Welcome, everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you for joining us. 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 the Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to country.

Today is actually number 62 of 100. It’s quite extraordinary, well past half halfway now, taking place every Friday. And 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. Built in 1899 it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. Interesting mix of coal and public transport there, probably come up in this conversation today. And in the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus towards the innovations of a net zero revolution.

I’m Craig Reucassel, you might know me from War on Waste, Fight for Planet A, or The Chaser. My guest today, we’re very lucky to have environmental scientist Peter Newman, who’s a professor of sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, where he’s currently working on the uptake of electric vehicles, trackless trams and other potential solutions to support the transition to a greener economy. He was awarded an Order of Australia in 2014 for contribution to urban design and sustainable transport. He’s worked as an advisor to local, state and federal governments and previously served as an elected councillor for Fremantle in WA. We’re thrilled to have him joins us today. So please join me in welcoming Peter.

So, Peter let’s go right back to a long way back and talk about a harrowing bus journey as a young man who had just completed his PhD in chemistry, that changed the trajectory of your life. What happened?

Sydney played a role in that, and I’m glad to be back in Sydney because it is a special place for me. Yes, look, I did chemistry mainly because it was the easiest thing for me to do while I was playing cricket and football and that was my main interest at the time. But I did eventually get over that and realised that I had to do something with my life. So, my wife and I in the 70s decided to come to Sydney via the Snowy Mountains on a bus from Melbourne. My wife hadn’t seen snow before and it was kind of like, oh well, let’s use this trip as a way of thinking about our future.

So, I started to read an article in a magazine about a guy who had cancer and was dying, and he was coming to terms with his life and saying, ‘You know, it was a good life.’ And I was thinking, Oh, yes, well, I suppose I think that too. I’ve had a pretty good life. And my wife wasn’t so keen about that idea, but we started to go up the mountain and the bus driver told us, ‘There’s a huge snowstorm happening up here, but I’m going to go through this because I don’t get put off by silly things like that.’ And so, we sort of looked at each other thinking, Oh dear, maybe this bus isn’t going to make it. As we went through, it was quite dramatic. We actually hit a car but kept going because you couldn’t stop. And it wasn’t a big accident. But anyway, we’d look over the side and say, ‘Oh my God, this thing could go over.’ But I was sort of a peace about it all for some strange reason.

Anyway, we came through and down into Sydney to my aunt’s place and who said, ‘Quick, sit down, we’re going to watch Monday Conference,’ which was the ABC’s big thing at the time. And Paul Ehrlich was on, and he was debating someone about the future of the world, and he was presenting an environmentalist’s perspective. It was quite dramatic for me because I thought, Oh my gosh, this is a scientist, but he’s doing something that is so important and maybe I’ve got to get into that. And it finished and suddenly there was a news flash, ‘bus goes over a cliff in Snowy Mountains’. And I’m thinking, Oh my God, what is this about? And it was the bus after us. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but it rolled several times down this mountain. And just a powerful statement, a story of my life, really, to say you have been able to get through this. You have a future. Get on with it. And it’s something to constantly be reminded of that you have a chance at doing something. And so, I then sat down and tried to work out what to do. I ended up working with Paul Ehrlich. But before that I did environmental science, which was the only place in the world you could do was in Delft, the Netherlands. So, at that point, I was one of the few people actually trained in environmental science and got a job at Murdoch University.

It’s interesting you say, I feel like nowadays I speak to so many people doing environmental science. That idea that when you first watched that ABC conversation, the idea of science and environmentalism being linked to seemed foreign a thing to you. It’s fascinating to look at it that way.

Absolutely foreign but totally exciting that you could think of that even. So, I got a job at Murdoch in the new environmental science program as it began in 1975, and the professor there was appointed with me and we set up environmental science, worked it out on the run.

On the run.

Well, it was good fun. And I’ve been doing it ever since, I’ve been an academic nearly 50 years.

And that’s interesting. I guess that interaction between society, science and environment has been at the core of your study for a long time. And one area particularly that you’re focus on is on transport. You and your long-term collaborator, Jeff Kenworthy, published a very groundbreaking study in 1989 about automobile dependence, a term you actually coined. What is automobile dependence and what did you find in that early study?

Well, it starts back in 1973 when I was at Stanford with Paul Ehrlich doing a post-doc and the first oil crisis hit and San Francisco just fell apart. It was extraordinary to see how people did not know how to cope without cheap petrol, because America and Holland were the only two countries cut off at that point from the new OPEC that was formed. And the price of fuel tripled in a few days. And it was amazing to watch. But back in Holland, where I – at Delft, nobody was affected. So, I started to think there’s a difference between cities in terms of their fuel use. And we began to study it, and Jeff Kenworthy came along at Murdoch with the same idea, and we formed a partnership that continues.

And we said, ‘Well, we got to collect data on cities.’ Nobody had data to show why cities were different. So, we took 15 years because you had to go to the cities. Now this is why a couple of Australians could end up doing something globally significant, because we like to travel. And we had to go and walk around these cities and collect the data from different parts of the city at different agencies. And so, nobody had put it together. And this is pre-digital, of course.

So, we put all that into a book, Cities and Automobile Dependence came out in 1989, and it shocked the planning, engineering, and particularly the transport world, because they had never seen the extent of the way car-based cities were so dependent on oil, and it was now built into the structure of the city. So, yes, look what happened after that is that we wrote two other books. So we had a trilogy and the second book was called Sustainability in Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, and we began to document those cities in the world that were showing how to do it. Particularly how you could recover from it, not just be a perfect old city that didn’t, you know – like Venice or something that nobody has a car in because you can’t. It was much more about American, Canadian, Australian cities and what you can do to change.

And then so what cities would you point to who kind of the planners of the time read your books, understood it, and then actually did change it? You know, where are the cities that have tried to fix their car dependence and have done a good job of it, whether it be through cycling or public transport or otherwise?

Yes, well, the first one was Toronto, because they had taken the money for a freeway and turned it into a light rail instead. And that in the early days was just abhorrent to any American city. You know, that is not what you – you closed them down. You don’t start in on that stuff. That’s old that’s finished. But it wasn’t. In fact, it made the city. And then followed Portland, which also stopped the freeway, the Mount Hood Expressway and turn it into their amazing light rail system, which transformed the city. And we were part of that. So, what happened around the world was that we got asked to go to these cities and help in the activists. So, we began to be real activists’ academics, and that translated then into other cities and eventually into Australian cities.

What are the – where I guess, are the wins in Australia? You know, where have we made the right decisions?

Well we’re always somewhere in between. Not quite European, not quite American and it shows in the data. But I got elected to being a Fremantle city councillor in 1976 during this whole process and in 1979 the Sir Charles Court government closed our railway, and it was seen by the American guy who was the Director General of Transport, had come from Shell Oil Company. He just said, ‘There’s no future for rail. It’s all about buses and cars. This is the only way you’ll make a city to be competitive. And that’s what we’re doing in America.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, I got a problem. I know that in my own town we have to change and fight this.’ And I was an elected councillor in Fremantle, so I started the campaign. The Friends of the Railway was started, and we won that. But it took four years and the Burke government that came in in 1993 were committed to bringing back the railway and look at how it could be modernised. So, we won that. And then the processes of upgrading Perth’s rail system from virtually nothing to something significant began and it’s still happening, and I’ve been involved in that all the way along.

So, Perth is actually something you can write about and talk about anywhere in the world, especially winning back. I went to Philadelphia and the outer suburbs where they closed the rail down and the community was devastated and pretty much the same time as us. And I was able to tell that story and show them how they can actually win back their future. So, that’s the kind of thing that we did. And Perth went from seven million passengers a year to 70 million passengers a year just on the rail system, rebuilt rail north, south, into the suburbs, which you’d never have dreamed of putting a railway. Into the car-based suburbs. But behind it all we’re getting rid of oil because this is electric transport and it’s bringing the city back in instead of sprawling car dependence. So, it did have a climate perspective to it, which is why I eventually ended up in the IPCC working on transport. But that process began in my own city and from the work we did looking at how oil dependent cities were.

I mean, you’ve talked about public transport becoming electric. Now, there’s obviously the other contrast at the moment is we’re seeing cars becoming electric. We’re talking about electric vehicles becoming more common. We’re seeing that as being a solution. You know, does that push people away from the kind of public transport approach? If you start saying, I know there’s kind of a battle in the climate sphere a bit off going, look, electric vehicles are not the solution. We should still be pushing for cycling and public transport and that. Where do electric vehicles come into this, I guess, solution to climate change problems, but also where does it fit in our overall transport solution?

Well, it’s 90 per cent of the problem solved if you get the fuel changed in the cars we’ve now got. And that’s happening very, very rapidly. So, in our transport chapter of the IPCC, which I’ve been part of over a 12 year period, we’ve slowly come to see that that was a major way to actually deal with that very large proportion. Most of IPCC stuff, most of policy on climate is about getting rid of coal and perhaps gas as well. But certainly, it’s power related, like closing down these sorts of things and creating solar-based futures.

But getting rid of oil is critical and the best way to do that is to tap into that solar power. Run your car on sunshine. And that is still going to be, as I say, 90 per cent of the problem, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the car and cars ruin cities. And you cannot imagine Sydney without its public transport or Perth even now without its public transport, whereas before they were imagining cities to be totally dominated by cars with a little bit of buses. Now there’s lots of Sydney like that still, and we have to be able to get through very rapidly in this transition to get rid of oil as well as getting rid of coal and gas.

Where are we now in terms of switching our transport all to electric? And I know that cars kind of seem like the simple part. What about our trucks? Our buses, you know, where are we now? There was talk for a long time it seemed to be that we were going to go towards hydrogen as the solution there. Is that the case now or is it now going to be electric?

No, hydrogen is not going to work in transport. Land transport is going to be electric based on lithium-ion batteries.

Even in your big trucks and –

Even in the big trucks. That transition is happening very rapidly. They are now available. Trucks and trains going electric with bogies with lithium-ion batteries on them instead of diesel. It’s a fairly easy transition. The hydrogen fuel cell can work, but you’ve got to get the hydrogen to it, and it doesn’t easily transport. You don’t easily store hydrogen. Whereas electricity. Just plug it into the sunshine and you’ve got all of that available and that’s happening. So, all the big mining companies are going this way. I think we’ll see hydrogen having a role, but it won’t be in land transport.

So, if someone from the IPCC is looking at the transport problem. Is hydrogen merely for what? Boats, cargo and planes? Where will it actually be part of the solution?

Yes, hydrogen is needed to help create the fuel for aviation and shipping, which are not going to be lithium-ion batteries. They’re too big and heavy and that process is way off. We’re probably 10 years away from a solution to that, but they’re the 3 per cent type factor in terms of the overall greenhouse problem. And what we have to do is do what is now cheaper than any other form of power: solar with battery storage and electric vehicles. This combination is going to transform our world into being a decarbonised one in all of transport, all of power, all of industry. That’s the transition we’re going through. But that process is also affecting all parts of transport.

So, at this stage there are two big breakthroughs that have happened in electric vehicles and it’s not Elon Musk and the Tesla and so on. It’s actually bikes and buses. 40 per cent of the global market in bikes is now electric. 40 per cent of buses are now electric. Now this is mostly China and India, but they’re pretty big and important places. But that’s what’s happening, and we will continue to grow in that area. Bikes and buses will all go electric, but right through – the tradie vehicles will all be electric. Everything’s transitioning and it’s going to be so quick by 2030, most of that will be in place.

In Australia it can feel a little bit like this is a very slow transition and is very small in that electric vehicles out there. It doesn’t seem like it – can you talk to where are the countries that are doing it differently? Where are the countries where it’s becoming normality? Where is this being done well.

Well, Norway, of course, is the poster child of the electric vehicle and a lot of other things. And they heavily subsidised it. It took off and it’s got its own momentum. They don’t need any kind of subsidy now, it’s cheap enough. And that process you can go through quite quickly. Look, we’re catching up. We’re always a little bit behind on these things. And there’s plenty of opportunity emerging for us and you’ll find that we’ll look back on this and say, ‘Oh yeah, we caught up pretty quickly.’ I’m not too worried about that. I don’t think we can stop it. It’s going to take off. And that process is happening in new kinds of technology as well. It’s not just the fuel. The new electric vehicles are better than the old diesel and gasoline-based ones. They’re smarter. There’s so much better for cities, but they are so much easier and safer and healthier.

It’s interesting, isn’t it because often EVs are discussed in the context of climate and climate change. But you just think of a city, if this city here was all electric vehicles, the lack of pollution, just that air pollution, that simple air pollution would be remarkable. I mean, even just on that front, it will be incredible transition that we see.

Yes, and one of the big things that I’m now working on is the transition to what we call mid-tier transit. It’s not a bus, it’s not a train. It’s in between, it’s the trams, it’s –

This is the trackless tram?

The trackless trams. Yes, and this is quite a story for me because I was a rail man, you know, I was saving railways everywhere. And then someone from Perth actually was brought over to do a study on Parramatta Road. What can you do with Parramatta Road if you wanted to make it a better place, not just better transport wise, but what about all the way along it? It’s just full of car yards and junk, so why not get a good public transport system along it? And what they came up with was the trackless tram, which had just started being made in China.

China faced that question of what they do after they’ve got high speed rail going to every city. They’ve got metros in every city and they’re working. But how do you get people to them? How do you get across the city? You need a light rail. So, they started looking at light rail and found that it couldn’t fit into the city. It just is so destructive to the economy of where you’re putting it. George Street, you know, five years closed. This is the kind of problem you have to avoid.

So, the rail company in China came up with this trackless tram. They took six innovations out of high-speed rail and transformed a bus. So, the only thing that’s bus like is that it’s got rubber wheels, but it runs like a tram like it – it’s got rail-like quality to it. Now, I didn’t believe this when my colleague came back and said, ‘You’ve got to go and see these things.’ I said, ‘Why?’ You know, I’m so used to the bus lobby saying they can do anything a train can do cheaper. And so, I was suspicious. We went to China, we rode this thing, and I said, ‘Oh my God, this is the real thing.’ We were doing 70 kilometres an hour down a street, and it felt like you were in a train and the kids were walking up and down the aisle and their parents weren’t grabbing them, you know, like you have to do if you’re in a bus and you’re going all the sway and the buck and the bounce. It wasn’t there.

So, what they’ve done is transform the ride quality, and it’s all done with sensors. So, it actually follows a painted white line down the road but is looking ahead and it shapes the bogies so that you actually are going to avoid any of that bounce. It’s very clever. And I thought, Well, this is what car dependent cities need. Not just everything electric, but something that will transform the corridors, those main road corridors like Parramatta Road, which are awful places.

You need to create beautiful places around the stations. And you can do it by putting in a trackless tram and you still got some cars going down its good electric vehicles, no doubt, and you’ve got cycleways and so on so that you can have that as well. But you will transform that corridor by the stations building around them. And if you work that process with the developers that can build net zero precincts, all the latest technology around that, you can be running off sunshine. You’ve got the whole thing, a net zero corridor, which is what we’re calling the work we’re now doing. Across Australia we’ve got local governments everywhere wanting this and we’re bringing two trackless trams to Perth and then to Melbourne and Sydney this year.

Okay, so this is happening now.

This is happening.

So, trackless trams – or as I call them improved buses – will be coming in soon.

Yes. Coming soon to a station near you. It will enable us to build a lot more value. You can go across corridors and link into rail lines and link into main shopping centres and universities and health campuses and stuff. But it’s a connector, but it’s also going to help rebuild around those stations. It stops sprawl.

I want to take you back a little bit. I want to kind of go back in time a little bit. In the early 2000s, you led Western Australia’s state sustainability policy. You went on to become New South Wales Sustainability Commissioner. What was the significance of these and what was it like working in sustainability at that time? Was climate change in the early 2000s, was that part of sustainability? Was it seen as a different issue? Was it even discussed that time? You know, where was the conversation and how has it changed, I guess, over these years?

Because I’d been in politics from my rail ventures in the 70s and right through, I continued to have a role that was linking policy in sustainability and politics. So, I was asked in 2001 to do the WA state sustainability strategy by Geoff Gallop, who happened to be a friend because we played cricket together and he was also a lecturer at Murdoch at various times. So, he’s the new premier, he’s just stopped the logging of old growth forests. And now he wants to do a sustainability strategy to try and show that there’s more to this stopping thing than just stopping. It’s all about a new economy emerging.

So, Professor Newman should be able to help on that. And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll come and work with you for three years.’ In his office. I was seconded, but I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea. But we worked it out. And that’s basically what I try to tell people today. It’s not all in the manuals. You know, this is new and most of climate change is very new. We’re learning on the run. And it’s – but it is different now because we’re in the home straight. We can see where it’s going, and this is the difference. And back then we were just starting on sustainability, and we were the first state in the world to do a sustainability strategy.

And was climate change part of the conversation.

It was, it was part of it, but very small and it was the hardest part to get anything serious. But everybody slowly learned that sustainability was here to stay, and we had to put that in and eventually we got into climate change. But it was a while coming.

How do you convince people, particularly in a resource dependent state like Western Australia, that climate change isn’t just a threat, it’s not just about stopping, it’s about opportunities. Where’s that conversation now?

Well, that’s what I learnt very quickly, that the future is about opportunities, not fear. And I did not learn that from Paul Ehrlich because he really thought that the best thing you can do is scare people. Just tell them it’s going to be the end. And what I found on my students, and it certainly didn’t work amongst politicians. So, you can get elected on the basis of saying that everybody’s stuffed. It’s not – you have to have hope and you’ve got to craft that into your message.

So, the subtitle of our sustainability strategy was Hope for the Future. And it was full of that. And what we had in that process was a bottom-up process of people saying what they saw as the opportunity. And you’ve got to constantly claim that. Last week was an interesting time because it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of our sustainability strategy and a whole lot of people from ESG, as it’s called, which is Environmental Sustainability in Governance. And there’s hundreds of consultants these days working on that, which is nice. And we all came together with Geoff Gallop, and we sort of reflected on where we’re at. The evening ended up with a wild brawl that I started about gas because that’s our problem.

In WA it is extraordinary the critical minerals we have, and you know we think we’re clever, but in fact we just have a crust that’s exposed. Ancient rocks. They’re not covered by glaciation or volcanic activity. So, you can easily get access to them. It’s amazing resource. And we’ve got every one of the critical minerals. We produce half of the lithium for the world, and it’s in one small mine mostly, but there are eight new ones and we’re now processing them. So, that is well underway. The quick side effect on that. I went to Sharm El Sheikh to the Cop 27, and I was part of an internal process called the Global Stocktake, which was trying to show practical things. We had to present and talk to groups, small groups. We had Saudi Arabia come to ours and they tried to say, ‘Well, you can’t electrify everything because, you know, oil so much better to do this.’ And eventually one of them came up and said, ‘Look, this is what we’re trying to say. You’re going to run out of critical minerals, so don’t try to decarbonise transport.’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m from Western Australia.’ I went through the story, and you could see the heads fall.

I mean, we will make those minerals available to the world, we’ll process them, we will make our economy around them. And that’s happening very rapidly. And all the mining companies are switching to net zero very quickly. But on the other side is this gas. Massive amounts of gas. Now, I believe those companies will collapse because the world’s markets are where they are getting their money. It’s not a local thing. It’s all LNG exported. It’s a hard call to make because they are big companies that have made a big past in Western Australia. And certainly, the politics is very much in their favour. They are desperately trying to show that they are part of the transition, but they’re not. They’re part of the problem and the world is going to recognise it. The certification process for net zero is going to constantly undermine them and tariffs are going to be put on and put on all the time to get rid of any kind of fossil fuel-based product. And that’s the new economy that’s emerging. So, we’ve got two sides to our economy. We always have had that and we, I think, are going to have to proceed through that over the next ten years. And I’m going to be, again hated by some people very strongly. But I think I’ll be right in the long term. Well, I’m on the right side of history.

It’s great to see that the same brawl is occurring at sustainability get togethers, as is happening at Federal Parliament and across Australia and across the world. We’ll see where it goes in the next five years. It’s interesting you talk about that, that balance between fear and hope. It’s a big part of the climate debate. Now you have been for 12 years working with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, including being a coordinating lead authors for transport in the latest reports there. What has that process been like and how has that – you know, IPCC reports are probably known more for the fear. They’re known for those stories that come out which say we are – it’s worse we’re in bigger trouble. We’ve got to do something. Do you think that fear is motivating people’s change? Do you think we need more hope in those discussions?

Absolutely do. And that’s been my life. And I’m sure a lot of the people in the previous 61 here will have been affected by that. The sense that, do you have a hopeful approach or do you have a fearful approach? But I’ve always found people like Tim Flannery amazingly hopeful in the midst of the despair of change not happening and choosing to hope, which means choosing the opportunities, choosing to encourage and enable and to tell stories that matter, that are able to show the way ahead. And that kind of thing was going on in the IPCC over my entire 12 years, and I found it quite hard at first to find anyone else to talk to like that because that was like the culture was fine, the science, yes, it’s pretty awful, isn’t it? So, we’ve got to say it’s awful and we’re all doomed. Well, no, there’s a whole lot of happening that can be turned into change. And that process began to happen towards the end. I found more and more people who I could really say, ‘Look, let’s make sure there’s plenty of hope in this document as well.’

And what happened in the end was a fascinating thing because the launch of our mitigation report, which came out last year, the director general said only that these are the last days. We’ve got so little time left, we’ve got to act, and everything is falling apart. And I said, ‘Look, our reports full of hopeful stuff in there. What’s going on here?’ And we had even tables up showing this is the hope and this is the fear, this is both sides. But the reality is he was launching this in the middle of the start of the Ukraine war with Putin telling people that there’s nothing wrong with oil and gas and coal and that the price had gone up and everybody saying, ‘Oh well, you have to put off climate now. We’ve got to make the most of this new economy emerging around very high-priced fossil fuels.’ So, that was the context and we had to overcome that.

You need, I guess, a balance in a sense, because if you only speak with fear, if you only tell people the threats – and the threats from climate change are extraordinary, we know how great they are. A country like Australia is hugely affected. But if you only tell people to fear and then don’t tell them the solutions, it’s kind of debilitating really for humans. You’ve got to tell people the positive, you know, how we can get out of it. And you’ve obviously focussed on that. There are a lot of positive stories about solutions. You’re now focussed a great deal on looking at net zero, net zero precincts, net zero cities. How are we going on this? Is this becoming the norm? Are we looking at this as the solution for the future?

Yes, and the process of change to net zero is just extraordinary and it’s driven now by the world of finance. When we produced our report, already the Paris Agreement had launched a whole process of finance boardrooms saying we are going to go net zero. Net zero as defined in Paris. But it was – find out how you do it. That’s been the main agenda. But the world of finance came out four or five years ago saying this. And each year they’ve put more money into net zero. At the moment it’s about $88 trillion, only available for net zero projects. That transforms things. I mean, governments can say lots of things to try and get people to change, but when the money is there, that’s a big difference.

One of the things I find fascinating about your career, your history, is that I heard you say once that you’ve learnt so much from being an activist, from actually getting involved in things so that you haven’t just been an academic looking at it in an academic sense. You always try to get involved. You’ve been involved in the Freo train and things like that. Do you think that’s where academia should thrive in actually being involved in the community and doing things?

Yes, we’ve got a new pro vice-chancellor who says that if we are not doing research and teaching, that is about practice of how to change the world, not why anymore. We’ve won that we’re on the home stretch. We’ve got to see how to get there now. And those are the changes that we need to learn about. And all the professions are either going that way or they are going to die. And the manuals, everything, the professional practice has to be redone as they’ve been doing about walkability, about transport, about power. I mean, you can’t say that anything that was produced in the 70s and 80s to manage that is relevant anymore. So, you’ve got to go out there and learn on the job. And that’s the process that I got thrown into and continued to be. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

It’s great. Well, I’m very glad to hear that and in the time you’ve been involved in this that we’ve gone from asking the why to the how, and I’m glad that you see more hopes and fears. So, thank you so much. Please thank my guest, Peter Newman. 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.