Welcome, everyone to 100 Climate Conversations. And thank you for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We respect their Elders past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country.

Today is number 60 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 60s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

My name is Paddy Manning. I’m a journalist of some 20 years and author of a number of books, including most recently, Body Count: How Climate Change Is Killing Us. Roger Swinbourne is the Arup Group Australasian sustainability leader, specialising in facilitating improved sustainability, lower carbon intensity and improved climate resilience from major programs and projects. Swinbourne is currently on a New South Wales government expert panel on developing a decarbonisation strategy for New South Wales. The Green Building Council of Australia named him a Green Star Champion in 2020. We’re so thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming Roger. You grew up in Perth before moving to Sydney as a teenager. How did you discover your lifelong interest in environmental science and policy?

For me, look, my journey started Perth, Canberra, then Sydney. But in Sydney I had the opportunity to grow up right next to a national park north of Sydney, and I spent my childhood playing with friends down the creek, catching yabbies, building cubby houses and really engaging in that, in that natural environment. And it kind of inspired me very early with a nature base.

While I was quite young, I ended up volunteering also for WIRES, which is Wildlife Information Rescue Service, and was basically taking orphaned animals and raising birds and releasing them back into the wild afterwards. So, I had a very early connection with and love for nature as I grew up. And I guess for me that became foundational to a lot of my passion around the environment. And I went on and did environmental science at university, finishing environmental science I sought out a practical edge to it. So, I did a Master’s of Urban Regional Planning, and I really spent the last 20 years working very closely on trying to bring that concept of environmental science and urban systems together. So, I spent a lot of time working on city scale, large scale infrastructure of buildings and precincts, and looking at where sustainability and environmental initiative can actually improve and enhance the outcomes of those projects.

When did the penny drop about the urgency of climate change for you?

It was an interesting one actually. At university I was going to say 20 or more years ago, climate change was really not in the general dialogue. It was emerging as a concept at universities. Even within the environmental science course, there was a lot of discussion around whether it’s something we should or shouldn’t be looking at at the time as a critical path. So, there’s been a really interesting journey, I guess, through my education around whether climate change and carbon was critical.

For me I had the opportunity when I’d finished university, I, like many other Australians, ended up in the UK. I thought I was going to work at a pub. I ended up getting a job with the European Energy Agency in the south of London, working within European policy towards decarbonisation of transport. So, I spent a lot of time in different European contexts looking at where carbon was sitting in urban context, which was very different to what we were seeing in Australia at the time. So, I spent three years doing that, looking at how carbon particularly was being dealt with in policy and in programs of government. So, that kind of I guess really drew to me the opportunity that we see in cities and urban scales, the challenge that carbon is and how we needed to adjust it.

Do you think the Europeans were ahead of Australia in terms of their debate about climate and decarbonisation?

It was really interesting. Yes, they were. Probably about 10 years at the time, which was fascinating in return. It was 2005 when I returned back to Australia and the conversation here at the time was not in that debate. So having come back with that experience, with that knowledge, that urban sustainability at scale was something that we needed to be getting into, having the conversations with many of the different consulting engineering firms at the time, going in talking about carbon at scale and sustainability at scale and that urban context was a really challenging conversation. And I think I probably ended up talking to about 10 different companies at the time about what I’d been doing. And they said, ‘Well, do you do biodiversity or decontamination?’ Because they were the dominant areas of environmental science and environmental consulting at the time. So, it was a real challenge to kind of bring that conversation to play. And it probably took 3 to 4 years until that conversation really started happening.

I was quite lucky, I ended up finding a company that really understood – they were involved with the development of the Green Games, so for Sydney 2000, and they understood the concept of sustainability at scale in major projects and what that looked like and what carbon looked like because it was a feature of those games in Sydney.

My understanding from talking to you in their preparation for this is that one of the realisations you had in Europe was that climate action was being driven by investors and in growing awareness of environmental and social and governance risks on the part of financiers.

Yes, absolutely. That’s really an emerging component and probably more in the last 5 to 10 years that’s really started to ramp up. But I think in the European context, it was quite interesting to see where sustainability in carbon sat, because as Europe was coming together, there was a lot of legacy, a lot of legacy. All these different countries have evolved in their own economies, in their own societies, in their own languages. And I think for me, it was really interesting to see sustainability becoming a dominant language in bringing those organisations and countries together because it was part of a common future.

So, the idea of, yes, there’s some history which we will probably want to avoid as countries, but the opportunity of looking forward, let’s look 20 years out and then that brings the countries together to have a conversation about what is better look like in the future rather than dwelling in the past, which was a very dangerous place for the European community. So, I think their increased evolution of sustainability wasn’t necessarily driven by altruism, it was driven by a need to drive a positive future. So, I think that that early move into this space was probably a lot around that.

They’ve also got significant resource constraints within the European community. So, therefore driving efficiency, productivity and circularity through that economy is a much more prominent part of what’s driving sustainability in that region. In terms of the finance question, we’re seeing a lot – in the last couple of years, what we’ve been doing in the sustainability, resilience and climate spaces has changed really quickly because of increasing transparency. A lot of that is actually driven by social media and the alignment with finance. And that is that large organisations and corporations historically could have had social and environmental impacts that were probably not necessarily publicly accounted for. But because if a company drops an environmental or social ball now the shareholders and the community will hold them to account very quickly and that’ll take a lot of money off the share price, right?

So, the financial awareness and the financial connection to social and environmental licence to operate has significantly come together in the last three to five years really, and we’re seeing that ramping up at a very fast rate of knots. And so, I think finance is definitely starting to drive the sustainability, carbon and climate resilience debate and service because the need for those organisations to really embrace, pull that forward, to manage their risk and also optimise their value is really important.

Greenwashing is a kind of overarching concern about the way business, companies, the corporate sector responds to environmental and social challenges. Are there some clients that you’ve knocked back? Are there some clients you wouldn’t work for?

Yes. So, on greenwashing, and I’ll come back to clients in a moment, but on greenwashing, there’s this interesting dialogue which I’m appreciating at the moment of greenwishing, greenwashing and greenhushing. Greenwashing is a concern and I think that the Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative and government regulations are increasingly cracking down on greenwashing, which is basically claims that are really ill founded. Greenwishing is a really interesting one, which I have had some play with, and it can often look a lot like greenwashing. But I think the idea of greenwishing is where a company has an aspiration and it puts the aspiration out there but doesn’t actually necessarily have all of the details worked out yet, right. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I worked for a client, a big retailer, a number of years ago that put out a very bold carbon target. And I as a scientist was looking at it going, you can’t just put that out there. You don’t know how to get there. And they went actually, we’re going to put it out there and the market will hold us to account for it, right? So, it’s greenwishing, but also, it’s an accountability thing. So, they ended up then working into that in a very dynamic way to actually realise the outcome and actually exceeded the outcome through putting that into play. Now many might have seen that as greenwashing because in one sense they don’t know how to achieve it.

But they did.

But in the same sense they did. So, that’s the kind of greenwishing, greenwashing challenge a little bit. Greenhushing is something that’s getting a little bit more scary, and that is that because of the social accountability for a lot of these things, rather than necessarily greenwashing or greenwishing, they’re just not talking about it. Which is because they’re avoiding being caught up in a greenwashing or a green wishing debate, right? So actually, we’re doing stuff that’s good, but we’re not going to talk to anyone about it because it’s kind of safer because there is this kind of like, I don’t know what you call it, the tall poppy syndrome a little bit. It’s like, well, [if] you’re starting and stand up and say something then how do you make sure that the accountability is there and who’s holding it to account?

So that’s just sensible, isn’t it, just to under-promise and overdeliver?

In a sense. But then there’s overpromising and then working to that point because you’re accountable for it, right? So, as I said, it’s a little bit of a complex challenge that I think a lot of companies are trying to work through.

I suppose the danger with greenhushing is that you end up with just low ambition.

Yes, correct.

And low achievement.

Correct. And that’s so that’s part of the problem. I think we need to be open about what we’re trying to do.

Speak up. No greenhushing.

Yes, no greenhushing and being very careful around how we’re dealing with greenwashing and the new regulations that come into play around that. Because we don’t want people to go, actually because it’s legislation now and if we say something that’s not 100 per cent achievable or deliverable, we might get caught up with greenwashing. That’s dangerous. So, we really need to be careful around where that boundary sits, I guess.

And what about those clients? Are there some that, you know, for example, the fossil fuel industry would you work with all comers?

No. So, Arup a couple of years ago realised in its strategic direction that everything we do is designing and delivering for the future. Look, we’ve always been doing that. And as engineers – Ove Arup in a key speech in the 70s, basically designed this concept of ‘total architecture’, which is actually looking at how the whole system comes together and making sure that you’re looking at things from a systems lens, not from an individual disciplinary lens.

More recently, obviously, climate and carbon, and there’s a whole range of other sustainability challenges that are now facing Arup, that realisation in the 2020 global strategy was basically putting sustainability at the front. So, the front cover of sustainable development is everything at Arup. So, it actually puts sustainable development before the brand, right? Realising that actually everything we do is designing for assets that have 50, 100, 200-year design life. We often historically made sure the concrete lasted, but how do we make sure the project is relevant? So, there’s definitely a big shift in what we’re doing and how we frame that.

At COP 2021 Arup announced that for every new building we would assess the whole of life carbon of that building. It was a big announcement at COP and scared a lot of people within our broader organisation about what does that actually mean? And how do we do that? What if our clients aren’t buying it, are we going to do it anyway? And it was just like – so now in the last couple of years we’ve developed up a database globally of embodied and whole of life carbon for buildings, and we’ve just developed and launched last year a tool to help us and our building engineers as they work through the process to deliver on that. And that’s a tool called Zero, which is being released. We’ve also developed up a Circular Buildings toolkit, which actually looks at why we build, what we build, if we should build, and then if we do build, making sure that it has design for reuse, design for retrofit, and it has the longest life loosest fit to make sure that the carbon story is managed there.

On the no go area, we also at the same time announced no more extraction, processing or transfer of hydrocarbons, so it was also announced at the same time. So, no more projects that do that. And for every project now we go through a very detailed flowchart of whether it is or falls within or falls without that. Every project we go ‘no go’ goes through a UNSDG consideration as well. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are – basically it’s what the United Nations and the world basically put forward as these things we need to achieve by 2030. And there’s 17 elements in there that cover climate change. But they cover a much broader lens of social, environmental and economic aspirations that were defined. So, they, from an Arup perspective, become a little bit of a foundation about how we think about sustainable development. Because if the world’s decided that’s what we need from a sustainable development respective, then we I guess organisationally have started to move around those elements.

You’ve been at Arup now, I think, for four years, is that right?

Yes. Bit over four years.

It’s a firm that’s come up in a few of the conversations we’ve had in these series. As predominantly an engineering firm, Arup has made a big international push lately on green and thriving neighbourhoods. Can you tell us, what do net zero or even climate positive neighbourhoods look like?

Yes, so I’ve spent a long time playing with this concept. I was working with the CRC for Low Carbon Living, which was a cooperative research centre combining government, universities and industry looking at decarbonisation. It operated across Australia for about seven years. As part of that, I was very much part of the precincts, the precinct team and developed up some primary research for empowering Broadway, which was looking at the area around Broadway in Sydney, looking at multi stakeholders within a precinct and what a decarbonisation pathway might look like at scale. And there’s been a lot of focus recently on, well, there’s so much you can achieve at a building level.

There’s more that can be achieved if you look beyond the building of the precinct. Once you move beyond the building and move into the precinct, there is the complexity of multiple stakeholders all with different interests and also different power and capacity to create change. As part of some work, we did with C40 Cities a couple of years ago, or last year, I think. The C40 is the 40 cities, well it started as 40 cities I think there’s now about 100 cities. I’m going to get that wrong. But there’s a lot of cities that have come together around carbon and climate.

Including Australian cities?

Including Australian cities. Correct. Sydney and Melbourne, I think are both part of C40 Cities, but effectively we are a partner with them globally and we were developing up this piece of research with them on green and thriving neighbourhoods and that obviously looks beyond just the energy and the electricity consumption. It looks at transport, it looks at water, it looks at waste, which at a precinct scale all have carbon footprint. It also looks at green infrastructure and the role of green infrastructure in managing micro climatic design, reducing carbon. Looking at sort of liveability as a key component of the outputs of those neighbourhoods, because carbon is important in that story. But these places have to be liveable, they have to be usable, they have to be functional. We can’t just have low carbon. It’s not necessarily going to take us to a better place. And that idea of precincts where you’ve got system complexity is a really good frame to be looking at carbon.

I understand you did one little interesting study on how whether higher canopy targets created extra value in the properties in the neighbourhood.

Yes. Well, that’s right. And I think one of the things in that–

How does that work?

It’s, look, it’s the idea of the system. So, there is lots of value lost in systems. So, green infrastructure which [is] trees, vegetation, it’s like you’ve got grey infrastructure which is your hard built form infrastructure and green infrastructure. There’s a really interesting tussle between those in our cities and often green infrastructure is just seen as an amenity value. But when we started unpacking it, we started realising there were significant health benefits, property value benefits, carbon benefits, water quality benefits, microclimate benefits that are all affected at the city level. There’s a realisation – we’re seeing a lot of city governments now coming up with urban forest strategies and urban canopy targets because I think it’s that general realisation that there’s a lot of value in that space, and particularly in the context of climate risk and resilience.

Arup talks about 15-minute cities like Paris. Melbourne has 20 minute neighbourhoods. The Greatest Cities Commission, which I think you’ve worked with, talked about developing three half hour cities for Sydney. Are we behind there?

Different contexts, different scales. I think as an urban planner, like there is a level of catchment for different services in different capacity. I think that idea is obviously very much focusing on walkability. We do have a density issue in Australian cities, Australian cities –

Too low?

Too low. Australian cities emerged around the car, around the era of the car and they grew and sprawled because of that, which means walkability is a significantly increased challenge. Whereas in a lot of European cities that actually grew up through a walkability world or horse-drawn world, their density and form is a lot closer. So, the urban amenity that we need to retrofit in Australian cities to create that same scale is significantly challenging. I think average densities in sort of new areas of Sydney is around 15 dwellings a hectare, whereas in most European cities it’s sort of 30 to 40 to 50 dwellings a hectare. So, it enables much more walkability, much more amenity at scale and much more functional public transport networks as well. That is a spatial challenge that I think we face in Australian cities that are different to those in other parts of the world.

I’d like to turn now to one of the major projects you’ve been involved with most recently and are still involved with, the Decarbonisation Innovation Study for the New South Wales Government. So, you’re a member of an expert panel chaired by the New South Wales chief scientist, Hugh Durrant-Whyte. Can you tell us how this study started and what it involved?

In 2020 or 2019 this process kicked off where basically there was a need to understand in the New South Wales context where the physical, social, economic and policy landscape provided a sense of competitive advantage or a lens on where New South Wales should be pushing into the decarbonisation space. And it looked at all sectors of the carbon profile of the New South Wales economy and really sought to identify within that, where are the areas that New South Wales from a research and innovation and from a policy direction should be prioritised. So, it looked at infrastructure, it looked at land use, it looked at energy sector. It looks at all the different factors. One of the areas that I thought was really interesting was the focus on finance in the New South Wales economy, because the New South Wales economy I think is around 16 per cent of GDP is on the finance sector and the finance sector globally is driving a lot of push into the carbon space.

Even the Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has called for a green Wall Street. There must be some national interest also in pushing sustainable finance.

Yes, there is. One of the other things I’m working on at the moment, I’m on a technical advisory group for the development of the Australian Sustainable Finance Taxonomy. So, we’re seeing this concept of a taxonomy which has been developed in Europe. Taxonomy is basically a series of definitions of what is and what isn’t considered as sustainable within the context of a financial market. The European taxonomy has been really struggling with where nuclear and gas sit in the taxonomy, and that’s been very public over the last couple of years. But Australia is now looking at developing our own taxonomy and it’s been out on exhibition earlier this year. But it as a concept is going to start to drive even more quickly the Australian lens on it.

We’re seeing push from all over the world on this as well. So, there’s the International Standards Board now looking at standards for investors around sustainable finance. But I think it’s interesting because I think sustainable finance probably even five years ago was sort of driven by philanthropic and aspirational financiers. But I think it’s really now because that risk is being seen by all of the finance sector. There’s a need to better understand and account for it because that accountability, which I talked about before around the social and environmental licence to operate within a highly transparent world.

The need to better understand that from an investor perspective is, if you’re buying into an investment portfolio and then suddenly it gets hit with a carbon price and your value of your asset goes down 20 per cent, you’re going to want to know that. So, there’s a fiduciary duty of the portfolio to be able to communicate this asset has this amount of carbon risk sitting on it. This one has this amount. You need to make your decision based on those variables, right?

It’s a bubble, isn’t it? There’s a carbon bubble.

Yes. And it’s coming through thick and fast. So, I guess an example would be if you were buying or looking to invest in a house, you would – before you bought the house, you would go in and get a termite inspection, right. Now a termite inspector, they’ve got to be someone who can see behind the walls. They’re very clever with the microphones and they’ll work out whether there’s termites in that asset. And you’ll make a decision once you found out how many termites there are in the asset, whether to walk away from the asset because there’s too much risk and the value of that asset is going to decline to zero or you will buy the asset knowing there’s termites, knowing how much the termites cost, you’ll negotiate on that. Say okay, there’s termites there, I’m going to take $30,000 off the price because it’s going to cost me $30,000 to fix it.

So, it’s kind of a similar story with carbon, right? So, you’re going to go in, you’re going to fix the termites, you’re going to protect the thing from future termites, because if the termites stay in there, your assets are just going to do that over time until it falls on the ground, right? So, carbon is the same sort of story you’re wanting – we’re seeing this now, we’ve been doing a lot of ESG due diligence on major infrastructure transactions. We go in, we find the carbon, tell them where the carbon sits, under which cup does that carbon sit and when do you need to move it. So, that is actually playing out now in I guess at a scale with carbon being your termites, right? So, it’s buyer beware, and the accountability is there.

Yes, because the estimates I’ve seen, there’s trillions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel projects on the books of publicly listed companies that have a valuation which is unsustainable.

Yes. If carbon is – like interestingly because carbon is a risk irrespective of whether the price or not, right. So, all governments in Australia have committed to net zero carbon by 2050. Now, okay, carbon price uncertain, but there’s a commitment there and there will be regulation in play, there will be programs in play that will invest in funding the other way. So whether there’s regulation, whether there’s investment funding towards lower carbon or whether there’s a carbon price, there is a carbon risk, and the price of that carbon risk is what gets factored in transactions. I mean, you see the New South Wales targets and the Victorian targets constantly going, ‘Oh, we can get there first, we can get there faster.’ So, there’s this really interesting game of one-upmanship playing out in the government.

You talk about the sort of competition between the states. How has New South Wales gone on decarbonisation over the last decade relative to other Australian states?

Once again, this kind of concept of one-upmanship it’s been fascinating to watch because obviously the federal government was a little bit slower to the party on the whole net zero piece. But all the states kind of moved quite quickly and then were kind of trying to push to our advantage. And I think it’s a sensible advantage because from an economic point of view, fast scale decarbonisation can actually create a lot of value and also protect a lot of risk. So, there’s actually a lot happening in that space.

And look, New South Wales I guess in the last three to four years has done – off the back of, some of it was off the back of the decarbonisation innovation paper, but there’s been a lot of policies and programs through all state government agencies have pretty much got tiered commitments now and strategies in place to respond. New South Wales, Victoria really though I guess the first two to push in that space, but the others are catching up quickly. We’re seeing a lot of movement in South Australia at the moment. Western Australia has got a very bold commitment. I think they’ve got 80 per cent by 2030, which is a very bold commitment. We’re definitely seeing a lot of movement at a state level, and New South Wales I think has done pretty well.

We’ve all seen Blade Runner 2049. What is it about that movie that keeps you awake?

The opening scene. I watched it a number of years ago, but the opening scene is basically Deckard flying across the Californian desert. Wall to wall solar farms. And it’s a very dystopian movie if you haven’t seen it before. But I think that idea that a low carbon world is not necessarily a better world and that necessarily is a really important point. I think of the idea of the carbon tunnel syndrome, right? So, if we’re just looking at carbon and we’re just looking to optimise carbon, it is very linear. And it needs to be done. We need to do it faster than ever. There’s no question at all on that.

But it’s recognising that there are other significant planetary boundaries being pushed. There are other significant social and environmental issues and challenges that need [to be] addressed. Which I think for me – so I lead sustainability services within the Arup region. We’ve got a decarbonisation team, we’ve got a nature positive team, we’ve got a circular economy team, we’ve got a whole range of other teams. But for me, in the context of sustainability, I focus and my team’s focus on sustainability in the context of the UNSDG. Carbon is half of one, climate is one. They are important issues, and they absolutely need addressing. But I guess the challenge is that we need to think about this in the context of a system. So, we need to think about carbon from a systems response.

Sometimes the lowest carbon option might be to use rainforest hardwood as a good solution because timber is better than concrete. But actually, is that a better thing to use? And we need to be able to balance that out with, what is the nature story there? How do we manage the social implications of what we’re doing in focusing on decarbonisation? Because dogged delivery of decarbonisation? Needed. But without the lens of that broader implications I think is really important because yes, Blade Runner scared me. I kind of went, oh yes, okay, that’s something that we need to be really careful of. Because I guess the challenge of shaping a better world – and I think one of the ways that I kind of look at it because sustainability and resilience are incredibly complex, intertwined and challenging concepts, right? One of the areas that I guess I look at from a sustainability point of view is how to simplify that complexity for our clients and our customers and our communities. And I think for me, just looking at what is design excellence for 2050 plus based on social, environmental and economic outcomes.

So, so often we build what we need to do for now, for three years, for five years, we prioritise that short to medium term on our current need base. But the opportunity and the challenge is to make sure that what we’re designing is relevant on social, environmental, economic frame 2050. And if we do that, we’re moving a long way to embedding sustainability into everything we do. I think one of the real challenges that we face, and this is more philosophically as a species, but I think we do tend to prioritise what’s happening tomorrow 10 times more than what’s happening next Friday and 100 times more than what’s happening Friday in a year’s time. So, that prioritisation of future and current design decision making is always a challenge for everybody. And I think that that real challenge of how do you prioritise that long term? And how do you – this is that challenge as a consultant in the context of our clients – is how do you capture that future value as well? How do you enable our clients to capture that future value?

Thank you, Roger. And if you could please join me in a round of applause. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

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