grant, bringing everybody to the table to try to find the answers to some of these really important questions. And that was fantastic. I mean, that sort of fulfilled my boyhood childhood dream thing of diving a lot, right? But the next thing we did was to then, with this partnership, start to derive, you know, I guess through those seven nations to really start to push hard on solutions and have a difference while we’re also dealing with the emission problem. And, of course, being an ocean scientist as well, I was very interested in a project which the World Resources Institute and a range of other organisations had been doing — in fact, 20 leaders of countries from Indonesia to Australia and so on — in trying to see the ocean not as a victim, which we’re always saying the ocean, coral reefs are dying, it’s all terrible, but to see if the ocean was a source of opportunity for solutions. And that’s turned out to be really interesting. So, we got together a large number of experts from shipping to energy to biology and so on and got them to think about their field and whether or not they could change things at a reasonable cost and get those advantages of the ocean acting to as a solution. And we did this in 2019, just prior to COVID. And what we did there was to look at things like offshore renewable energy. Was that a go? Was that something that’s going to fill that in. Transport, you know, huge amount of emissions come from us sending stuff to each other across the planet and so on. And the cost of transport. Things like blue carbon, where we can lock carbon into the soils of ecosystems such as mangroves and seagrasses and so on. It turns out there’s a really interesting area of food that if you eat protein from the sea, obviously sustainably, it costs a lot less in emissions per kilo of protein than feeding a cow or a steer and going through that process. So, there was that. And then there was also the idea that, which has been waning in popularity and back and forth, which is whether you can actually squirt CO2 into the deep parts of the ocean and store it down there. But the risk, for example, of that particular strategy is that we don’t really know whether that CO2 will remain there. And the last thing we want is it to burp and suddenly introduce that CO2 all at once, which may be devastating. But then there are others, like the offshore renewable energy area. So, we’re now redoing this report, you know, after COVID interrupted and so on and so forth. But now we’re doing that report again with the same groups of professionals that have come ’round the table and some new ones. And there’s some good news there. In that if you take technology off the shelf and apply it, you don’t have to invent anything new. And so, it’s the feasible and ready-to-go things. You can do a lot of work in terms of closing the emission gap between the emission reduction we need to achieve versus what we’re doing and, at the moment, all the efforts globally tell us that we’re not doing enough because at the moment emissions are going to keep on going up. If we have the current set of policies and everyone does what they said they were going to do at these various different meetings. We still go to 3°C, which means that would be absolutely horrifying in terms of an outcome.

You identified earlier five areas. Let’s talk about solutions-based stuff and what we’re doing, ocean-based renewable energy.

In the report that we’re putting together now — not to sort of anticipate it and, of course, it’s got to go through review — is that the ambition and plans for putting in solar wind on the ocean have doubled, if not tripled. So, there is that positive link. Other areas curiously, not curiously, but maybe there are reasons for it in terms of acceptability, but the idea of switching to ocean-based protein with better design of fisheries and so on hasn’t made a lot of progress. So, we know there are areas that need investment and need to be sort of examined quite closely. Other ones that are, you know, looking like they’re going to exceed the targets they’re setting for themselves. Ocean transport, you know, the idea of alternative fuels to power these crafts. So, you’ve got solar-powered essentially transport ships. That also looks like it’s going to be very real in terms of that. But others, such as, you know, in our current report, it has a section on removing fossil fuels. That appears to be very much debated about whether that’s, you know, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing and so on. And you’ve got to be careful of things like double counting where you move the fossil fuels out, but they move somewhere else. And so, you’ve got a win in one area but a loss in another. So, all those sorts of subtleties that need to be sort of worked through. But I think, you know, there are seven areas which show a lot of hope. Probably four of those could be done, I think, successfully and have a good growth by the time we do this type of study again in maybe four years’ time. So, I mean, I– yes, that was a big sort of optimistic moment with this next phase of this project was that actually when you do the systematic review, you do find out that there are technologies that can at scale bring emissions down at the speed they need to be.

And literally right now they’re available.

Yes.

We can do, today.

Yes. We’ve got in this latest report the idea of mature technologies versus early adoption and then things that may need a lot more work. And you’ve got quite a few mature ready to go. That’s technology that exists, put it in and play. Now, then it becomes this issue of how do you get governments, the leadership industry, to take up these opportunities, and the idea of stimulation of particular industries and so on, is really important here. You know, unless you help the transition from coal and gas, then it probably won’t happen. You’ve got to somehow leverage off. And then, of course, avoiding that problem of reducing the impact one place and then having it pop up somewhere else.

You did mention that while doing all of your incredibly important work, and I’m going to take you back to the 50 Reefs project that you did get to dive a lot. So, is that how you chose the 50 Reefs, Ove? Or was there something else in that original work there that helped select those 50? Because there are hundreds, thousands of coral reefs to choose from. Must have been a lot more–

Yes, we tried to do as much as we could do for the budget that we had, and so it was to make sure that we had coverage in the Caribbean, which is one of the big realms of coral reef ecosystems with sites in the Pacific and Western Indian Ocean and so on. We did our best within that budget to get a whole bunch of sites down. And we took a million photographs. Very proud of that. Which of course, are there as a future resource because as technologies increase, improve, we can get to a point where we should be able to re-examine those things as a sort of living record. And so, it’s now ten years since we began the last ones. And so, we’re going back to those sites, not to say perfect score for covering every part of it but having a very significant — this is the largest survey of coral reefs done with this type of technology. And so, even though it’s not the best design, perhaps it’s a lot better than what we had. And the idea is we need to do this. At the moment we’re trying to look for support to get that second set of expeditions off so we can really start to say the last ten years, we saw six or seven huge global events happen. Are corals going backwards or are they somehow beating the odds.

But I guess you’re right that you want a really good baseline, and you don’t want to just pick all the corals that are doing the best or all the ones that are doing the worst. But it must be a difficult task anyway, because these are biological things that naturally do change and shift in time. How do you make sure that between one survey and the next that there is consistency?

Yes. So, it’s done in every site that we visited. We did the full reef, the side areas of the reef and the back areas of the reef. We had a protocol that measured two kilometres per transect, if you like, of photographs. And then we analysed that amount. So, that was thousands of photographs per site and then multiple sites and then this sort of full reef, back reef and side reef and so on. So, there was an attempt to do it. But again, this is, you know, this is boats working more or less full-time for two years. We’re also– at the same time did some interesting work on the mesophotic reefs, which is where coral reefs are growing at the limit of their ability to survive in light levels and finding out that there’s huge amounts of biodiversity there, which, you know, literally uncharted. You know, on our first use of a bunch of robots and deep divers and so on, we saw like three new species of coral for a particular area, a new species of pygmy seahorse. This biodiversity is sort of akin to almost what Darwin saw when he first saw reefs on the voyage of the Beagle. And so that was really exciting because it just highlighted the problem. It’s like, well, yes, when you talk about those coral reefs and that less than 1% of the Earth’s surface that’s sort of covering it, it is even more diverse than we thought. It’s even more valuable in terms of the genetic heritage that it bequests humans. You know, it’s– I sound like I’m trying to sell you something, but I’m not.

I’m buying. It’s okay. I’m buying.

How many?

All of them? I’ll take the lot. But it is incredible that there is life and not just a little bit, but entire world of life on the edge of what life can deal with. And if we are warming things up so that that edge shrinks a little, we’re losing entire worlds.

We made that argument. I think it is a terrible thing that’s happening. So, I think we now need to– this is we might. It’s go beyond that now to say yes, enormous amounts of biodiversity with climate change is under threat. It’s that simple calculation of whether it’s worth intervening or not. And of course, it just becomes an overpowering argument to say there’s so much value here that we need to now get on with the solutions. And that’s where the Coral Reef Rescue Initiative — that’s that project that is in partnership with the seven countries who depend on coral reefs. And our big focus is how can we make them as resilient to climate that’s going to inevitably affect them, and how do we protect people, nature and businesses so that you’ve got that stability ongoing? You know, unfortunately growing corals really can’t be done at scale, or at least I think it’s going to be really difficult to do it at scale and cost. Estimates of restoring one hectare of coral reef ranges from sort of several hundred thousand dollars to as much as a million. And so, you’ve got that problem that yes, it sounds good and it’s a good thing to do. And the other thing, of course, is you grow the corals back in the place where they just got nailed by a thermal stress event. You haven’t solved the problem. You just delayed a little bit and then it fell over. And I don’t want to say this with disrespect to all the fantastic people that have been putting their heart and soul into restoring reefs. But I think we have to be totally practical now. You know, climate change is here. We need to find those solutions and put them into play and get this job done. And I’ve gone from ten years ago sort of suffering a little bit from depression to then waking up recently and going, it’s not over yet. We haven’t actually tried. This is our big moment of really turning this around and it comes back to mitigation. And that’s what we’ve got to really focus on.

In August 2023, I should say, UNESCO, which is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, deferred the vote to decide on whether or not to add the Great Barrier Reef as in danger. Some might think, oh, thank goodness, but others maybe less so. What’s your take?

Well, the existence of this list means that you’ve got a bit of a way of prodding governments to make the right decisions. So, in our case, if the Great Barrier Reef is potentially going onto that list, then of course you’re hoping to see a lot more sort of activity and so on. That’s what I believed ten years ago. Does it leave it in place, you know, that’s a tool that can be used to help move politics along and get people to realise. But more recently, we’ve had a number of outlook reports from the Great Barrier Reef — which are part of a legislated sort of reports that have to be now done on the Great Barrier Reef — have in many cases gone from poor to very poor, and that type of language. And so, at the same time as this was last being discussed was that we had two massive bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef that killed an enormous amount of coral, back-to-back bleaching events and so on. And so, I’ve changed my mind into saying now, well, you know, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and it swims like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And I think it’s really misleading now to say that it’s not on the endangered list. So therefore, just as you said now we can sit back. No, that’s the opposite. And so, I think we need to face up to reality. It’s not only Australia, it’s all coral reefs around the world. It’s something we need to recognise, as a planetary society, is that this is a problem that we are facing. It needs to get the attention of everybody. There are no winners if we don’t.

I think the other problem for reefs is often when they do recover, you get some– I understand, correct me if I’m wrong, you can have quick recovery, but often with kind of a coral that isn’t the one you’re really wanting.

I’d like to refer to this as, that you can have a forest, right? And in the case of seeing it come back and so on, often it’s like you’re planting radiata pine forest. Diversity is low. It doesn’t have any– it’s a fairly fragile system. Versus an old growth forest equivalent of coral reefs, where you’ve got millions of species and you’ve got all this sort of checks and balances and that stability. And so, what we’re seeing more and more is we’re getting lots of radiata pine forest equivalents and less and less of the old growth systems that are so important to biodiversity and reef benefits and all those sort of things.

All right, let’s ‘news you can use’ this. What do you want to see happen? Next couple of years? What do we need to do to protect the reefs?

Well, I think we’ve got to do a couple of things. I think we’ve got to address mitigation far more aggressively than we have, and that’s a given. So, we’ve looked at a whole range of different possibilities recently with an injection of funding from the federal government. And that was to sort of take a look at some of the potential technologies everyone’s talking about — super corals and whether we could get them out onto reefs and then we’d solve the problem by having this coral that would be robust against temperature change and all of that. That’s one thing to say it, it’s another to do it. And so, this funding was out there to literally do what a lot of industries do when they want to solve a problem, and that is innovate, test, fail fast, re-innovate and keep going. And that’s something I think we need to do. And so, what we’ve done there is in sort of a four- or five-year period, we’ve tested a whole bunch of ideas and found out the ones that work and the ones that don’t, ones that come with problems about feasibility or socioeconomic acceptability and so on. So, we’ve done that. But now we’ve got to get over and say, okay, well, what have we got in the arsenal to help reefs adapt to changing climate? As we say, we’ve got to have this downward trend to, as quickly as possible. But what are the technology thinks? And so, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been investing a lot of time and energy in the Coral Reef Rescue Initiative, which is about identifying the low-exposure reef systems and putting our heart and soul in protecting them. That to me is important. I might be biased, but when you look at the options available, that makes a lot of sense. It’s scalable. You’re not trying to keep an aquarium facility going, you’re essentially maintaining a reef system as best you can so that it becomes a sort of parent generation to the recovering. So, that’s the two things that I think are important. And then I think with education, I mean, the things like this exhibit here at the Powerhouse Museum, the idea that there was a day when people that told us the weather didn’t believe in climate change.

Yes.

And they had to step around typhoons and cyclones. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? I think we’re a really interesting species. And in that, you know, if you look at what we’ve– we’ve got a monumentally big problem to solve. But we have this explosion of technology from AI to clever materials to this, that and the other. I think we’re going to solve it. But as humans, not to quote this as being what they always do, but it’s like we always leave things until the last moment, the razor edge, and then we have the big innovation event and it’s all a bit too fast and we get a bit of pain from it. But it’d be great if we could get to a point where we didn’t have to go through the pain that we were shifting and understanding and at a faster and more responsible timeframe.

Please join me, a round of applause, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. 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.