Sotiris Vardoulakis  0:07  
Now we'll move on to the first plenary session of the Conference. We have a great lineup of speakers. These are short talks of around 10 minutes for each presenter. We will try to pick up a potential one question from the chat box for each speaker, if we make up for the time delay we have at the moment and my colleague Daniela Espinoza will be picking up these questions from the chat box, on the Zoom chat box. If we cannot answer them today, we will also try to answer them by correspondence after the Conference. I would like to invite the next speaker. It's my great pleasure and honour to introduce the CEO of Lowitja Institute, Dr. Janine Mohamed. Lowitja Institute is Australia's National Institute for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health and research and we can see here the plenary session programme. Janine is our first speaker. I believe we have a recording, have a recording from Janine that we can play at this point.

Janine Mohamed  1:16  
I'm here Sotiris, in person. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:19  
Ah fantastic, Janine! Thank you so much for joining. Janine has been moving offices this week. So it's been a bit challenging but, delighted to have you live on the programme. Janine the floor is yours. 

Janine Mohamed  1:30  
And Sotiris, thank you and good afternoon, everyone. I have been having trouble with my Wi-Fi so I am going to turn my camera off, but I'll leave you with some beautiful slides that I hope you will enjoy. So I'll do that now and share my slides with you.
I'm hoping that you're all seeing that. So of course, I'd like to begin by paying my respects to the **Warrangi** people whose traditional Lands I get to live and work on and pay my respects to elders past, present and future emerging generations, for whom our collective work on climate action is so very important. I'd also like to acknowledge Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples present here today. I am a proud Narrunga Kaurna woman from South Australia, and I am the CEO of the Lowitja Institute, which is Australia's National Institute for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander community controlled health. I'd like to speak to you today about a much needed piece of research we've undertaken on climate change, and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health. This work was prepared for the Lowitja Institute and the National Health Leadership Forum by our amazing hosts here today, the HEAL Network, also CRE-STRIDE. And I cannot go without mentioning the amazing support of Fiona Armstrong at the Climate and Health Alliance and we'd also particularly like to thank Dr. Veronica Matthews for leading this work. So today I commend to you our report, climate change and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health, a discussion paper and you can find that on the Lowitja Institute website. This journey for the Lowitja Institute into this area of research began in developing our strategic plan. Acknowledging that climate change was a policy area that needed immediate attention when it came to the health and well being of our peoples. So the report highlights the effects, the disproportionate effects, we are now seeing for our people. So many very direct and indirect climate change impacts on morbidity and mortality of our people. And we heard about them directly at our roundtable. Just last month, which we helped to inform the recommendations on our paper, that included hearing from the Elder that you see here on the screen. He is from Central Australia, and he described the impacts of extreme heat, and I'm sure Dr. Matthews will talk about, you know what that means a little bit later in the programme, but you know, the impact of extreme heat on his life and his health. He told us that when he went away for dialysis, which is often, that he returned home to find that his power was off, that his food was spoiled and that his medicines, unfortunately, which are life saving for him and you know, expensive, were unable to be kept safely and cold so they had to be disposed of and this is not an isolated case for our community.
Oops. Here we go. So our report finds that climate change is compounding historical injustices and really does disrupt cultural and spiritual connections to Country that are really central to our health and well being. It also highlights that our health services are struggling to operate in extreme weather with increasing demands and the reduced workforce. And that all of these forces combined to exacerbate already unacceptable levels of ill-health within our populations. And here, I want to highlight that, you know, we shouldn't be seen as a vulnerable population. I like to make it strengths base and describe us as needing to be a priority population. Yeah, today, we've not seen or been sufficiently included in national conversations about climate change and the environmental health determinants have largely been absent from National Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health policies. There are gaps in research and data. So welcome, hopefully, you know, some resourcing to have Aboriginal led research in this area and most reporting on climate change does not include our voices or our local knowledge. Many solutions are known, but access to these solutions is not equally or equitably available across Australia. And this report finds, importantly, that these issues are inevitably linked to structural and systemic racism. I'll just leave it on that slide for a moment so people can quickly read what I'm talking about when I speak to the terminology of systemic and structural racism. And I'm sure many of the participants will know prior to colonisation, Australia consisted of more than 250 Nations representing a broad diversity of cultures and cultural knowledges. Central to our cultures of course, is the holistic nature of health and well being that understands that good health is dependent on respect, respectful and reciprocical relationships to Country, culture, spirituality, community and family. You know, for at least 65,000 years, we've developed a unique connection and equilibrium with the land, seas and environments in which we live. And we took our role as custodians of Country very seriously. Now, I invite you to look up and remind yourself about what custodianship actually means. But colonisation of course severely disrupted and devastated these connections and our custodianship of lands. As Maori scholar Dr. Rhys Jones says from an Indigenous health perspective, climate change can be seen as an intensification of colonisation. And colonisation, you know, obviously ignored Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing right down to the weather. You know, insisting that we live according to just four seasons, and that was bought here, of course from England. Instead of the many seasons our people knew and respected. So we even had our weather colonised. And in doing so, it threatens to make this country uninhabitable. Ironically, Terra Nullius, yet again. So if we're honest about truth telling, needed in our country, we must be honest about what made our country sick in the first place.
But of course, this brings strength and opportunity as well. Climate change presents an opportunity for redress and empowerment of our communities to lead climate action based on our intimate knowledge of Country, and that's why the Lowitja Institute and the NHLF is working with CAHA to spread the word on our discussion paper and its recommendations. So we can have a meaningful impact on policy and health outcomes through what's very important to Lowitja Institute's work, which is knowledge translation, not just into policy, but back to communities as well so that they can feel empowered around their decision making. I was really pleased as a part of this advocacy work to present the report's recommendations at a side event of COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, and to have watched as so many Indigenous peoples from across the globe, really raised very similar issues in Glasgow on the main stage and inside events and on the streets. We believe that this paper should not just lay alongside of other strategies and documents or be complementary to them. We believe that this should be the leading policy document to guide, you know, climate action policy in this land we now know as Australia. So our paper really does clearly map out calls for right based climate action, and place based adaption and mitigation. And it has four levels, for high level calls. So number one is take action take action. Action that respects human rights and achieves equitable health and environmental outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The climate crisis is already disproportionately affecting the health and well being of indigenous peoples. Central to this, as I've said, is the existing inequities, the ongoing effects of colonisation, and I underscore poor relationships. Whatever we do, we need to address these and not exacerbate them. Number two is value and centre our knowledges and rights as Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples. We've protected Country for millennia and survived dramatic climatic shifts. You know, we must remember that Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples were here at the last ice age. And so we are intimately connected to Country and our knowledges and cultural practices does hold solutions to climate crisis. Work with us to protect Country and do the work on adaption and mitigation planning. We need equitable access to housing, renewable energy solutions, and our lands and waters and the united efforts to stop our government ripping every mineral out of the ground. For last but not least, create a movement for climate justice. Climate change will affect us all but some some of us more than others. We need to ensure climate action learns from historical truth telling and commits to not repeating the wrongs of the past. This is climate justice, and it's deeply linked to race relations in Australia. And we are the only first world nation with a colonial history whose Constitution does not recognise its first peoples. The current government dismissed what was offered by Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples, as what we called a gift to the nation, the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The statement calls for voice, treaty, truth; and in my view, you cannot be taking serious action on climate action, unless you're acting on self determination and climate justice. And I you know, throughout the conference will be deliberating on a conference statement, so I asked you to consider these calls to action on behalf of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples to put climate justice at the heart of our work going ahead. And thank you Sotiris for all of your hard work and the Lowitja Institute absolutely looks forward to continuing the partnership.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  12:30  
Thank you so much, Janine. Thank you so much for your leadership, your amazing talk, your contribution to COP 26, and for organising the front of the discussion with CAHA, with HEAL, with CRE-STRIDE. But I'm very, very, very privileged to have you and Lowitja Institue as part of our network. I've been told that we're running a bit late. So we'll move on to the next presentation. By the way, we have one of the first breakout sessions will be on Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health, just after this plenary session so please join that session if you're particularly interested to hear more about this so important part of our network. So I would like to at this point, move to the next speaker. It's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague at ANU Professor Mark Howden, Director of the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, who has been one of the main leaders of this area of work on climate change adaptation in Australia and internationally. He's the Vice-Chair of the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize on climate change in 2007, in believe. Thanks so much, Mark, for joining us. We look forward to your talk. 

Mark Howden  13:53
Thank you very much, Sotiris, for that introduction. And, and I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners on the Lands on who I stand. That's the Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge their continuing contribution to the life of Australia. I'd also like to acknowledge the leadership that's shown by Tony McMichael over many decades. Previous to this, particularly in relation to climate and health, and also to Sotiris for his leadership in developing the HEAL network proposal, which is looks like a fantastic thing for Australia and Australians. So I'll just, trying to give a quick update on climate change. So very significant topic at the moment, and hopefully you can see my screen there? Full screen? Sotirus, all good? Yeah. And so so it's an extremely complex topic and I'll only be skating through but really the intent here is to give a very quick update on what's happened in relation to climate change, later science in particular from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So the first point I'd make though is that, in spite of all of the promises that meetings like Glasgow, is that our greenhouse gas emissions are not going down. They're actually continuing at extremely high levels. This is a graph from the Global Carbon Project, which shows carbon dioxide emissions from things like fossil fuel combustion industry, cement manufacturing, going back to 1990. We can see sustained increases in that, even over the last few years, we're seeing record levels. COVID obviously knocked those emissions down about 5.4%, globally. But this year, we're back pretty much to where we were pre-COVID0 and I think we will likely to be above this level next year due to essentially the economic bounce back. And to put this in context, if we were to go net zero, which many countries have signed up to and go net zero by 2050, we'd actually have to take that trend line of the reductions in emissions from that COVID period and continue that downwards every year, until 2050. So that all of that pain and suffering we had in terms of COVID, in terms of change in practice and changes in our systems, we'd have to multiply year on year on year to get to net zero. This is a seriously non trivial thing to do.
Because carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, because it has such a long lifetime, what we're seeing is a buildup of carbon dioxide, we're still not seeing it going down or even levelling off, we're still building that up. Today, it's 417 parts per million. When I was born, it was 317 parts per million. So it's gone up 100 parts per million in my lifetime. It's now the highest level it's been in at least 2 million years. And we also have record levels of methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases. We're not solving the problem yet. And increasingly, it's become clear that human influences through greenhouse gas emissions and land use change and a few other things, are significantly influencing the climate. There is now no uncertainty left. That was stated in the recent IPCC report. There is clear space between these simulated, the best estimate of natural only influences on global temperature, and the human plus natural. You can see, when you add the human, you get a very clear separation from the natural only, we can see that that best estimate of human plus natural influences corresponds very closely with the observed temperature changes across the globe. And if we look at the decadal temperature increase, we're now about 1.1 degrees above the pre-industrial level and the last few years we've actually experienced temperatures of 1.24 degrees above pre-industrial. And in fact, really importantly, that would have actually been 1.5 degrees due to greenhouse gas emissions, except for the cooling influences of air pollution, particularly in places like East Asia and Southeast Asia, which cool the atmosphere, but at the same time they kill people and cause significant morbidity because of that air pollution influence. And I raise this point, particularly because solving one problem, like climate change, or solving one problem that you get pollution actually could accelerate another problem like climate change. So we need integrated solutions to this. We're also seeing a whole range of impacts on other critical things such as Arctic sea, sea ice extent, and sea level rise, and glacial retreat, and the list goes on. We're also seeing really significant impacts already on climate extremes. And those are the extremes of things that particularly hit human health hard, but also environmental health. So we're already seeing impacts in terms of increased extreme heat. So those events are more frequent, and they're more intense. Similarly, with heavy rainfall and floods, more frequent and more intense, particularly in some of those most populated areas in Asia, which is essentially the epicentre of these impacts. We're also seeing increased cyclones with all of the health impacts that cyclones bring. So more of the category three, four and five cyclones as a proportion of the total. We're seeing increases in drought in some areas, increases in fire, including in places like Australia, but also in the Americas, and both South and North. Also in Europe, in particularly, and also in Africa. We're seeing increases and changes in our oceans. They're warming they're acidifying, and they're losing oxygen and in the process impacting on ecosystems, which then impact on human health, as well as the health of the natural systems. So what choices do we have in the future? So simple scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions are portrayed in this straight from the IPCC. So what I've put here is different trajectories or different scenarios of emissions going from the very high to the very low. And I've put against these, the indicative end of century temperatures, if we go on those emission trajectories. Fortunately, we seem now to be off the worst case emission trajectory. But at the moment, we're not home and hosed. At the moment, we're still producing something like 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year once you add in the land use change component on top of that graph that I showed you before. And we're not decreasing that yet. And so there's still something on this sort of intermediate trajectory, which would lead to a world perhaps of three degrees. If every country does what they say they do under the Glasgow agreement, we'd be somewhere between 1.8 and 2.7 degrees depending on how you calculate it. But to actually get to the Paris Agreement temperature goals, we actually have to go on one of these trajectories, the very low or the low emissions trajectory. For the very low, which is consistent with 1.5, we've got to go netzero by about 2050. For two degrees, we have to go net zero by 2070. And then in both cases, we're know that's not the end of the story, that's not the end point of the emission reductions, it's a way point, we have to continue to go below zero. And we have to do that really significantly. So when people talk about Net Zero, they're actually not giving you the full story. The full story of living with the Paris Agreement goals, is to go to below zero. So what might this mean in terms of big scale, climate changes, and some of the health implications. So these are two of the key graphs from that recent IPCC report, the left one on temperature, the right one on rainfall. We can see on the temperature and rainfall pictures, that there is no uniform change, it depends on where you are. And so if you're in the Arctic, or the Antarctic, you not only heat up faster than other parts of the world. But you also get a lot more rainfall in those places. If we're in the oceans, we actually don't heat up as fast as if we're in the inland parts of continents, which heat up faster than the coastal areas of continents. And if you look at the mid latitudes in terms of rainfall, so that's right across the southern hemisphere and parts of the Northern Hemisphere, we see really significant reductions in rainfall in most cases. And some of the indicative health impacts here, which you probably know well about from past work. So in terms of the heat, and particularly lots of health related issues related to health stress, vector foodborne diseases, air pollution, because that's linked in with temperatures and impact on mental health. And that list could go on. In terms of rainfall changes, particularly rainfall variability, is likely to change as well as rainfall amounts to increased variability. And that generates problems in terms of food security, in terms of the impacts of drought, both physical and mental health, in terms of water availability, in terms of fires. If we look at rainfall intensity, which will increase under climate change, because as the atmosphere warms up it can hold exponentially more water. So when it rains, it can rain in much bigger dumps. So we get increased flooding, increased water contamination, infrastructure damage, and food losses amongst other things. And of course, there's sea level rise, which impacts on our close neighbours across the Pacific, and through parts of Asia and Southeast Asia, in particular, with Indonesia being perhaps the most affected country on Earth. And we're likely to see flooding and many, many different types of losses of different types, social, economic, cultural losses, amongst others, and importantly, compound events. So a cyclone hitting a coast where you had sea level rise is going to cause a lot more damage than a cyclone, the same cyclone, hitting a cosplay we haven't. So these things add on top of each other. And just as an indicative indication of what a heat stressed world might look like under climate change, this is a recent, from a couple of years ago, study by Antonio Mora and others in the University of Hawaii. The top left hand panel is historical incidents of heat stress days, these combinations of temperature and humidity which cause significant stress to people. The bottom right is what it might look like under high emission scenario by the end of the century. And we can see they're fundamentally different worlds. With many parts of the world, many disadvantaged peoples across the world, almost having everyday being a heat stressed day. And the likelihood of impacts on this across the population are huge. This is a recent study by Wayne Thiery and he looked at the incidence of climate related disasters likely to be experienced in the lifetimes of people who are alive now versus those who are elderly now versus those who are actually young now. And this headline picked it up, I thought very explicitly, today's kids are likely to suffer three times more climate related disasters as their grandparents did. A completely different circumstance, one which is going to impact on health in all the sorts of ways we're talking about in this conference. My last slide Sotiris is about urgency. So this is another graph from the IPCC report. What this shows is temperature increases under different emission scenarios. One of the key points is that under all emissions scenarios, from the very low to the very high, we're likely to pass 1.5 degrees sometime in the 2030s. And if we stick on a high emission scenario, it could well be this decade. So we haven't got much time before we're hitting that 1.5 mark. And that will happen regardless of what we do in terms of emissions in the next few years. In terms of our emissions budgets, at the moment, we're burning up something over 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. At that rate, at that burn rate, we only have 10 years of those emissions before we're committed to 1.5 degrees. And every year after that, we burn at that same rate, we increase the temperature significantly. Now, the hope that comes out of this graph is indeed indicated in that very low emission scenario, which shows that if we stick to that scenario, we go up above 1.5 a little, and then we start to come back downwards. And that's a really important message. If we actually get our act together, we can turn back climate change. So there is hope. But as long as we act effectively as a global community. Thank you very much. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  27:04
Thank you so much, Mark. This is a very sobering account of the situation, but with some hope as well at the end if we mitigate effectively and act now to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. I suggest we move to the next talk. There might be a little bit of time at the end for questions, there are many questions coming through the chat box but in the interest of time I would like to introduce our next speaker, Professor Andrea Hinwood. Andrea is the chief scientist of the UN Environment Programme. She's an Australian, she was the first Chief environmental scientist of the Victorian Environmental Protection Authority. Andrea will be joining us from Nairobi, I believe, and it's very early for you, Andrea so we're very grateful. You have made time for for this presentation. The floor is yours.

Andrea Hinwood  27:58  
Thanks very much Sotiris and hello, everyone. It's nice to see your small faces on the screen. Can I just check you can see my screens Sotiris? Terrific. Thank you. And congratulations on the HEAL Network. I think this is going to be a fantastic initiative. So I'm just going to talk from UNEP's perspective and also give a perspective on the Australian landscape. So I think we've already talked about climate change but UNEP has three planetary crises that it's actually dealing with. One is climate climate change, one is biodiversity and ecosystem loss and the other is pollution and waste. And so we have three strategic objectives, which is climate stability, which we've talked about, that we live in harmony with nature, where we actually work much more harmonious with nature and towards a pollution free planet. And it has been alluded to in the previous presentations but these issues are all interrelated. And I guess what we want to do is to start dealing with them in that fashion. I just wanted to show you, we've already seen the information from Mark, but this is the emissions Gap Report which was released just before the COP. And this is actually showing what greenhouse gas reductions we need to make to actually achieve the two degrees or the 1.5 degree increase over time. We've just completed our analysis of the announcements and also where countries have updated their nationally determined contributions and unfortunately, we're we're still tracking at about 2.7 degrees with those commitments. We might be able to shave off about point four degrees maybe down to 2.1 with some unconditional determined concentrations emissions, but the The bottom line is we actually in order to meet two degrees Celsius increase, we need to actually do four times the amount of effort we've got with our greenhouse gas emissions. So we really need to take the action within the next eight years to do as much as we can to start to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions, and much more to actually achieve 1.5 degree range. So I don't need to belabour that point. But this is just showing the gap and we produce this every year. I want to provide a focus on methane, because I want to come back to this in terms of issues for Australia and air pollution. As also mentioned, we have this big increase in methane, methane is emitted from oil and gas, from agricultural activities, and also from our waste practices. And again, we've seen some of the highest concentrations of methane, even last year 2020, when we had our lockdown scenarios, and this actually has implications for both as a short lived climate pollutants, it has implications for climate change, but also has implications for the formation of ozone in a warming planet as well. So I'll come back to that a little bit. And I don't know whether you can see this clearly. But there has been some work done in terms of the contribution of methane. And if we were very efficient in reducing emissions of methane, which to be honest, is technologically achievable in the oil and gas industry, we need to do a bit more in the agricultural and waste sectors, but we can actually do an awful lot in the next few years and actually make a dent in terms of the emissions of methane but also take some a small percentage of temperature off our predicted increases. But we also can have an impact on the formation of tropospheric ozone and impacts on health. And this slide is just showing you some of the estimates that have been made if we have a concerted effort to deal with methane. And I want to talk about bending the curve. So we've talked with COVID, with curves and we've all looked at Curves every day. This is the biodiversity curve, the curve, and one of the issues that we're not necessarily linking up is our substantial loss of biodiversity, which also has implications for human health and climate change as well. And if we are actually going to take much more action to improve the health of populations and the planet, we're also going to have to integrate our work in terms of restoration of environments, but we actually need to stop degradation of our natural environment. And this is particularly pertinent in the Australian context. So in terms of the hazards affecting human health, in the Australian context, I think we all know this very well but it's worth reiterating. We've already heard we're gonna have climate change with frequency intensity of events, the presence of more flooding events, which have associated water quality issues, of course, heat and a range of other implications for human health. And of course, with air pollution, including methane, as you put heat into the mix, you actually increase air pollution concentrations. When we add increasing bushfires, we increase air pollution, we have then a greater burden in terms of air pollution as well. And so we really need to be linking these issues and making some concerted decisions in terms of how we deal with air pollution. Many of the sources of air pollution are also sources of greenhouse gases. So if we integrate our action, we may actually be able to achieve some good outcomes. But I also want to talk about pollution and waste. The volume of plastics pollution in particular is massive and increasing. Associated with those plastics are a number of emerging pollutants. And but we also have existing pollutants: mercury, lead, are prominent in a range of different locations. They're still being emitted and impacting on populations. And we have those existing situations in Australia as well. So we have emissions and discharges of old pollutants that we know the health effects about, but we also have the emerging pollutants, new pesticides, the PFAS group, and I'd like to mention the pharmaceuticals in Australia. There is now quite a body of information coming out now about the pharmaceuticals and their load in aquatic ecosystems and so, and their contribution to antimicrobial resistance, of course. And we need to be integrating and looking at the way we are managing our emissions and discharges so that we don't have those pollutants present in the environment so that humans are not exposed and there's a subsequent health impact. So we're dealing with water quality, can be related to climate change, as well as some of our existing activities. Air pollution can be related to climate change, and some other activities, water quality can be improved with ecosystem restoration and maintenance of biodiversity. Antimicrobial resistance is an emerging issue, and the one health agenda is becoming very important globally but I know my colleagues who are online today in the Australian context as well. And again, that's the joined up approach between agriculture, health, and environment. And of course, maintaining the environment, and preventing ecosystem degradation will actually help in terms of the spillover of zoonosis into the human population. So I hope that I've given a small picture of the integrated nature of our environment. And in the Australian context, all of these are issues for us as well as the global community. So integration and Co-benefits and protecting health. Clearly, if we stabilise the climate, if we prevent biodiversity loss, and better still, improve ecosystems by restoration, we will actually be doing a lot to help achieve two degrees increases, but also ensure food security and slowing the rate of biodiversity decline. Ecosystem restoration, as I said, can also reduce greenhouse gases and help us with storage of carbon dioxide. And of course, managing pollution and waste, reduces pollutants and improves public health, which many of the people attending today are undertaking research in. Just to put home the point, I'll put up this slide and draw your attention to ecosystem restoration and the generation restoration, which the UN is actually promoting at this point in time, and outlines, again, the co-benefits of action across a range of different environmental silos, if you want to call it. So we will achieve air and water quality improvements, we will have climate change mitigation, we can prevent biodiversity loss and enhance ecosystems with enhanced agriculture and reduced food insecurity. Economic outlooks are actually improved with every effort we have in terms of restoring ecosystems, and of course, the improvements in health. And I guess I'm of the view that we have the tools available to actually make these improvements and to actually be able to measure them. And I'm looking forward to HEAL actually working in this area in the Australian context. So with that, I will leave you with some of the solutions that we have. And thanks very much for inviting me today. Thanks Sotiris.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  38:04  
Thank you so much, Andrea. That's a very compelling case and of course the focus on integrated solutions is that, it's very much the at the core of of the HEAL Network and there are many co-benefits to realise as you pointed out, and some main consequences for air quality as Mark was saying earlier. We're picking up many questions on the chat box. I would like to invite the speakers to stay on the line. We'll have two more or three more talks, brief talks before we can have a few moments of discussion before going to break. So please stay stay online. I would like at this point to introduce the next speaker it is my great pleasure and honour to introduce Professor Alistair Woodward from New Zealand. Alistair is professor at the University of Auckland is a very very well known internationally known epidemiologist and environmental health scientist. He's the lead author of the IPCC assessment report six and he will join us to talk about public health and climate change and what we have achieved so far and what can we do better in the future. Alistair, the floor is yours.

Alistair Woodward  39:16  
Well, thank you very much Sotiris. Kia ora koutou. I'm speaking to you from Tamaki Makoto, Auckland in New Zealand. And, and I really appreciate being invited and congratulations to the heel team for achieving what they have done. Let me just share my screen. Mow, I'm going to give you a New Zealand point of view. I'm very interested in other speakers who will present, who know more about the situation in Australia, but I'm I'm offering you as a provocation really, a perspective from from across the Tasman. I want to argue that public health has done something through well, and has not done as well as it should other things. I'm going to give you two examples of that. Let's start with the what was done well. I think that we can give ourselves a pat on the back for the work that's been done, the excellent work that's been done in describing ways in which climate change affects health. I mean, it's now a case that it's very well made. Mark referred to a number of examples, I want to give you just three One relating to acute events and the work done, excellent work done, on this and many of the people who were responsible for this at the conference and are part of HEAL I know. But this work done on the effect of the bushfires in Australia two years ago really pointed to the magnitude and reach of the effects of bushfires and in particular, bushfire smoke. It's not just acute events that matter, the long term degradation of environments on the other side of Australia, work by Neville Ellis and Glenn Albrecht and others has pointed to the effects of long term drying on mental health and well being. Mental health being a Cinderella, really, in terms of climate change and health, but terribly important. And now I think we're gathering together some very good work pointing out what the consequences are as a result of environmental damage, long term and acute on people's sense of worth, place, identity and well being. It's not just the effects of climate change, but it's the effect of the responses to climate change. And this is a New Zealand example, my apologies. There are many good Australian studies I know, but this is one that I think, you know, makes the point very well. Phil Howden-Chapman's work on housing improvements, which have shown how improvements to housing can both save energy, reduce energy use, reduce emissions and improve health at the same time. And this work has been very influential in New Zealand leading for example to the Healthy Home standards that now apply to rental properties across New Zealand. I want to turn now to the other side of the report card, the could do better side. And this really I'm thinking about impact. You know, what has been the impact of public health on climate change both resilience and mitigation, both adaptation and emission reduction. Now here is a paper that appeared in Lancet just a couple of weeks ago, it's a summary of the findings of the Pathfinder Initiative. A wonderful piece of work funded by the Wellcome Foundation. Looking at ways in which health research on climate change can be improved. And you can see on the right hand side, I've just summarised some of the points. Good reasons to think hard about better research design. Can we harmonise our methods so that work can be pooled? We can build a bigger and stronger body of evidence, more quantitative research, because that helps to establish the size and speed of change, and more rigorous evaluations like the work that Philippa did in New Zealand looking at what exactly are the consequences of interventions. Now, all of those things are terribly important, and I support them. But my question is, are they sufficient? Will better studies of co-benefits be enough in terms of achieving a healthy netzero future?
I have some doubts. And this is the reason for those doubts. Mark and others have spoken about the IPCC and of course, you know, the IPCC has done it's best for 30 years to bridge the evidence gap. From the first assessment report that came out in 1990 to the sixth assessment report which the first volume came out. The sheer volumes two and three will come out next year and during this time, global emissions have soared. I'm just showing you here a graph of New Zealand. And I want you to concentrate on the bottom line, which is net carbon emissions. New Zealand has this peculiar belief that methane can be put aside and so a lot of our official statistics, exclude methane. But the point here is that back in 1990, when IPCC was just getting underway, New Zealand was at or below carbon net zero. And the embarrassing point is that that is now aspirational target for 2050. And many of us are unsure whether we'll even achieve it. So the point being that during a time of great science, and New Zealand, and maybe other countries as well, certainly other countries as well, have gone backwards in terms of climate policy. So I'll come to that in a minute. Um, so what does this tell us about the pathway from knowledge to action? I suppose that's what the provocation is. And that's what I'm offering to you huge as a question to think about when we considering what the HEAL Network might most usefully do over the next decade. Obviously, the, the pathway is not linear and there are many influences in it. We talk about translating evidence into policy. I'm not sure that translation is the right verb. It's interesting that Guy Salmon, a New Zealand environmentalist of the blue green variety, was asked to explain this graph that I'm showing you here. And he said, there are two things to his mind that explain why we've gone backwards in 50 years. One is that we've been unwilling, he was talking about New Zealand as collectively, to take responsibility for the future. And the second comment he made was that we, again, he's using the royal we're talking about New Zealanders, have a very strong difference to vested interests. A very interesting comment coming particularly from somebody with Guy's background. So the point is that climate policy, like all other policies are messy and contested social construct. But, but, public health remember is changed making it hard. We've been here before. And, and this is where my next slide comes in. You know, many of you I know, in the audience, were part of the or have been part of the tobacco control effort in Australia. And you would recognise, of course, Simon Chapman's name. Now, of course, the epidemiology was absolutely fundamental to working out what we should do about tobacco, but it wasn't sufficient in its own right. And in this book, published in 2007, Simon reflected on what other ways did public health help make smoking history. And I've just picked out four and these are my choices not Simon's: the point about newsmaking framing communications, the importance of challenging norms, getting close to politicians, at least to understand their point of view, and what Simon called vector control. He was talking about public health response to the tobacco industry and how important it was to challenge the position of the industry, to challenge its authority, to point out the hypocrisy in what the industry was doing, and to support the regulation and control of the industry. All those things are necessary in order to make tobacco control effective. Now, do these things apply to climate change? I am, I'm going to suggest to that they do. Certainly worth thinking about. And my last slide is another book that I've read recently. I don't know whether any of you have come across this, "The Ministry for the future". It's a science fiction book. It's not high literature. It's about 200 pages too long, in my view, but it's a very thoughtful and provoking imagination of what the near future might involve. And I've on the right hand side described the book and those three bullet points. And the author argues that the drama lies in the solution space. And he thinks it's very important that we think what it would be like if we really took seriously the welfare of future generations, hence the title of the book. And I'm confronting the commercial determinants of climate change, just where would that lead us. Very important and powerful questions. And on the left hand side of my slide, I'm suggesting that we ask, is this just science fiction? Or might it provide signposts for public health, public health research and practice? At the very least, I must say, personally, I'm quite drawn to the idea that we should be spending more time in the solution space that really does appeal to me. Now, that's, that's from me. I know that there's a session tomorrow on policy and practice, and I look forward to dialling in. But in the meantime, I'll finish and if there is a chance to answer questions, I be very happy to do that. Thank you.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  51:18  
Thank you so much, Alistair. These slides were very thought provoking. We are catching up with time, we can take questions for the end of the session just before the break. Very thought provoking presentation just to say there have been success stories in the environmental health sector stratospheric ozone layer, led in better so there are things we can learn from other challenges, which might not be as complex as climate change. But of course, you know, we need to keep optimistic. And of course, communication is a key aspect. There will be a communication, science communicators breakout session as well after the break where colleagues from ANU and the University of Western Australia will focus on these aspects. I would like like now to move to the next talk. I would like to introduce the next speaker. It's a great pleasure to introduce Professor Tarun Weeramanthri. Tarun is the president of the Public Health Association of Australia and former Chief Health Officer for the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Tarun also chaired the climate change and health commission in Western Australia recently, with a great groundbreaking report, which was published, I believe, last year. Tarun the floor is yours. And I believe we don't have slides today. We look forward to hearing from you.

Tarun Weeramathri  52:42  
Thank you, Sotiris. And I'll try and help you catch up some time here. So I'm phoning in from Whadjuk Noongar Country or dialling in from Whadjuk Noongar Country. I'd like to thank Auntie Linda for her Welcome to Country and join my acknowledgment to that of Sotiris and others previously. I'm going to actually continue with Alistair's theme and just respond a bit in that kind of slightly provocative way. And I did warn Sotiris as well, maybe it's a kind of older man thing. And just say there was one big difference between tobacco and climate, in that the commercial drivers of tobacco, we're not kind of part of in public health. We can see the those drivers as other than us. Whereas with the climate problem, I think one fundamental thing to acknowledges that we are part of the problem. Now, that's going to be the we I want to just discuss in a little bit more detail. But that includes anyone has any power in this world, the health sector, the health research sector, and even public health is part of the problem. And unless we recognise that I don't think we can do as much in terms of being part of the solution. So I do want to congratulate HEAL and Sotiris and his team. And I think this is part of how we need to change because I'm already seeing some elements on how HEAL's organised that I think gives me hope that it can be contributed more and in a different way. So Sotiris mentioned that we conducted a climate health WA inquiry. And one of the key findings, which came out last year, was that the last decade was a lost decade for climate action. And that also applied to a lost decade for the health sector broadly. And also health research particularly. And in the final report, not accidentally, I included a section which is called History of climate and health research in Australia. And I won't go through all the details but from the submissions we received both verbal and written, it's absolutely clear that there was a marked drop off in funding between 2010 and 2020 compared to the previous years, as well as in, you know, scholarly articles, etc, etc. And I don't think that's an accident. I think there are various reasons for that. And some of them are outlined in the report. I do acknowledge, Anne Kelso's statement that she herself acknowledges that there was a gap between the, you know, the the funding and the seriousness of the task, when she looks back over 20 years. I think that's even more stark when you look back over the last 10 years. So having said that, health research has been part of the problem, how we fund health research, but hopefully we can we can move forward.
I want to, first of all make a point about research and scholarship. Because what I'm, what I'm arguing here is that if we do research the same way, even if it's through HEAL, then we won't make the difference we need to make in this urgent next 10 years. So HEAL itself has to do research in a different way. And one of the helpful things I think was pointed out to me when I was doing my PhD by my supervisor, John Matthews many years ago, is the difference between research and scholarship. So research is the production of new knowledge. Scholarship is the utilisation and synthesis of existing knowledge. And I think that's always a part of research. So when you do your literature review, you do a scholarly review. But I think we need to elevate the importance of scholarship, as well as the production of new knowledge, because essentially, we've got many of the tools that are at our hands already. And it's the job of researchers to be good scholars. And it's yes, it's synthesis. Yes, it's synopsis, but it's also an active act of storytelling. Now, if you see that, and I think you see some of the elements of that in the way HEAL is set up with. You, I can't remember, with the HEAL observatory and some other kind of story based atlases, etc. I think the team has already acknowledged that that will be part of the future. I also think that the you need to look at the cycles, how long it takes for us to generate research, and therefore action. And the current cycles of research and advocacy are just too long for what faces us in the next two years, next 10 years. So how can you speed that up? I think part of it is to look at how quickly you produce your outputs, what are your outputs, and they're not just research outputs. They're also story outputs. They're also advocacy outputs, they're also policy outputs, and quicken up the cycle of outputs. So even in this first year, you can demonstrate some outputs and outputs and some links into policy and advocacy. They don't have to wait for the research to be done over two or three years. That's too late. One of the key examples, I'd say opportunities, is, for example, the Lancet Countdown and their indicators. Can some of this research quickly produce new indicators that can then get into the next round for the Lancet Countdown, etc. There's many other opportunities, but that was one that arose to me. So my question to you is, to everyone is, how can we quicken up the production cycle of research. I will also want to make a point about professional culture. And I do think that if we don't recognise that we're part of the problem, we cannot address this. And I think health professionals are now saying we must lead by example. But we're not yet saying we are part of the problem, which I do think we do, we need to say, how are we part of the problem? If you look at this funding cycle, it's terrific that the HEAL has got funded separately, but you also have to look at the mainstream research funds and Anne Kelso did acknowledge that too. If you look at the research translation centres, for example, they're the advanced health research centres in the metropolitan areas and the rural centres in some rural centres on their website, and they're funded by NHMRC or some of them are funded and that's not quite right. But it's they're all spaced by an NHMRC. They claim to represent 90% of researchers and 80% of acute care health services. So very firmly in this health in the mitigation space, at least, the sustainability of healthcare systems. And there's a few words I've looked very carefully at there's a few words around sustainability, but there's very little action. Now if they're the research arm of the health system, it's our job I think to engage with them to get them to do more around sustainability actively, not just say the word but actually do more. Similarly with the mainstream, you know, NHMRC grants and similarly with the medical research future funds. So there was some recent analysis that was produced by Lesley Russell about the MRRF, but Arnagretta Hunter wrote an extremely good piece in Croqi saying why there needs to be a radical rethink of the MRRF in terms of Environment and Climate Research. And she basically argued for investment across three broad categories: the biology of disease, the social determinants of health, and the environmental context in which we live. It made me think of a three-legged stool. Currently, almost all research is in that first, you know, 80% of research is in the biology of disease, if you're lucky, 10, or 15%, is in the social determinants of health. And if you're lucky, 5% is in the environmental context. And we need to rebalance. So the question then becomes what is the role of HEAL and the researchers in helping that rebalancing outside the funded HEAL Network. And I think we have to use all of our networks and all of our connections, to drive a greater change in the mainstream research funding, in the mainstream health sector, and in the mainstream professional culture, and recognise that we are as much part of the problem as, as anyone else who has any power in this world. I do think that the communities of practice model is very important. It's been great in WA, there's been, there's been some really strong health and climate change community of practice. I praise Jamie Yallop, who's driven that over the last three years, that links into wider climate justice networks, that Jamie has been brought into this area with climate and health. And I think links into what Brad Farrant is trying to do in WA, around the HEAL Network and linking in. So kind of what we're saying is, and that's day two tomorrow, and there's a meeting in WA. I'd encourage the other states and territories to also look at these wider communities of practice, which go beyond health, beyond health research into climate justice, into policy, into advocacy. And I think that's also part of the shift we have to make. So, really welcome this. And but I also put out the challenge about how will we as a research network work differently, including speaking truth to power, which includes our powerful professional colleagues who will say yes, in terms of this as a priority if you mentioned it, but in my experience, the mainstream of health doesn't mention this as an issue, unless it's asked specifically about it. So when you look at strategic priority setting exercises from health in the mainstream, and I've been in lots, no one mentions the environmental sustainability unless they're pressed. Thanks very much Sotiris.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:03:22
Thank you. Thanks so much, Tarun. That's an excellent point and of course, we need to do things differently. And that's the purpose of HEAL. To learn from different experiences. The pioneering work in Western Australia, the inquiry, the work of communities of practice led by Brad and Jamie are doing there and, of course, you know, move forward with innovative solutions and focus on communication. And without further ado, I'd like to invite the last speaker of the session, Professor Carmen Lawrence. We're very grateful to have Carmen as part of our advisory board. She's chairing HEAL advisory board. Carmen is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Western Australia and as many of you know, is the first woman Premier and Treasurer of a State Government in Australia. And also has done research in mental health and bushfires, which is one of her keen interest. So we're grateful to have Carmen with us today. And we look forward to your talk, Carmen. Thank you.

Carmen Lawrence  1:04:26  
Thank you very much. I hope you can all hear me. I'm very pleased to be dialling in from Whadjuk Noongar Country at the University of Western Australia. A classic meeting place for Indigenous people in this part of the world. I might also say that I'm president of the Conservation Council of Western Australia so some of what I have to say is from the activism end of the spectrum, I suppose, that we're considering at this conference. And I'm not going to use any slides today, but rather just speak to you about my experiences and some, a couple of concepts in psychology that I think are helpful in understanding why we do and don't act on climate change and on biodiversity decline. I just want to start off with a personal note. I don't know exactly when it happened, but I fell in love with this land. Perhaps it was when I was a little kid picking wildflowers with my mother from the great swathes of everlastings that smothered the woodlands of my childhood, or may have been when I got the first hidy whiffs and unforgettable whiffs of the coastal heathland on the approach to the boarding school where I was exiled to. Perhaps it was the first time I craned my neck of the flickering light to gaze at the stately carriers of the Southern forests. Or maybe when I pedalled up Windjana Gorge, wondering of the ancient rock paintings and the towering remnants of the Devonian reefs. Or maybe it was when I squinted into the harsh midday sun to watch **Nunnatyara** women dance solemnly through the spin-effects of the Gibson desert. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but it's now very deep. The feeling is only intensified, the longer I lived here, making me more than a little protective of my Country. And without being too personal about it that's something that we need more of our politicians and business leaders and communities to feel. And perhaps it's why less than enthusiastic about the siren call of economic growth, which looks to often like want of destruction, and destruction, sadly, that occurs out of sight of most Australians, because we are for the most part, city dwellers who rarely lift our gaze above the ramparts of our audit suburban security. And there's increasing evidence that this absence of contact with the natural world means that we care less about it. And we see ourselves as separate from it, even fear it. And researchers as many of you will know confirms that this nature deficit, if we can call it, that weakens ecological literacy, and our sense of stewardship of the natural world. Conversely, we know that spending time in nature and living in greener places not only benefits health and well being, but appears to make us value the environment more and act for its protection. However, as you also know and as we've heard here today, any dispassionate assessment of the state of the planet, at the corner of it that we inhabit, shows that we're making one hell of a mess of it. Our increasing consumption and our growing numbers are accelerating the depletion of finite resources. And we're also polluting our air, land and water. We're destroying our heritage places, and uprooting our communities. What's happening to the floods as we speak in New South Wales. We're producing drastic changes to our climate, and eliminating other species at an alarming rate. As Mondeo puts it, the living world is dying of consumption. And despite the increased material wealth, which sometimes flows from this destruction, human distress and inequality are also on the rise. But despite this evidence, and there's a great deal of it, we've just heard in the COP Conference, it seems that most of those in positions of power, and many of our citizens too operate on the assumption, even if they say otherwise, that the planet's resources are inexhaustible, that human beings are almost infinitely adaptable, that technological fixes are available for every problem we confront, and that the only serious policy objectives are those which promote economic growth and material acquisition in the short run, usually, with a little eye to social and environmental costs. We don't even factor them in. We proceed collectively on the basis of what local researcher Jen Price has defined as an elastic worldview, one that framed the environment as unaffected by humans, or at least able to bounce back from any damage inflicted on it. It's a form of thinking that also construes the economy and society as identical. If one grows, the other must be improving, along with the quality of people's lives. It follows that when we're asked to judge the achievement and public policy in exclusively economic, rather than moral terms, when we consider whether to support a particular development or initiative, we don't ask whether it's good or bad, whether it will bring about a better society or a better world, but rather how it will affect the economy, whether it's sufficient, whether it lead to an increase in GDP or more jobs. We're fighting those battles constantly here in Western Australia.  
Even if we and they have a sneaking suspicion that this formulation is not entirely correct, most of our leaders in business and government don't appear to regard it as a serious problem. They don't seem to see any alternatives of this construction. It's simply the way the world works or should work. After all, we have been enjoined to have dominion over all the earth. And the adverse consequences on us and our environment simply have to be borne, or at best mitigated to some degree, or exported to less regulated economies. Most of us, I think, are very well aware of the effects of environmental degradation on plants and animals. But we pay less attention to the effect of such degradation on us, and what it implies for the planning of our cities and neighbourhoods. Although we know that the quality of the natural environment affects our health and our general well being, and not just for its physical effects, psychological consequences. There's now a great deal of evidence that our well being depends in large measure, on our relationships with our environment, the people around us and the natural and built environment we inhabit. If this environment is destroyed or degraded, or if people are prevented from enjoying it, their health and well being deteriorate. There's a mountain of evidence now that can't be ignored. But we're still inclined to minimise these effects because of the view that humans are infinitely resilient. Oh I hate that word resilient now. That we can bounce back from almost any adversity, and then we can adapt to any circumstance, or at least the tough amongst us can and the rest should be ignored. Now, I think a key concept in understanding our relationship with the natural world both for good and ill, is placed attachment, an aspect of human behaviour I've investigated with colleagues, particularly in the context of climate change and fire preparedness. Along with the deep insights that can be derived from various art forms, research from a number of disciplines underlines the importance of a sense of place, and feelings of attachment to a place or neighbourhood in shaping an identity, our sense of belonging and well being. Given the opportunity, most people do develop robust emotional bonds to their places and the communities in them. Although these links, I think, maybe eroding as people become increasingly mobile. Tim Winthon has it: the country leans in on you, like family, to my way of thinking, it is family. This has broader social ramifications, including enriching the quality of people's lives. Studies in various parts of the world have shown that those with strong place attachment, have better relationships with their fellow citizens, are more satisfied with their lives, have stronger bonding and neighbourhood ties, and are more interested in their family roots. They trust other people more, they're generally less egocentric and more altruistic. Pretty good recipe. Place attachment also helps us to understand people's reactions to the threatened distractions or treasured places, like their local Bush lands. And research has established a positive link between the strength of these emotional bonds and people's resistance to change which then spoils their environments. Where there is little sense of place, there's little emotional response and no protest. Our own surveys of southwest Australians reveal that people who are strongly attached to their homes and neighbourhoods are the same ones who are most likely to take actions to protect those neighbourhoods, to prepare for bushfires, and to take action to oppose threats to their local governments autonomy and capacities to act. We're inclined to minimise these effects because of the view that human beings can bounce back as I said before. In the investigations showed, too, that the hipot happiest and healthiest Indigenous Australians with lower risk rates and good educational attainments are those who've been able to retain a strong attachment to their Country and strong Aboriginal identity.
The second idea often invoked to explain our relationship to nature is Biophilia. A concept that many of you would be familiar with, promoted by a E.O. Wilson, who I recently discovered is still alive, amazing guy. He're renowned American biologist and he used it to discuss the implications of that disconnection from nature that I mentioned, by biophilia, Wilson argued, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. He speculated that all of us have a biological need for connection with nature and this connection affects our personal well being, productivity and social relationships. And but the growing gap between humans evolutionary environments and current living conditions is producing ill effects which we're all familiar. In his wonderful book, "The Moth Snowstorm", which I'm happy to recommend to you by Michael McCarthy, he captures this relationship exquisitely. He says they're very old these feelings, speaking he was awestruck responses to wild creatures and goes on. They are lodged deep in our tissues and emerge to surprise us, for we forget our origins in our towns and cities staring at our screens. We need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation, and workers in neon offices for three or four, but we were farmers for 500 generations, and before that hunter gatherers that perhaps 50,000 or more, living with the natural world as part of it. Well, the evolutionary basis of the Biophilia thesis is difficult to verify. There's now a lot of evidence confirming the beneficial effects for people of contact with nature, and have detrimental outcomes when the natural environment is degraded. Indeed, the intergovernmental platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services has identified nature's contribution to people as one of the key elements in the relationship between humans and the natural world. This understanding informs the recommendation that such relationships should be a routine part of decision making about infrastructure and land use. Non-material benefits derived from ecosystems through a variety of sources, including aesthetics, leisure, recreation, and identity, and not just the monetary measurement of ecosystem services need to be central to our considerations. And I guess my message here is that we need to be able to talk frankly about the long term effects on us, on the quality of our lives, to have such a single minded focus on what we can rest from the land on the economy. Maybe, instead of seeking dominion over all the earth, perhaps it's not too late to learn from Indigenous Australians, from our brothers and sisters, and recast ourselves as its custodians. Thank you. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:16:54
Thank you so much, Carmen. That's a very powerful message for the the end of the session. Very grateful for your points. I couldn't agree more. I think we focus too much on quantitative research. Sometimes, what's important is not only what we can quantify, and mental health, emotional health, connection to Country are so important for health and well being. We have caught up with time, which is great. We have a few minutes for questions and I would like to invite all the plenary speakers of this session to give a comment before we break for, before the next session. There have been many very, very interesting comments in the chat box. They all, all the talks have resonated a lot with the audience. We have around 30, over 300 people online. I would like to pick up a provocative question put online on the chat book by Professor Billie Giles-Corti from Melbourne RMIT University. So Billie is asking how do we make sense of our government's response, and I suppose, is referring to COP 26. And I would add, you know, how, what can we do us as researchers, as practitioners, as community, what can we do to change this response and, and raise to the challenge of climate change and environmental change in Australia and internationally. Shall I ask, I'm not sure if Janine is still on the line. Janine Mohamed from Lowitja Institute. That means that she probably had to had to go. Can I can ask first, Mark, then Andrea, then Alistair, Tarun and Carmen. Just in one minute if they have something that you want to say in response to that point. 

Mark Howden  1:18:57
Look, thanks Sotiris and thanks for the question. Look, at the moment, it's very clear that the government's response is not aligned with what the science says is needed. It's not aligned with what the public broadly wants across Australia. So around 90% of Australians want more action on climate change. And it's certainly not in the interests of future generations. We simply can't let climate change be the legacy that we leave for those people. And so my view is, it's up to all of us to be informed. It's to keep asking questions, and it's to keep the focus on this and related topics. So as we've heard from various speakers today, it's not just about one issue, like climate change, but it's actually the multitude of issues, the interactions between issues, its climate change, and biodiversity and various forms of pollution and sort of overconsumption, etc. And so for me, we need to keep this on the political agenda. There's such a risk at the moment that, you know, things move on so quickly. So, you know, the government released its modelling for Net Zero last Friday, you know, right close a business. The media had moved on by Monday. And so there was no questioning of it yet, there was a whole second really serious questions that needed to be asked of that modelling. And so, so we need to keep on bringing it back, so that we get good questions, and we get a proper discussion across the public. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:20:29  
Thank you, Mark. Andrea.

Andrea Hinwood  1:20:33  
There is so much I would like to say about this topic, from where I sit and what it's like to be an Australian in the international arena at the moment. Clearly, politicians need to be much more aware of the science. But I also wonder if what we need to be doing is communicating and translating the environmental issues much more clearly, with people wherever they live, i.e., making the science understood by people on the ground and what it actually means, because I think we need to make it much more tangible, because maybe there will be much more action taken across the sectors. And I also think that we need to be working with our industry and businesses, in terms of how they can actually take this as an opportunity going forward. So I'll leave it there. Thanks Sotiris.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:21:35  
Thank you Andrea. Alistair?

Alistair Woodward  1:21:39  
Well, I wouldn't dare make any comments about Australia and what it should be doing. But I'm reflecting on the New Zealand situation where we have a government that is quite good on rhetoric, but is falling down in terms of implementation. And I think there's some deep questions. Why does that happen? And just to pick up Tarun's point about commercial determinants yes, it's quite true. Of course, Tarun you're right. We're all involved in one way or another in the generation of global greenhouse gases. But, you know, 10, companies are responsible for half New Zealand's greenhouse emissions. Two companies are responsible for almost a quarter. We have the world's biggest dairy exporter, responsible for 12 and a half million tonnes of carbon emissions a year. And these are not insignificant players in the policy landscape. So I think, you know, it's absolutely, you know, home territory for public health to burrow into these things to say, you know, how do these industries operate? What influence do they shed? What opportunities to politicians have, you know, to respond? What, how much discretion do they have? So I think, I don't know to what extent this is true in Australia, but certainly in New Zealand, we're very interested in this knowledge to action connection. And the complicated landscape there. We need to understand it better.

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:23:28  
Thanks so much, Alistair. Tarun? 

Tarun Weeramanthri  1:23:32  
Thank you, Sotiris. I'll just make the point that we're the usual suspects. And kind of we, this fantastic 300 people, it's brilliant, and the networks are growing and growing. But we're still not mainstream, you know, we're still on the edges, you know, this, even this HEAL project is $10 million which is absolutely fantastic but it's still on the edges of a very, very large funding pools, etc. And that is a proxy for power and influence. And the status quo has got us this far. It's given us something, but we have to do something different with it. And so part of the trick here is to get people who are not the usual suspects who have never spoken about climate change or the environment, but who are in our professional networks, to start to ask a question about it. Because it's more powerful coming from this powerful health and medical researcher who is dominant in their own field, to ask a question, are we doing anything about environmental sustainability? And who knows about this? To ask that question coming from them is more powerful than, you know, the public health researchers kind of talking about it in our own field in our own circle. So can we look at our networks find all of those points of contact with the other networks and the more powerful Health and Medical Research Networks in order to magnify our power fix and can we get more powerful people have never spoken about this in their lives before, asking a question about the environment and sustainability and climate action. Thank you. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:25:13  
Thank you, Tarun. And I agree, I think quite often we talk to the converted. And so the points that we need to talk to those who have not converted yet and have influence. Many comments coming through the chat box on health equity, importance of health equity from Professor Sharon Friel and other colleagues. Very important point, and I would like to invite Carmen, to give us the last concluding remarks for the session. What's your take?

Carmen Lawrence  1:25:44  
Thank you. I've been on both sides of the decision making table, both as a lobbyist and as a politician. So I'm very conscious of how difficult sometimes can seem to get policy change. And it's often not evidence informed, or even evidence based, but rather, you know, emerges from a series of pressures, political pressures. And I think one of the things that's important in this area to try and get better responses to protection of biodiversity, climate change, etc., is that we identify the special interests. We need to be aware of who else who's talking to government, and what pressure they bring to bear? What influence are they using, and be unashamed in trying to shine a light on that, that the so called spotlight on these relationships. I know in Western Australia we've shown that the there's a revolving door between some government ministers and some fossil fuel interests in Western Australia, which is potentially one of the reasons that the decisions go the way they do, because they hear mostly from people who have a vested interest. So shining a light on that is important, but also then getting directly to the shareholders in these companies that are mostly responsible for particularly greenhouse gas emissions Western Australia, and trying to influence the shareholders and then I think has been shown nationally, internationally to be very effective. So some of the big pension funds and others who are investing starting, say, hang on, we don't want to suffer the reputational damage that goes with being associated with these groups. Putting pressure on those who those companies sometimes support and benefit by way of, you know, the fairy dust they sprinkle around in the arts and sports, rather, again, shining a light on why they will be doing that, and trying to loosen those connections. But I would say that state governments have done a lot better, with the possible exception of Western Australia actually, in advancing the climate change chain but not so much on biodiversity. And perhaps it's because they are closer to the action, ultimately. The Federal Government is somewhat remote. So I think focusing on where we can see good responses is more productive than worrying about whether Scott Morrison is going to be viasually marketing a particular point of view as opposed to listening to the evidence. It's pretty clear that state governments are listening to the evidence and they are acting in ways that are much more productive. So finding the right target I think is an important question. 

Sotiris Vardoulakis  1:28:11
Thank you. Thanks so much Carmnen. It's very, very well placed as a comment and to conclude the session. We had a great lineup of speakers with great talks, very thought provoking. I feel I learned a lot and I think energised the conference immensely.