Climate change requires a new way of doing public policy

I will give a small content warning at the start: considering the impacts of climate change can be distressing and upsetting. If you need to, please give yourself a moment sometime today to process what you’ve heard and reach out to others if you are struggling.

Let’s start though with where climate change comes from.

Those of you who watched the footage from the Artemis moon mission would have seen how the Earth, our home, is a small blue and green dot in a vast universe. As far as we know, it is the only place in that vast universe that supports life. One of the reasons that it can do this is because the temperature is very stable. Compared to other planets, the surface temperature of the Earth stays within a small range, and we, and all other living things, are adapted to exist within this range.

What keeps the temperature constant is the mix of gases in the atmosphere. These form a blanket around the Earth which regulates the amount of radiation from the Sun that comes in, and the amount that leaves again.

Since the industrial revolution, we humans have been messing this up. By burning fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent by clearing land, we have changed the rate at which carbon dioxide goes into and out of the atmosphere. If you like, we’ve been making the blanket thicker.

And as the blanket gets thicker, the Earth gets hotter.  So far, humans have raised the average temperature of the Earth by about 1.4 degrees from where it was before the industrial revolution. And this is disrupting climate all round the world. It is changing weather and rainfall patterns, from the monsoon in India to the rains over western Tasmania. It is making the effects of multi-year climate and weather patterns such as El Nino stronger. It is slowing ocean currents that modulate temperatures across continents. It makes natural disasters more frequent, and their impacts more devastating.

These impacts are with us already. It is too late to stop or reverse them.

These impacts are not isolated events. They flow through to every system that underpins our society, our economy, and our culture. Take for example, insurance: more disasters, and more correlated disasters = more payouts = higher premiums = fewer people having insurance = fewer policy holders to spread risk across = higher premiums = death spiral = collapse of an insurer = businesses that can’t operate and banks whose mortgage book is hit = lower GDP, higher unemployment. All of this tears at a social fabric that is already under strain.

We need to adapt, and fast. We have to harden our infrastructure so it can cope with more frequent disasters. We need to start conversations about where it will no longer make sense to maintain human settlements. Work practices will need to change. Most of our buildings need to be retrofitted if they are to remain useful. Adaptation is under-studied and under-served by policy. If you are looking for a future growth area to direct your career towards, this might (unfortunately) be a place to focus.

While we have missed the window to prevent climate change altogether, we can stop it from getting worse.

Everything we do to reduce or eliminate emissions from fossil fuels is part of this effort. At a systems level, this will involve making our electricity supply as clean as possible, and then using electricity to replace other fuels, from cars, to industry, to cooktops, to trucks. This system underpins everything in the economy. The energy system powered the alarm that woke you this morning, your hot shower, and ironing your shirt, and the Uber or the bus that brought you here, and the first cup of coffee and the quick scroll of Instagram while you were waiting for the coffee, and the lights overhead and the speakers through which you are listening to me right now. All these rely on the energy system.

And because the energy system underpins so much, changing it is not simple. While most energy use will eventually rely on electricity, the transition from here to there will not happen at the same pace in every sector. When one sector moves faster than others, the inter-connectedness of the system creates a ripple effect.

Let me use an example to illustrate this.

It makes sense, from an economic perspective and from a climate change perspective, for households to stop using gas and change their cooking, eating, and hot water systems to electricity. But, it is largely households that pay for the network of gas pipelines that delivers gas to all users. If households start switching, this leaves fewer users to pay for the system, which means gas bills go up. Gas generators, that use gas to back up the electricity system, start to face higher gas prices. This pushes up the cost of electricity. This makes it less attractive for vehicle owners to switch away from petrol and diesel. Higher gas and electricity prices also tend to disproportionately affect the poorest households — who already have the least capacity to upgrade to shiny new cars and appliances.

To be clear: this does not mean we should STOP the switch from gas and petrol to electricity. But it does mean that this change to the energy system has a systems effect, and while there are obvious things to do — like changing your cooktop — these need to be accompanied by complementary policies that deal with the system effects. It is truly a case of everything, everywhere, all at once.

The more pointed impact of a systems change problem is that it means responding to climate change is your professional responsibility too, regardless of which area of public policy you work in. While there is a Department of Climate Change and Energy, the impact of climate change and the energy transition will permeate every agency at every level of government, and will demand your attention. Take the insurance example above: it affects housing departments, financial regulation, small business, interest rates, planning, infrastructure, unemployment, welfare payments…. And that’s just one ripple.

All of this throws up challenges to the public sector.

Firstly, climate change and the energy transition are now part of the operating environment. Climate change itself will affect you and your team and your capacity to get things done. We humans are adapted for that narrow temperature band, and we don’t operate well outside it.

Secondly, we also live in an increasingly disrupted and volatile age. You will not have the luxury of dealing with just the climate crisis (or your bit of the climate crisis) but all the other crises on top of it. In the past seven years we have had major natural disasters AND a pandemic, AND a fuel crisis. We have been very very lucky that they followed each other rather than occurring at exactly the same time. Try to imagine what it would be like trying to run flood evacuations during a fuel crisis and a pandemic… Or a pandemic response during a fuel crisis. Or fuel rationing and distribution during a bushfire…

This is where we need to get smarter. We can improve our responsiveness and the effectiveness of policy and programs, if we start looking for things that respond to multiple problems, and if we focus on systemic policy that can be dialled up or down, rather than treating crises as… well… crises, that demand a crisis response.

The response to the current fuel crisis is an example of this. In the EU, where there were already widespread and systemic policy responses in place to encourage the shift from petrol to electric vehicles for climate reasons, the response was to increase the pace, while also taking short-term measures to protect access to traditional fuels. In other words, deal with the acute crisis, but use the existing response to the systemic problem to reduce the probability of an acute crisis in the future.

In Australia, our policy to reduce emissions from fuel use is much less developed. And so our response was biased towards the acute crisis, and we are going to have to work much harder to prevent a future fuel crisis.

If you want to put a positive spin on living in an age of crises, think of it as an age where many more windows of opportunity will open up!

There is also a formidable barrier to sustained systemic change in the way the public sector is organised. The division of responsibility is a series of vertical reporting lines, each with a single minster at the top. The Department of Health works to the minster for health, the Department of Transport works to the minster for transport. This pattern repeats at state level.

But climate change is not a vertical problem, because it is a systems problem. And the response also therefore is not the responsibility of one minister. It requires many minsters to act, and to act together. It requires state and federal government to co-operate.

(Climate change isn’t alone here, by the way. Many other knotty public policy problems have this characteristic: homelessness, preventative health, the Murray Darling Basin, radicalisation…)

The challenge is to find the enduring institutional structure to do the work. Most of our cross-government tools are useful for short-term co-operation on short-term tasks. Think the taskforce, the inter-departmental committee. Central agencies can provide the helicopter view and the joining up, but have limited capacity to go deep. And things like communities of practice are good for skills, but not for policy change.

No-one anywhere has cracked this problem. Governments everywhere are struggling with how to do this. And it might not have an institutional answer.

If climate change is now a permanent part of the operating environment, and responding to climate change a permanent feature of every policy area, then we should see understanding climate change and learning about emissions reductions as part of the portfolio of experience that a successful public servant requires.

Our public service is small, and people move around a lot. When you talk to senior public sector figures about their careers, the pattern you see is a deliberate acquiring of experiences. Some time in a regulator, to learn how to apply law in the real world. Some time in a central agency, to learn how budget and decision processes work. Some time in a delivery agency, to experience the front line. We should add climate change to this list. (I note that the current secretaries of PM&C, Treasury, DFAT, Health, and Defence all spent significant time working on climate policy).

You don’t have to know everything there is to know about climate change and responding to it. But it is helpful to know who to call when you need to know something, and to know that they won’t mind you calling. In other words, adding experiences to your portfolio is about adding relationships as well as skills. These interpersonal connections could become the scaffolding for an emerging institutional form.

The relationships you build here today and throughout your experience as Pat Turner and Roland Wilson scholars will add to your list of phone-a-friend options. Keep these links going after you finish, and build links with those who join the program after you.

Look after yourselves and each other. Climate change will be hard on our mental health, but what will get us through is the factors that underpin resilience of all sorts: trust, relationships, knowing we can rely on others, and inviting them to rely on us. It is OK to have moments of despair, but don’t forget to celebrate the victories as well. Many of the things that we have done to reduce emissions already turned out to be easier and cheaper in hindsight than they looked at the start.

Recently the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists charged with advising governments on climate science to inform policy – scrapped the two most catastrophic climate change scenarios they use to inform their advice. Climate deniers will call this evidence that the scientists were overstating the problem, and that it shows how the whole thing is a hoax. But actually, the reason these scenarios were scrapped is because they are no longer considered plausible. And the reason they are no longer considered plausible is because, collectively, we have acted to reduce emissions and bring about technology change, to such an extent that we have warded off the very worst-case scenario.  This is great news! It shows we CAN make a difference to the future if we keep going.

When you finish your time here, keep the habit of deep thinking and being driven by facts, especially in these times when disinformation and bad actors are proliferating. Be generous with your knowledge, and open to learning.

We started today by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, the traditional custodians of this land. Every year for thousands of years, the Ngunnawal and other Indigenous groups would gather on this country around Canberra, to feast on the bogong moth. A bogong moth is about the size of your little finger, and they are chubby and high in protein. Millions of these moths would migrate every spring from Queensland to the caves of the high country, and they would stop off around here on the way.

When I first moved to Canberra in 2008, to work in the Australian Public Service, you knew when the bogong migration was on, because the city was inundated with moths. There were flocks of them visible at night, and great piles of dead moths under the lights in the morning.

I haven’t seen a bogong moth now in years. The population has crashed and not recovered, in part because climate change has made it too warm for them to breed.

So what, you might ask, who cares? We have tastier, more abundant food now, it’s just a moth. Well, yes, in the way that Don Bradman’s baggy green cap is just a hat. Or the cathedral of Notre Dame is just a building. The bogong season was important for culture – for forming relationships between tribes, for settling disputes, for collaboration and celebration. The bogong moth occupies an honoured place in Indigenous culture for this reason.

And this is the point. Climate change is not just about weather, disasters, events. It will come for every aspect of culture, including the culture of the APS.

You are the stewards of an APS that was built for you by the public servants of the past, and which you will bequeath to the public servants of the future. Your tenure is the hinge between the old and the new – you are the people who decide what is worth saving, what needs to be left behind, what must be built.

Decide wisely. I know you can.