 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech Globe, just with a very short introduction. I guess the salient point is that she is the executive director of the Hawaii and Asia Pacific and director of strategic partnerships for the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. It took me three breaths to get through that. Welcome to the show, Amanda. Thank you, Jay. It's great to be here. You know, you're much more than that. And I want to talk about it in conceptual terms. I began to, well, I actually got through your resume, your CV. It took me a while. I have to admit, but by the time I was recorded through, my head had exploded. I was no longer conscious, but it was quite a CV. I haven't seen one like this. You have been everywhere. You have done everything. And I guess the focus point is that you are into global relations. You've been the New Zealand ambassador to the United Nations. You've been in various schools, programs all over the world. I don't know how you live with yourself. Well, it all started here in Hawaii. I was so lucky to be a student at the East West Center on a graduate scholarship. I won't tell you how many years ago, which is where I met my husband. And there were 350 of us from over 55 different countries. It was the absolute best training for the Foreign Service, for my later jobs at the World Bank and the United Nations. Just an amazing experience. So it's wonderful to be back here in Hawaii. Yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, the East West Center started around the time the Vietnam War, what? 1960. Release 60s. 1960s, right. And Congress was supporting it in a more robust way perhaps than now. And a lot of people from Asia who hadn't been here and a lot of connections were made. It was an example of diplomacy. And that's the kind of East West Center that we need to perpetuate. That's a real jewel in Hawaii's crown, don't you think? Absolutely. It's so important to be able to talk to people who don't look like you, don't think like you. And in today's polarized world, we're perhaps not seeing enough of people coming together, really listening to each other and learning to find solutions. Yeah, speaking of which, I'm still sort of qualifying you as a guest. And I want to talk about your global relations training, your experience in diplomacy, so that I get a handle on the essence of what you have learned about humanity in service of those areas of study. Wow, big question. I guess having had the opportunity, as a very boring old economist, to work at the OECD in Paris and then at the World Bank in the Foreign Service, speak French with a bad French. You have a degree in French, yeah. I do. Ça va, ça roule? Oui, ça roule, très bien. I was the prime minister's special envoy to Francophone Africa, which was a fascinating role in conjunction with my role in the UN, as ambassador to the UN. I guess with having come at the world from a very rational economic perspective, I soon realized that you can't just give people the information and then expect them to come up with the answer that you expect them to come up with. There's a whole raft of other factors that play in. And in relationship, we actually end up with different solutions. And so for me, I think the biggest outcome of all that incredible, wonderful global experience has been what I call the diversity dividend. If you have people sitting around the table who look and sound like you, you're going to come up with the same kind of solutions. And Einstein always said, you're never going to solve problems at the same level at which they were created. You need a different lens. And that's why I think my East West Center experience was really at the heart of what I'm able to do now at Arizona State University and with the amazing Julie Wrigley, who founded the Global Institute. And really that is looking at sustainability and the UN sustainable development goals and mapping those as solutions, but through interdisciplinary and systems approaches. And I think for me, that's the biggest takeaway of all my global learning and why I think I feel so blessed to be in this new role here in Hawaii, but connected with the Global Institute of Sustainability. So unpacking that just a little, the Wrigley Institute is a recent organization recently founded. Has it been around for a while? So it's been around for 14 years. And Julie Wrigley has a house on the Big Island. She is just an incredible leader and decided early on as a child in looking at the abalone and how it was changing on the beach where she grew up, that she was going to be a committed environmentalist. And so she founded the Institute with the proviso that every student at Arizona State University would graduate with a competency in sustainability. Now that's quite something given that there are 103,000 students. It's the largest university in the US. Really? It is. And it's number one in innovation with Stanford at number two and MIT at number three for three years in a row. So there's some very cool things going on. But Julie was really a visionary and with Michael Crowe, who's the president who had come from Columbia University. The two of them really decided that the way to create a multiplier impact for positive change in the world was by ensuring that university students who are the leaders of tomorrow really understood sustainability through their own disciplines, but in a multidisciplinary way. Absolutely, gee, that's right on the button, right on the money. I, sorry, I could talk about this forever, but I had a wonderful experience when I was speaking at the East-West Centre Global Graduate Student Conference a couple of years ago, and I had just met Julie at a philanthropic event on sustainability and been very impressed. And I, in my speech, I was talking about the Sustainable Development Goals and mentioned her institute. A student from ASU came up to me afterwards and said, I'm an engineering student, and I just wanted to reinforce what you said. I am going to be a very different engineer because of the Sustainability Change. That's a true thing. That's true. Absolutely true. Which is so great. Yeah. Everybody has to have some of that. And so it's so wonderful when you think about committed leadership that can lead to sustained change through tomorrow's leaders. Yeah. Well, okay. So clearly you can reach greater levels of sustainability and resilience if you teach every college kid the course. But what else can you do in a more immediate sense with government and with the public? I love this question, and I think Hawaii is a global role model. When I look at the fact that Hawaii is the first state in the nation to have said we commit to Paris Accords, again, the Climate Change Accords. And the first state in the nation to come out and say 100% renewable energy target. And for me, having been part of the negotiations at the United Nations when the Sustainable Development Goals were being crafted, it is so exciting to see Hawaii as a state and the state legislature, the governor, the four mayors all come out together and say, we're committing to these targets, but you know, we can't do it alone. And I'm very privileged to be a board member of Hawaii Green Growth, which is what we call a Sustainable Development Goal number 17, a multi-stakeholder coalition where there's government, private sector, and civil society all sitting around the table saying, how can we actually meet these commitments? So Hawaii has actually mapped to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They're collapsed into six main goals and there's an online dashboard where you and I as citizens can go on and see just how we're tracking. So it's really transparent. I have high praise for what's happening here in Hawaii. Let me ask you, if we are here at point A and point B is the realization of those goals, you know, reaching the target, reaching the goals, what do we need to do in terms of action between A and B? Fantastic question. So the idea is that by 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals will have been met. Some are more appropriate than others for a developed economy. So for example, poverty. There is relative poverty in Hawaii. It is a part of sustainability. You have to deal with that. Gender equality, goal number five. That's one of your specialties. And the empowerment of women, very dear to my heart. Some 90% of countries still have discriminatory laws preventing women from being economically active, for example. Would you think that would be the case in 2018? Nine out of 10 countries still with discriminatory laws. And that's part of the reason that the Secretary-General of the Inter-Parlamentary Union was here last week. We're working together to try to educate all of the legislators in his 178 members. So I think if we're going to meet those goals, we need the legislators to be going to the UN every year as they are and being held accountable. But we need citizens to be engaged and to know what's going on as they are in Hawaii. So it's not just about government setting targets. It's about all of us looking at the different goals, seeing how they're being measured and seeing how we can make a difference as well. I personally had a real aha moment here in Hawaii about a year ago. And I went to see the movie Chasing Ice at the Doris Duke Theater. And I'd seen Al Gore's movie on climate change. This was a sequel, no? Yeah. And I'd been very depressed because he told us to change our light bulbs. And I thought, oh my gosh, is that all I can do? And there was a panel afterwards made up of some of the amazing people who are very active here. And I think it was Josh Stambrough who runs the offer for climate change and resiliency, who said when I asked the question, but what can I do as an ordinary citizen to help meet these goals and help make a difference for climate change? And he said, have you got solar panels on your roof? And I said, well, I applied, but I was turned down. And he said, apply again, because now the rules have changed. And you'll be approved. And I was approved. And then he said, and then get an electric vehicle. I found out that it's just as cheap to have an EV as it is to have an ordinary car. And then you can have free parking at the airport and downtown. So you can feel good. And it's also not you don't have to go to the gas station. You're not emitting any noxious fumes. So it's a win-win. And then composting. So instead of throwing out compost and contributing to methane gas, you can go to Costco and buy one of those or loaves, buy one of those little containers, put your leaves, and you compost every day in there, your food scraps, turn it around, create compost for your garden. So I'm doing those three things. And now I've estimated that we're at carbon neutral. So thank you, Josh. If you're out there, it's wonderful to think that we can actually make concrete steps ourselves to create a difference. What about legislation? What about requiring? What about forming up incentives to require people to do that? Well, I think the fact that there are incentives now and HIKO provides incentives for the electric vehicle. Connie Lau, who's the CEO, was very generous in explaining to me how that all worked. But there are incentives. And I think now that there's 100% electric transport, the city is working towards that goal. So legislation helps set the goals, getting the incentives right, and then having everyday people like us educated so that we can bring about change too. I walked today instead of driving. Just little things that we can do to make a difference. Strikes me that all your experience in global policy and all the connectivity in the diplomatic community and your training and your books that you've written about empowering women and so forth, it all qualifies you to be exactly here, exactly now in Hawaii, in the history of the call it the sustainability movement. Nothing could be finer actually. I could not agree more Jay. And actually I'm hoping that they're going to put up that nice little backdrop of the Hukalea that I sent in today. Because Ninoa Thompson was very generous in allowing us to use that at ASU and for ASU to be learning from what's going on in Hawaii. I couldn't agree more. I feel I'm exactly in the right place at the right time. And I feel so privileged to be learning from the indigenous wisdom that the Hukalea and Ninoa, the Polynesian Voyaging Society represent. Tomorrow I'm going to an indigenous food systems day that the University of Hawaii is sponsoring. And of course one of the goals is that we should double local food production by 2030. Hawaii used to be self-sustaining when there were a million Hawaiians here. But one of the things that I think Hawaii has to teach the world is this incredible generosity of spirit that is embodied in aloha. That's part of sustainability. It is integral to sustainability. And in fact I have a brilliant artist friend called Maliana Maya who has done a beautiful mural with a number of other amazing artists like Kahi Ching and Solomon Enos. And the mural actually looks at sustainability and the link to peace. And of course Maya Satoro Ng and Maxine Burkett are starting the Institute for Climate and Peace which is global cutting edge here in Hawaii. But this mural of Malianas is one of those stopped dead in your tracks. You see it and you think, wow, this embodiment of taro, the local knowledge that is really reflected by Hawaiian iconography but has a global resonance. And then you go around to the other side of this two-sided mural and you see the pain and the trauma that happened with colonialism. And then you come back around and you realize that in fact we're all on a journey and that we can process the pain and suffering that we have in one of two ways. We can stay stuck in it or we can circumambulate and come back to the future by grounding ourselves in indigenous wisdom and recognizing that by being close to the earth and listening to what we can learn from, and I know his ability to sail over the horizon with no fixed point of reference or from being in the lowy patch and then taking that to the United Nations. I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. We're teens to smoke, we'll lose years of these moments. It's your life. Don't miss a thing. Hi everyone, I'm Andrea Gabrieli. The host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. We're talking about global affairs now, but we're talking about Hawaii's role in global affairs and through the East West Center and otherwise, Hawaii is doing things that are leadership things. Hawaii is known for doing things that are leadership things. And I guess my question, Amanda, is how can we realize our destiny as a global leader in high values? Thank you for asking this question. So first of all, I think that it's a matter of letting people know, and that's partnerships. So for example, one of the things we're looking forward to is the Inter-Parliamentary Union sending out to all its 178 members information on Hawaii's leadership in renewable energy targets and with the Paris Accords. But you brought him down. Thank you. And he was a fabulous guest and a fabulous and elegant gentleman. Well, it was wonderful because our officers were very close in Geneva. And when I was on my way to Davos in January, I saw him and was telling him about Hawaii's leadership and that it really was global good practice. And he said, okay, okay, you've convinced me, I need to make a visit. So he had been at the UN High-Level Political Forum where countries come in and report on the Sustainable Development Goals, actually with Celeste Connors, who's the CEO of Hawaii Green Growth. And then he flew all the way out here and spent three days with us and was very impressed by what was happening not only at the, he saw Kalani English at the Senate, he saw Blue Planet Foundation, the Elemental Accelerator, spoke at the East-West Center. We did a joint event with the Wrigley Institute. So he was really impressed. And so just making sure that people are aware and are able to tell that story and share the good practice so that others can emulate it. Being part two of other gatherings, for example, Hawaii will be present at Governor Brown's Global Climate Summit in September with a whole range of players in California. And they're part of the states and the mayor's associations that are also working on this issue. Hawaii is also a very active player in the Pacific Island Development Leaders Program where all of the Pacific Island states plus Hawaii and the Northern Pacific come together and as leaders share good practice, Hawaii is a member of the Global Glyspur, the Global Leadership Island Partnership. So there's a whole range of fora for Hawaii to really be able to tell the story even though it is a sub-national entity. What I get, and it's a song that I've been singing myself, is that if you want Hawaii to exercise influence and leadership on these critical things around sustainability, around high moral principle about humanity coming together and having a better planet, you have to get out there. You have to travel. You have to get on a plane. You have to participate in a conference. You have to go to places. You have to think beyond your own shoelaces. And invite people here, yes. And Hawaii can do that, but it must make the effort of traveling. It must make the effort of doing what you do, of moving around and singing the song elsewhere. And I think there's so many amazing people here who are doing that, as well as others who are coming in like Martin to see what is going on here in Hawaii. And bringing them here, yeah. Yeah, it's a matter of exchange. I think that's really, really important. And of course, like your wonderful show, Online. We have online platforms too. This reaches everywhere. What you're saying now is going everywhere. And this is part of the reason that Arizona State University and the Wrigley Institute are so keen on having a partnership and having many partnerships we already have a partnership with Kamehameha Schools and we're in the midst of an MOU with the whole UH system. We have one already with the Hilo campus, but really it's about learning and sharing and partnering. And one of the good things that I think ASU really has to offer is an amazing online platform. There's 400,000 online learners who are doing a range of different courses. And President Crow really believes that we all have to be lifelong learners. So part of this lifelong learning lives here. That's great. And I couldn't agree more, especially at my advanced age. It is really important that we keep on learning and we find different ways of addressing issues. I was privileged to meet Linda Furuto who is one of the first women navigators who has apprenticed under Ninoa. And she is a professor of ethnomathematics. And she says... What kind of mathematics? Ethnomathematics. Ethnomathematics. Yes. It's not about sitting in a classroom and doing your geometry. It's about getting out on the Hokulea and counting the seconds that something drops into the water and you can figure out the angle and then the speed at which you're traveling. And she said that is just so much more meaningful reviving the ancient practices and the incredibly advanced techniques that Hawaiians had way back in the 13th century in a meaningful way. And Arizona State University is very much committed only to research that has an impact. It's not research for research's sake or education for its own sake. It's education and research to make a tangible impact and difference in the world. So that's why there's this incredible alignment and why I'm so thrilled and privileged to be the first executive director here in Hawaii. Perfectly suited because of your experience and in bonding people up and connecting them from various places. What you've done in your CV is what Hawaii must do now. So- Well, I'm learning from Hawaii. Very much. We should all commit to do that because Hawaii is at a place where culturally it can teach us all. More perhaps than before. So question though, how does this all connect with your area of empowerment of women? Can you connect that up for me? Absolutely. Well, I said before that 90% of countries still have at least one discriminatory law on the books. It makes no economic sense. McKinsey did a very interesting research study a couple of years ago which showed that we could add $28 trillion, $28 trillion to the global economy. For productivity. Yes, were we to have a level playing field. So it's good for women. It's good for families. It's good for communities. It's good for society to have gender equality. Now the link to sustainability has been more recently drawn. There's a fabulous publication called Drawdown by Paul Hawkins and a team of scientists that have worked on this issue for the last 10 years. If you add together girls' education and women's reproductive rights, you come up with the number one solution for solving climate change. Telling how that works. Well, first of all, a better educated girl is more likely to know how to respond in a crisis, is more likely to have fewer children. So for every year of additional secondary school, you are likely to have an additional 0.7% of added to GDP and those girls who only have a primary education are likely to have eight children in a developing country. If they finish secondary school, it's two to three children. So the impact on the planet through education linked to family planning really makes a difference. I'm beginning to get the idea about all this. And maybe it's something I didn't understand before is when you talk about sustainability, you're talking about saving the planet, saving the species. Absolutely. You're talking about trying to have a better life for everyone and not have a worse life for everyone. And climate change is a big starter issue on all of that because that in our face is what it is. But let me look at the dark side for a minute. Suppose we do nothing about sustainability. I'm sure this motivates you and other people who are interested in sustainability resilience. If we do nothing, if we ignore it, we turn our backs on it. What happens? Well, again, as a boring old economist, looking at some of the data points, they're pretty scary. So if we stay on the trajectory we're on now, by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. That's pretty scary. We know that we are on an unsustainable trajectory in that 17 of the last 18 years have been the hottest on record and we're looking now at a hockey stick. So the data alone is telling us a very depressing story. But if we flip that around, in 2015, there were four watersheds agreements at the global level. All UN members, all 193 UN member countries came together and in March 2015, signed the Sendai Declaration on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience. In July, came to a recognition that we can't just rely on ODA. It's some 250 billion a year, it's peanuts. We need trillions of dollars if we're looking at infrastructure and wellbeing for a resilient planet. And that was what the Addis Ababa Declaration on Development Financing agreed. And then we had the Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 goals, which as you have so eloquently said, covered the whole watershed from reducing poverty to gender equality, to climate change, to renewable energy, to life under the oceans. So those goals are a very comprehensive blueprint for the planet. And it's the first time we have ever had a globally agreed blueprint for a development agenda between now and 2030. And then Paris was signed in December. So those- So we have- We have a general agreement. And general agreement. So now we just need to get on and do it. And your point about how do we make people aware is a really critical one. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited that ASU requires every student to graduate with a sustainability competency. But they also map every single faculty member to the Sustainable Development Goals. So I would challenge every university to do the same. And in fact, the Wrigley Institute has now worked with 350 other schools of sustainability. They were the number one, first globally, but they've now helped 350 others to bring about that vision. And we're working with a school here called the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability, which is a charter school that looks at how you integrate sustainability into the curricula here in Hawaii. And so again, we're looking at that, learning from that, and saying how can you really work now from K through 12 and ensure that it's not only university students, but it's kids. And Blue Planet Foundation has done a great job with kids and getting them to do art competitions around sustainability. I've seen your work in that room. It's beautiful. And kids are so warm to that idea. We can learn a lot from kids. But how do we integrate that into our curriculum so that we have a real global awareness from a young age? Because really, that legacy that you and I are creating now is going to be either a positive or a negative legacy for future generations. This is a very important time. One last question before we run out of time, Amanda. And that is, you know, we have, you're into diplomacy, into foreign policy. You spent your career mainly doing that. And we have stress situations. Stressors are not good for sustainability. We have stress situations in the EU and NATO. We have stress situations in Asia. And certainly, South America has been in a stress for a long time. And I wonder, from a global point of view, from a global relations point of view, and I know you study and write about this, you know, what do we do to get back into harmony? What do we do to get back to a place where there's less risk of war, there's less risk of controversy and dissension, there's more risk of people taking the high road and trying to put these things together for the benefit of humankind, to get from where we are now, which is maybe not a great place in terms of global relations, to a better place. How do we do that? Three levels. At the macro level, we have these global agreements. They need to be implemented. We have mechanisms which are working still, not wonderfully, but are still working. And I'm a great believer that we need to talk to each other. The United Nations brings together 193 countries. It provides an opportunity, which I didn't realize the full extent of until I was privileged to be ambassador. And suddenly recognizing that it's really important to sit down and have a conversation with someone who is opposed to your views in every respect. And I remember going to a function at the Iranian ambassadors and setting out to shake hands and then of course realizing that in his culture, can't do, can't do, women are unclean. And feeling very offended and not wanting to engage. And then realizing that in fact, I was becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution by having that response. So at the macro level, we have institutions, we have a global agreement for the first time, we need to continue to work to make that a reality. Global agreements. Mezzo level. Corporates are really stepping up. So we have groups like the B team. We have the Fortune group, which brings together CEOs who are committed to sustainability and creating a peaceful planet. So I think it's really important for corporates to live their values and to be held account at the micro level by you and I who can choose our purchasing power, who we vote for and actually how we make a difference in our own lives and in our own communities, even if it's a really small gesture, actually beginning to bring our values into alignment and thinking about seven generations out. What legacy do I want to leave for my grandchildren's grandchildren? We all have a role. Every level has a role, but the overriding principle is to save the planet. Absolutely. And the work that educational institutions are doing to bring people together and especially at a young age, I was just at the Student Global Leadership Institute in Punahou and they've brought together China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, and there are these kids who all have scholarships to come in cohorts to connect with each other and figure out how they can begin to create solutions to tomorrow's problems as well. They are the key. They are the key. And they will, I mean, I really feel confident that they will understand this and they will carry it forward, but you've got to do your work to help them. Thank you, Amanda Ellis. It's great to talk to you. You have to come back and discuss these things more with us. We have to drill down on this and that when you can tell us how you really feel. Thank you so much, Jay. Great to be on the show. A tu tala. A tu tala.