 It's very easy to be pessimistic when you see the trends that are going on now. Emissions still going up, certainly CO2 concentrations still going up, biodiversity still being lost. However, I think there's some extremely optimistic signs and that is when you look at complex systems, and I'm thinking about human societies as complex systems, when you approach a tipping point you often see a lot of chaotic behaviour in the system because it's getting ready to reorganise, whether it's a natural system, an ecosystem, or whether it's a planetary atmospheric circulation system, that's happening by the way in the northern hemisphere jet stream for example, it's very chaotic at the moment, but it happens in human systems too before we change. Just in the last two years I see a lot of real sort of excitement, a lot of stuff bubbling up in the private sector, in a lot of government sectors around the world, unfortunately not quite yet in Australia, although underneath at the state level and at lower jurisdictions, there's a lot happening. We are approaching a tipping point where people internalise this, the climate change and the bigger planetary issue. And I think particularly younger people, it's going from being sort of an intellectual problem that's so vast and so far in the distance you can't get it, your head around it, to something that people are starting to internalise conceptually and starting to feel. Part of that is because we start to experience it in terms of the biosphere, we've had two mass bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and I think that's actually shook up a lot of Australians who were complacent to say, oh this isn't going to happen or it'll be so far in the distance, well in two years you've wiped out 50% of the world's biggest marine ecosystem. But people also feel it in terms of bushfire threats, I've talked to firies for example out in Perth, and they said for the first time we're seeing fires that we have to give up and run for our lives. They are so intense, so threatening that even with the best equipment we can't fight them. And so now we've got a new category in our bushfire rating system in Australia which is catastrophic which means get the hell out of there, whether you're a resident or firefighter. And that's only because we have higher temperatures, hotter days, drier vegetation. The tipping point we need to get over now is for people to realise that there are solutions on the other side. That this isn't, we've got to give up everything we have and go back to Stone Age or whatever. And I think the biggest positive there is the renewable energy boom because not only is this clean energy, it's undercutting the incumbents economically as well. Rather than this being doom and gloom, rather than this being impossible, this is turning into a challenge, an opportunity and a chance for humans to do what we're best at, which is to be really, really innovative. The thing we have to understand is to get out of this notion that we are somehow going to be massive geo-engineers and manage this planet because we don't understand this complex system enough. We're disturbing it, but we can't manage it top-down. The most important thing that we have to understand is that we have to manage us. And we have to make sure that by us, I mean our societies, I don't just mean individuals changing a light globe. I mean we have to think of the structure of our societies. Beyond that we have to think of what's most valuable in our societies, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. We have narrowed down so much of life and tried to stick it in a market-based economic system that we are headlong for failure if we don't realise that. We have to put limits on what is in an economic system and what we manage elsewhere outside based on fundamental principles and values. So we have to understand that we actually have to manage ourselves in a way that we take pressure off the Earth's system. For example, Indigenous Australians, their main goal in life was to manage the cycles of life that they came into. And they modified Australia and they built structures and they had fishing systems and they grew grains and so on. But they did it within the cycles of the Australian system and when Europeans got there, this place was like an incredible garden on the most arid continent on Earth. So I think that really is our challenge now is to say how do we develop thriving societies where there's a high level of human well-being that are in sync with the cycles of the planet? And I emphasise that it's not managing the cycles of the planet, it's managing us so that we fit in with the cycles of the planet and that is a very big difference. When I look around the world and I had the great pleasure of being director of an international global change research programme that had 50 countries on every continent. So I got to see a fair spectrum of how countries, cultures, people are thinking about this. And you've got the big gorillas out there. You've got the United States which is hugely important economically and a very vibrant scientific community as well. And you've got the European Union, you've got China. But you've also got really innovative small countries. I'm thinking here mainly of the Nordic countries. I had the pleasure of living in Sweden for six years who are incubators for really innovative ideas. And they can do that because they're small, they're nimble. There's a lot of connectivity across disciplines in science and so on because they are small. Knowledge does not scale with the size of your economy. It scales with your education level, your social systems and the cleverness of your people. So maybe there are opportunities for New Zealand to come up with maybe approaches to carbon neutral aviation fuels for example, something we've talked about. Or certainly we have to have new systems for managing agriculture to reduce the pressure of agriculture. Not only on the climate but on the water systems and so on. Agriculture is big in New Zealand but New Zealand is innovative. Maybe some new thinking about how we manage agriculture then could be a huge knowledge export from New Zealand. This is a way we need to think I think of becoming an incubator for innovative ideas. And that a small country can do.