 Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Alex White. I'm Chair of the IAEA's Climate and Energy Working Group, and I'm delighted to welcome you to today's event, which is the first presentation of the 2022 Environmental Resilience Lecture Series, which is co-organized by the IAEA and the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. And I'd like to recognize and thank the EPA for their sponsorship of this series, and we'll hear from Laura Burke in a couple of minutes. Today, we're delighted to be joined by Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, MBE, and I'd like to thank her for being so generous with her time to speak to us today. Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh is Director of the ESRC-funded UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, CAST, in short. She is an environmental psychologist specializing in perceptions and behavior in relation to climate change, energy, and transport, based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath. Professor Whitmarsh regularly advises governmental and other organizations on low-carbon behavior change and climate change communications. She was one of the expert leads for Climate Assembly UK and is lead author for the IPCC's Working Group II sixth assessment report. Her research projects have included studies of meat consumption, energy efficiency behaviors, waste reduction, and carrier bag reuse, perceptions of smart technologies and electric vehicles, low-carbon lifestyles, and responses to climate change. The title of Professor Whitmarsh's presentation this afternoon is Mobilizing Climate Action Lessons from COVID-19. She'll speak for approximately 20 minutes or so, after which we'll move to the Q&A session. And you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom. You should see that there on your screen. Feel free to send your questions in throughout the presentation or when a question occurs to you, rather than waiting until it's over and we tend to have a bunch of questions. So just pop the question into the Q&A once it occurs to you. Please identify yourself and any organization affiliation that you may have when asking a question. And just to bear in mind that the presentation and the Q&A session are all on the record. So feel free also to join the discussion on Twitter. But first, before all of that, I'd like to hand over to Laura Burke, Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency, to offer some opening remarks today. Laura. Thank you very much, Alex. And delighted to be here this afternoon and really delighted that Professor Whitmarsh is coming virtually albeit to speak to us for this environmental resilience lecture. And as Alex said, this is the first of our environmental resilience lectures this year. And the purpose of these lectures is really just to bring all stakeholders together behind a collective message of resilience and emphasizing both individual and societal responsibilities to be good stewards of the environment. And I think the lecture today looks incredibly interesting, incredibly relevant. When we look at the recent landmark IPCC report on climate mitigation, that outlines the nature and extent of the cause of climate change at a global level, and of course reinforces the urgent need for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and that needs to happen now, not sometime into the future. And of course, then over the last two years we've experienced a time of profound change of it due to, due to the pandemic will prevent change both economic and then social activity. And whereas this has shown a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and in 2020 there was a 3.6% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And it was really due to the pandemic. And it was due to the fact that we couldn't travel and meet and do all of those normal things. And there is of course a significant risk of rebound once the pandemic is over. So, really what we're talking about is that the next decade needs to be one of major developments and advances in the implementation of climate action. And we've got ambitious targets under the European climate law, but also our own national climate act from 2021. So an ambition to have a 51% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and that is a really significant challenge, but something we need to do. And of course, to do that there needs to be a significant and immediate increase in the scale and pace of action. So, the last thing I would like to say before Professor Whitmarsh comes in is just to highlight work the EPA did with Yale University and we're continuing to do it, which is climate change in the Irish mind. This was a survey engaging 4,000 citizens from across Ireland to discuss climate change. And what this really demonstrated is that Irish people overwhelmingly recognise the threat of climate change, feel personally affected and want to see real change. There's a very high level of awareness of climate amongst the Irish population, people are informed and understand the implications of a climate changing climate. And they also see the opportunities that exist for jobs, innovation and well being. And I spoke very importantly for Professor Whitmarsh they also really trust the science and trust scientists, which is a good position to be in. And this project will help people to under or help us to understand how Irish people perceive environmental challenge. And this can fundamentally change then how we communicate on the topic. But it also demonstrates that as a country we're ready for the transition to climate neutrality that we see the benefits. And we also are as well advanced on the journey. So ultimately effective public engagement is essential because there is going to be significant changes for all of us in the coming years. So I'm going to hand over to Professor Whitmarsh it looks like a fascinating lecture it's so relevant and we've all talked about this connection between how we reacted to COVID and how we react to climate. So really looking forward to her experience and expertise in discussing this. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Indie Laura and thank you Alex and and Luke as well for inviting me it's a real honor to be with you today. And yeah I want to sort of spend the next half an hour so just reflecting I think on the differences and the similarities between these two global risks and to make a few suggestions really from our work and wider work on how we can mobilize the public around climate change. So, if we cast our minds back two and a bit years ago to the beginning of 2020 and it almost feels like another world now but we were seeing images like this one on the top left of the Australian bushfires, kind of covering our TV screens and elsewhere on the screen, which really illustrated in a very kind of visceral way actually how devastating climate related impacts can be to people and to biodiversity. As the year went on, we saw devastating floods around Europe and elsewhere of this of the sort never seen in many of these locations before leading to loss of life and damage to property and so on. And as we moved into 2021, the climate change evidence grew stronger than ever and we had the publication of the latest IPCC assessment, the sixth assessment report, really emphasizing that, you know, we need to act now on climate change that we cannot delay and the window of opportunity to act is closing but we still have a little bit of time left to actually take action. But of course during this time, the pandemic hit and so we saw images like this of people in hospital and really our lives were turned upside down in many ways. And these two risks have a number of things in common there of course global risks we have been and are being affected by both of them very profoundly around the world. They both need individuals you and I to act for the common good. We all need to play our part we can't just leave it up to a minority of people everybody needs to act. It's linked to that we need governments to actually enable and motivate people to change their behavior. I think both of these risks have also challenged societal resilience they've they've really, I think, for many of us called into question a lot of things that we took for granted about our lives that actually we could continue the way we were and that nothing would disrupt would disrupt the status quo but actually we know that a lot of things that we took for granted really are not as maybe secure or resilient as we thought they were. And the two issues also have some common causes and solutions, travel being maybe the most obvious one obviously the fact that we are a globalized world we travel internationally has obviously contributed to the spread of the virus. As Laura has just mentioned the fact that we were able to stop traveling actually led to a led to a reduction in our emissions that cause climate change so global travel has also been a contributor to global warming. And I think what I really want to focus on in the rest of the talk is the fact that actually both of these issues do mean that we need to change our behavior very profoundly they involve people doing things differently to what they've done before. So during the pandemic this was clear we were told to stay at home, we were told to wash our hands to distance ourselves from other people to wear face masks. And when the vaccine came along we were told to get vaccinated so these were things that we all had to sign up to do. And most people did actually most people complied. And so there was a really profound change in what people were doing. But the same is also the case for climate change actually the evidence is really clear now that technology alone cannot save us from climate change we need people to change as well. So in the UK the Committee on Climate Change for example, estimate that almost 60% of the measures needed to reach net zero will involve consumer behavior change. So things like adopting electric vehicles and heat pumps, eating less meat and dairy being less wasteful. But the rest of that the wedge there, which they really call technological change will imply change in terms of the behaviors that professionals and employers and and policymakers, that the things that they do because technologies don't just happen by themselves they don't get rolled out or used by themselves they need people to, to implement them to choose to buy them to adopt them, and to use them. So, actually you could argue that all of the measures needed to reach net zero will involve behavior change, even as either as private citizens or in our professional workplace capacity. And the level of change really has profound there's a fairly recent report from the hotel cool Institute that did some modeling, looked at various European countries and showed that most of the European countries need to cut their carbon footprint by an enormous amount in the UK for example we need to cut out carbon footprint print from eight and a half tons of CO2 per person at the moment to two and a half tons in just eight years time, if we're to stay within a 1.5 degree warming limit. So really profound change over a very small time frame. And this message actually is starting to get out into the media interestingly even into the more right of center newspapers we're seeing messages that are coming from the scientific evidence that we will need to change and that there are things that we can all do to contribute to climate change. And as I've already mentioned and as Laura's mentioned, one of the lessons of COVID one one of the few sort of happy consequences if you like, of the pandemic has been that we have seen a drop in emissions over the last couple of years so in 2021 alone we had a 7% drop in global CO2 emissions mostly due to travel restrictions. And so that might suggest to us well maybe for climate change we just do something similar to what we did for COVID. Clearly, there were so many negative consequences of the pandemic and of the restrictions in terms of, you know, the impact on jobs, as well as kind of wellbeing and broader social consequences that we should be able to do things differently and in a more planned way for climate change we have not very much time but we have a little bit more time to be able to respond to climate change in a more have a more planned societal transformation. But what we do know is that change can happen very radically and almost overnight if we want it to. And I think that are also really important to consider between climate change and COVID and some of these are quite obvious really because COVID of course, for many people it's a much more tangible and perhaps more emotive risk. If you sort of just think about the fact that all of our lives really were touched by COVID and you only had to look out the window or just pick up the phone to realize just how profoundly people were being affected. It kind of really brought it home for people, whereas climate change for many tends to still be while it is maybe important for many it isn't necessarily as, as kind of as visceral as real as tangible. It's still seen as rather a sort of distant risk. Similarly, COVID that were things that you and I could do to actually reduce the risk of contracting the virus we could wash our hands and distance and all those other things. And climate change. It's, it's more difficult to actually protect yourself there are things you can do, but because of the nature of the risk. It's much more sort of diffuse and global that actually any action I take to mitigate the risk will not necessarily benefit me directly so it's a people don't feel that they have the same ability or efficacy self efficacy to actually reduce the risk. There's a lower social norm to act on climate change with COVID. We could see other people wearing masks and staying at home and so clearly there was a strong signal that everybody else is doing their bit and you need to follow the rules to there aren't really those clear social signals that we see from from climate change yet. They're still consuming and they're still going about their lives which are often quite high carbon lives. And so the signal is not there yet that low carbon lifestyles are the norm. And one thing I'm going to emphasize as well as that there are for many people, they would say there are fewer government signals to act on climate than there were on COVID there wasn't. There were nightly briefings from leaders that were not scientists taking to the TV so much they were in it that cook the visible signals from from leaders in both in terms of communications but also regulatory signals and other things are just not there yet with climate change. And the solutions are more ambiguous with with climate for climate change so sadly there is not yet a three word kind of motto handspace space that we can tell the public do this and that's that's pretty much the main thing you need to do that is we have to change everything for climate change pretty much so it's it's a more complex set of messages to get out. And I think as well there isn't, and I'll show evidence that there isn't as much public support for political action on climate change while that the support is growing. It isn't at the level of the public feeling that they would be able to make the same level of change that they would for COVID and linked to that. This is because we're talking about it being a long term or even permanent set of changes and transformations to society to tackle climate change with COVID. We could bear some short term disruption and pain because we knew at some point we the restrictions would be lifted. So it was a price we were willing to pay but climate change it's it's it's a longer term issue. So let me kind of dig into a few of these I mean if you if you think about this kind of idea of psychological distance so we use this term to really talk mean that for many climate change is not really as real or as tangible as many other sorts of risks. So it kind of is something which seems physically distant often people associate it with polar regions. The polar bear is often the poster child of climate change, whereas compare that with images for COVID and this is people like you and I this is images of hospitals this is this is everything around us this is very real. Similarly, the sorts of ways we measure climate change are in terms of CO2 emissions which is a very abstract kind of concept something which not many of us would kind of be able to relate to readily. The way in which we measure COVID is often in terms of the numbers of cases or even the numbers of deaths things that are well not just familiar but they're extremely kind of visceral and emotive ways of measuring the risk. And as I've already touched on the norms are just completely different any in both of these cases we look out the window we see people complying for COVID. We see people shopping when it comes to climate change so so the two issues really are kind of psychologically very different for people. But another thing that our evidence shows is that the government signals are very different and those signals in turn affect how people see the two risks. So what we found was that actually, when we asked people about how serious they thought COVID was as a risk. What it turned out that they actually inferred the severity of the virus from the fact that the government imposed a lockdown. In other words, they thought well it must be bad if the government's taking such drastic measures that we've never seen before in living history. It can only be the worst risk that you know we've ever seen. So they judge they judge the severity of the risk based on the government's response to it. Now we also know from our other work that we've done that the public do not think that the government's are in general taking enough action on climate change they don't think that the risk is being taken as serious as it seems like scientists say they should so they're kind of sort of inferring maybe it isn't as serious as scientists are saying so they are likely to be inferring the fact that climate change isn't as serious as other sorts of risks. So I think this has quite important implications for sort of the role of government and how we communicate the issue. I mean in fact, we can go as far as to say that the government in many countries I, I use many UK examples but are giving some pretty mixed signals and you know so there is the airport expansion. We have had the reduction of domestic flight taxes in the same year that we were hosting the UN climate talks. So the public is left with the with the maybe the message well I guess there isn't a climate crisis then. Interestingly, we can also look at how climate change and climate policy is framed by governments and in the UK. There was a very interesting forward from the Prime Minister to our net zero strategy the net zero strategy which is aims to get us to net zero emissions by 2050. In which he talks about the fact that previously going green meant having to sacrifice things but this strategy means we don't have to wear hair shirts. But in 2050 will still be driving cars flying planes heating our homes, but the cars will be electric, they'll be gliding around our cities silently our planes will be zero emission allowing us to fly guilt free etc. So really quite explicit rejection of the fact that people will have to change their lifestyles people can continue consuming and living their lives as they have been technology will save us. So he's he's a very sort of committed explicit techno optimist. And so really what is embedded in that strategy is very little of people have to change or there is a need for sort of public engagement there are hints of it here and there and green choices but the vast majority of the focus is around technological change. So really, this may be why we see some of these results so this is from some work that colleagues in our center have been doing to explicitly compare how people see the risks and responsibilities of COVID and climate change. So the figure on the left here shows the perceived responsibility for tackling these risks okay and you've got the personal responsibility and government responsibility. Whereas, most people see government being government and individuals. Oh, sorry, for the two risks okay so that the sort of pinkish blobs. COVID and the triangles are climate change. You see that for both of the risks the government is seen as being as having a high level of responsibility. But there is a gap here, when it comes to personal responsibility whereby COVID was seen as being as individuals as being responsible as responsible as governments for tackling COVID. But when it comes to climate change people place much more responsibility with government than they do with themselves. Similarly, they also feel that their actions are less effective to tackle climate change than COVID. And the same study found that people are less willing to act, sorry to accept restrictions to personal freedoms for climate change than for COVID. So in the first place we could say there isn't the there isn't the buy-in or the social contract really for tackling climate change to the same degree as there was for COVID. The public are not yet there to say, well we accept that, you know, we need to radically change. What we know is that we really do need to engage people and build this social mandate this kind of this support for radical change. We know that one of the strongest predictors of policy support is how fair people think that policies are. And part of that sense of fairness it's not just about distributional in other words sort of whether some people are kind of worse off than others, but it is also about procedural and actually bringing people with you engaging with people having dialogue in order to actually bring the public into decision making about climate change. We know that that sort of more participatory policy making tends to lead to better as well as fairer outcomes. It can help build the political mandate fraction so it can give it can embolden policymakers to feel they have the support of the public behind them. And this is why we see actually there's quite an important role for more deliberative forms of engagement like climate assemblies so as was mentioned earlier. I was involved in the UK climate assemblies as a citizens assembly on climate change which brought together over 100 members of the public to discuss how we reach net zero and came out with some really bold recommendations for change. But of course, in Ireland, the same happened several years earlier so the citizens assembly in Ireland also made some really bold recommendations for how Ireland can reach its climate targets. This sort of way of more substantively engaging the public can actually be really powerful in terms of making progress towards that sort of transformational change we need. Okay, I mean I've mentioned as well that we had some really clear messaging from most governments around what we need to do on COVID. But maybe we don't really have the same for climate change in fact we know there are gaps in in people's knowledge about what to do on climate that's clear. We also have an evidence base on how better to communicate climate change and one of the things that comes out of that is that it's about knowing your audience and what they care about, especially in marketers have known this for a long time is actually, you can use different messages to appeal to different market segments so for the green consumers you can talk about the green benefits of whatever product you're trying to market. For other people, maybe you talk about what are the personal benefits so it will make you feel good in the case of this this water. Similarly for kind of measures that have been put in place in workplaces where they've talked about more sort of tangible benefits to the individual like it'll save you money or you'll have more time. Those sorts of things tend to have broader appeal than just talking about it'll reduce emissions. And the good news is that actually most of the measures to tackle climate change do have wider so called co benefits so additional added benefits for individuals and society. So the latest IPCC assessment includes includes a slightly terrifying table that you see here don't worry. You don't need to understand that but essentially what this table shows is where there's the most blue colors it's where there are the highest positive impacts from measures to mitigate climate change. across a number of different dimensions. And essentially what this table as a whole showed was that the vast majority of measures to mitigate climate change has led to or could lead to improvements in well being. And health was one of the areas where they showed really robust and very strong effects but more generally across other areas, including kind of social cohesion and participation and education and so on, there were there were also benefits to. So this is something that we can use in messaging around climate change to engage to a much broader audience I think and actually bring people with us to say, this is not just about climate change which maybe seems like a distant threat to many people but actually this is about the here and now and improving your quality of life right now. In fact, our analysis shows that those with greener lifestyles in general happen tend to have higher well being and this is something we've shown across a range of different cultures around the world. In other words, going green is not about sacrifice contrary to what our Prime Minister has spelled out far from it it actually improves quality of life so we can communicate this I think to quite powerful effects. I also mentioned that the social norms were very different for covered than they are for climate change that at the moment, the norms are rather unhelpful when it comes to getting people to act in lower carbon ways. We can kind of harness and change social norms through a number of ways so some of the kind of classic nudge type studies have used social norm messaging to quite substantive effects so just telling people that most other people in well in this case the hotel are reusing their towels or most other people in your workplace are starting to give up that car can be very effective. Because people like to conform to the norm they think oh this is this is the done thing this is the norm, this is what other people like me are doing. So even just describing what other people doing can be effective. We know that even on a more implicit level actually people look around them and see what other people are doing and they infer things that could be appropriate for them so we know that adopting solar panels. If people in your neighborhood have solar panels. The chances are greater that you too would be likely to adopt solar panels so we see this these kind of neighborhood effects that having people around you adopt solar panels or also electric vehicles. And the more likely you are to as well because you see people like you starting to change their behavior. And we know the same is the is true for other sorts of behaviors and cultural norms can be very powerful. Communication by itself is not enough I think I really want to emphasize that and we of course we can we saw this in the pandemic we had very clear messaging, but we had other things to we had rules and we had. We had availability of tests and vaccines and, and other things that reinforced and enabled people to change their behavior. So a recent, a recent study actually meta analysis, compared different ways of changing people's climate behavior and they found that what we sometimes called downstream interventions but basically information provision of different kinds whether that be labels, or getting back and other sorts of ways of giving people information is only about two to three percent effective in changing behavior. The more upstream you go the more you actually change the context in which people act. Either that through nudging at one sort of set of techniques were sort of changing the choice architecture. The more effective that tends to be. And so to give you just two concrete examples there's a really nice study by garnet and colleagues where they doubled the proportion of vegetarian options available in a number of canteens. Previously it had been one in four of the options, then it went up to two and four, so you could still choose meat there were two meat options available. But just that increase in the availability of veggie options increase plant based sales by up to 80%. So reducing defaults can be also extremely effective and a nice study done in Switzerland showed that when they put energy consumers onto a renewable tariff by default, and they could still opt out if they wanted to, and actually doing that would have saved them a little bit of money because the fossil fuel tariff was cheaper. The vast majority stuck with that renewable defaults previously, it had been 3% opting to choose in opting to choose the renewable tariff when it was the default. Almost 90% stuck with that so an enormous effect by just making it easier making it the default to do the right thing. And of course you can change the physical environment as well, you can reallocate road space away from cars to lower carbon modes for example and actually some of that was done during COVID to enable the space for people to move around without being too close to one another and some local authorities have managed to retain some of those measures because of the obvious health and environmental benefits of doing that. So one of the really key headline things that comes out of all of the work on behavior changes that the more you can combine measures, the more likely you are to have additive effects so yes have a bit of information but also definitely have maybe some economic incentives some regulations some other things going on as well because that is more likely to all together to be much more effective to remove the barriers to behavior change. What I want to kind of focus on is just to talk about timing, because we know that actually it matters when you intervene because habits are one of the biggest barriers to behavior change. Often we do things kind of on autopilot and we maybe just don't think about how we're going to travel to the shops or to work. We can just go by the same mode for example, but there are times when our habits are disrupted, maybe we are moving house or retiring. Those big life changes can disrupt our habits and so at that point, we're more open to changing our behavior in a number of ways and we call these times moments of change. There's always experimental evidence showing that actually if you intervene during these moments of change, you're more likely to effectively change people's behavior. So in this study, this was a German study from a number of years ago, they gave residents a some information about their bus service, and also a one day pass to try the bus for free. That same intervention to people who had recently moved house in the last few weeks, the relocating group, and to people that had not recently moved house. And they found that amongst the relocators bus use increased by over double as a result of that very low cost behavior change intervention, whereas the same intervention amongst people that had not recently moved was not significantly effective in changing bus use. In other words, it matters when you intervene you're more likely to be effective if you can get people when they're more open to changing the behavior during these sorts of moments of change or disruption. And there's evidence from a number of different areas actually that sort of global crises of various kinds can actually really help trigger or accelerate innovation. There's evidence from the history of inventions and the the bicycle was invented as a result of the eruption of a volcano which led to essentially the death of a lot of horses so people had to find a new way of getting around the bicycle was invented out of necessity, and of course we've seen in the pandemic, enormous amounts of innovation, not just the speeding up of developing vaccines but also in terms of communication technologies have improved vastly over the last couple of years. There is converging evidence that timing matters that actually during periods of disruption, people innovate and potentially do things differently for the long term after that. And it really led us to the question of well, does that mean that covert might represent a moment of change where we can reconfigure people's habits to be more sustainable. So we've been tracking people over the last two years we're just about to launch the fourth wave of a series of surveys that we've been doing in the UK. We've been looking at how people's behaviors have changed over that period and to see to what extent people might be behind more or less sustainable. At the height of lockdown so this was a couple of months into the restrictions in the UK we saw as you probably won't be surprised that a lot of people were shopping online, their grocery shopping was was more likely to be done online. They were also reducing their food waste, and they were generally shopping less that they were well shopping in different ways but overall reduced consumption, and of course a lot of people working from home. Interestingly people were also changing their leisure activities so what we found was that compared to before COVID at the height of the lockdown restrictions in about the middle of 2020. People were saying they were gardening and spending time doing kind of creative hobbies. This is essentially out of necessity, given that we were sort of trapped in our homes and had to find things to do. Now as it happens most of those things are lower carbon activities than say some of the alternatives that people might have been doing like shopping for fun. But when we ask people as well, well of the things that you've had to do differently because of the restrictions. Are there any that you actually want to continue to do in the longer term. The vast majority of people said yes, I have actually enjoyed some of these things and I want to keep doing them so people saying yeah I've discovered online grocery shopping that's really great I'm going to keep doing that. I enjoy spending time in the garden I have enjoyed kind of having a daily walk. Visiting visiting garden centers recycling and so on and so on the right you see all the sort of the categories of the sorts of things that people were most likely to say and people discovering new sort of hobbies and things that they particularly enjoy and wanted to stick with was fairly at the top but environment as a category was actually relatively near the top as well. Of course as the restrictions lifted consumption has increased travel has increased food waste has increased some things are sticking though. Some people are continuing to work from home or at least partly work from home. We found that people have generally enjoyed being able to work from home at least some of the week. And we also see that walking levels are now higher than they were before cave it and car ownership is down which is very interesting so there are some things which, despite not necessarily needing to do these things some people are continuing to do some of these things which have a lower carbon footprint. And in fact, we haven't seen a reduction in concern about climate change during this time in fact it's, it's actually gone up we've seen a growth in the sense of urgency about climate change over the last couple of years. Contrary to what we expected, but a lot of polls actually are showing that we're now at record levels of concern about climate change despite having had a lot of other things to worry about over the last couple of years. And we know that there is support growing support for policies to reach net zero, even as high or even higher in some cases. As there was support for covert restrictions so despite the fact that I mentioned earlier, we still need to build the public mandate for some of the measures to reach net zero. We already have a strong support for things like buying energy efficient appliances, cutting down car use flying and so on. I think there has been some opportunities actually that present themselves from coven we have changed our behaviors in a number of ways traveling and consuming less spending our leisure time in generally lower carbon ways. And many people want to continue with some of those things, they need to be locked in though with the appropriate infrastructure incentives and so on, and those things are generally not in place yet, but most of the public would actually support a lot of those measures. Now wrap up here just to reiterate we can learn a lot from the COVID crisis. We can see that very radical behavior change is possible under certain circumstances. We're not there yet in terms of the social mandate for radical change for climate change we need to build that we need to engage with people. We need to communicate some of those wider co benefits I mentioned the fact that actually well being is likely to be higher when we take climate action and I think that will help build some of this support. We need to implement a range of different measures to enable people to change their behavior as well. The downstream the communication is important, but, but even more important is the sort of upstream stuff the changing the environment in which we act, and get the timing right we can actually use periods of disruption to try to get people to innovate try new things, and, and encourage them to stick with them. So, I'll leave it there and welcome any questions you may have. Thank you so much for that presentation and I think what you did very effectively was you identified look what are the great insights that we can draw from this awful period of COVID-19 and use them effectively in the period ahead as we, you know, try to try to accelerate the work that needs to be done in the agenda, but you've also then identified look there are there are drawbacks that's not get let's not get carried away there are there are big differences the challenges are different in very significant ways. And the one that I suppose that I was very interested in what you said about people thinking that, look, it must be serious. If, if the government is introducing restrictions, that's kind of fairly there's sort of a number of layers in that if you think about it because you think well, not so much immediately about the restriction or how, or whether it's good or bad or right or wrong, but if the government is doing it, they must be doing it for a reason. In a sense that's kind of a positive view of the state and a positive view of government is a certain element of trust in there, and just to look on the bright the positive side that the people think well if the government is doing that, they don't have a good reason for doing it. And, and, you know, the ram and annual terrible cliche now not to waste a good crisis and so on. I'm just, I'm wondering. Before we talk about all of the, you know, I suppose, many things you spoke about which are the downstream incentives that nudging, you know the timing issue, all of the redesigning public but all of the stuff that we, the good stuff that we're all trying to push for to happen. Is there though still I'm going to start at the extreme end of the conversation is there still a role though for this idea of, look, we should fear climate change. I mean, there should be an element of fear here. It's not immediate it's not manifesting itself in the immediate sense we might, those of us who live in this part of the world at this time of our lives probably won't see it. But we should fear it for our for our children and for those who come after and that therefore there is a case for leveraging fear in the way that perhaps governments did or had to do during COVID. I think that's a really good question because I think that has tend to be the way that maybe some campaign groups in the past have have often tried to motivate people to take environmental action. But we know it only works in very specific circumstances and those circumstances are if people know very clearly what they can do to reduce the risks. So you can for example with smoking is a great example so you can tell people yeah this is going to kill you and you can give them really graphic pictures on the on the cigarette packets of what's going to happen to your lungs if you keep doing this and absolutely terrify them. But at the same time you have to be very clear of what people can do to avoid the risk which is of course give up smoking and give them ways of doing that so support services and you know put in place regulations and incentives and things to also enable and incentivize people to change so all of that kind of sense of efficacy like I know what to do and I can do it has to be there if fear based messaging is to be effective. And at the moment, we just it's so difficult to take a lot of those steps for most people, and maybe in some cases they don't actually know really clearly what to do people don't actually have a good sense of what makes a difference. We just, it wouldn't be very effective to really scare people into taking action on climate change so I think we can definitely spell out the risks I think it's important to do that but what we need to be much better at doing is giving people a sense of, and here's what you can do to, to avoid those risks. So showing as you effectively did towards the end showing people that our lives, the quality of our lives can improve intrinsically, you know, for its own in its own right, even, you know, apart from the necessary agenda that we're looking at in terms of the longer term impact of, of climate change. And, you know, we've had a debate here about turf burning in recent weeks, and I think one of the most effective elements of the public discourse was the discussion about air quality. So, you know, immediate air quality in urban, well rural Ireland in the country generally, and associating that risk to health with the burning of term, which also then has a broader context for it in relation to the climate agenda. People that the idea of buying in, and you again you drew that out very well that there isn't the same buy in. Inevitably there isn't the same buy in to the necessity to take action in relation to climate as there was manifestly in the case of the covert emergency. And then you, you drew from that the important, the lesson that it's important that people can see that there should be to participate in decisions participate in building alternatives themselves to have a stake, as in how these decisions are made and you mentioned citizens assemblies and we've had a number of them here as you know and in fact we have a new one now on biodiversity which just sat for the first time. I think just this weekend gone or at least very recently and how important do you think because we're now coming to the stage of budgeting of carbon budgeting. We've had it in the law in the UK for a while we have it here now and we're now starting to work out precisely how that's going to affect different sectors. So each sector will have its budget and the public debate will have to be at least partly about if one, if one, if one sector doesn't meet its budget that will impact another set. So for everybody should be at the table to see well look if they're going to argue for a reduction on the ask for them, who's going to take the impact. Would that be another area of importance for this deliberative approach that you spoke about the people are all at the table. I think yes, I mean I think that's a really good, good way of looking at it as well as across a sort of different sectors is that you might think, and I suppose there's been a tendency for the public to think you know I've done a bit of recycling and then you know so that's okay then for me to maybe just take a flight and that people maybe make those sort of implicit calculations that well I've done a bit of good so I can sort of afford to be a bit bad here. Well the idea of net zero is that actually we've kind of everything's got to be pretty much zero and yes we can have a bit of kind of, you know, sort of negative emissions are taking carbon out of the atmosphere for those really difficult to mitigate sectors but actually we've all got a pretty much radically get as close to zero as we possibly can so I think having those sorts of deliberative for can actually help show that yeah there's nowhere that you can kind of borrow from it's all got a pretty radically reduce. Yeah. And donal brolic on who's an II a member and ask the interesting question. Do you have whether you have suggestions for changes that we can make to institutions and I think I mean obviously he means existing institutions. And this is slightly as a contrast to the, to the citizens assembly model to existing institution in order to get government action at the local national transnational level to act for the common good given the influence of interest groups and so on. And while you're just thinking I mean I think that seems to question when you put up the slide of Rishi sooner can. It did. And I think this is not just applied to the UK applies here applies elsewhere that in some ways, all of the institutions of government need quickly to be transformed. I mean, the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be the Chancellor of the climate of climate change you know the Minister for Finance should be the Minister for how do we tackle and resolve these big questions so you know our existing institutions government institutions are about managing an economy that's no longer fit for purpose. So what sort of institutional changes occur to you or do you agree that they're necessary. Yeah, I mean I think this is a huge question and I mean I'm not I should say not a political scientist and there are going to be people people that are better qualified to answer that this than me but I am involved in at the moment that the UK House of Governments should carry on behavior change to reach environmental and climate goals and we're looking at kind of the fact that really there's a huge deficit in the kind of current governance arrangements that would enable well not just effective net zero policy but but but behavior change as part of that. There is huge fragmentation across the sort of the government departments and so why you might have sort of formal responsibility for tackling climate change residing in well the business and the business department as it is here. Of course, all of the departments have to be, you know, radically sort of changing what they do as well and so that they're but but they aren't, they aren't to different extents and so that kind of the fragmentation across the different sort of siloed working continues to be a problem. I don't know if there are really great examples of where governments have cracked this to kind of get that more effective coordination across different departments because we definitely see, and the public perceive it you know that airports are expanding, but you're saying climate changes and emergency and you know so so it's quite clear that we're not very joined up in our country but I have to say I don't know of any particularly great examples of where there is better coordination but maybe maybe having the budgets as you talk helps a little bit to move towards something where there's a bit more joined up thinking. And perhaps also certainly it occurs to me in the Irish context, maybe it's similar to the British, you refer to Boris Johnson and his speech and so on or some of his contributions that really these actions need to be coordinated in the Prime Minister's office or in the Taoiseach's office as we have it here so that government departments inevitably are, you know, department of agriculture is always going to be influenced by the farming sector. It's just the reality, of course they bring about change and they say they would stand up to them at different times and they don't always get what they want as well. But inevitably it's the Irish Farmers Association most often go in and see the Minister for Agriculture that's just the way life is and the same in other sectors so if the Prime Minister's office or Taoiseach's office isn't involved in that coordinating and that you know really driving insisting on change I think it's probably going to be slower. Yeah, and I think I guess the other thing, because also we see some better models that devolved level in the UK. So the Welsh Government for example have the Well-being of Future Generations Act which actually enshrines the Well-being of Future Generations within everything that the government is supposed to be doing and they have these sort of ways of working that are supposed to mean that they're all much more joined up. Now it doesn't always work quite as well in practice but at least it's a model, it's a governance sort of arrangement which is trying to address that need for much like having sustainability at the core of everything that happens. No question. The Welsh experience I think it's really worth looking at. Jean Moore of the National Economic and Social Council, and by the way she and her organisation have been very much to the fore when it was either profitable or popular in looking at these, as they say, looking at these behavioural issues for a number of years. And she says a really interesting presentation, she thanks you for that. The urge to travel or to fly, particularly post COVID for many is a strong motivation to counter what I suppose people feel are a few years of being deprived of the opportunity or the right to travel. That sense of regained freedom, I mean we've all felt it for honest, but how do you counter that with low carbon options given the high carbon cost if most people are going to be flying more frequently? Yeah, that's a really good point and it is so difficult isn't it because we all want to be kind of enjoying travel again, but I suppose at the moment the incentives are so perverse that it enables people to travel by plane for really short distances. Whereas you know they should be encouraging people to take the train and lower carbon modes. Like what's happening in Germany I think at the moment is quite interesting because they're debating, I think making all travel around the entire country by bus and train, only costing eight or nine euros or something. Like really making it incredibly cheap to take public transport. So if you have that sort of like shift whereas you know in the UK we have the tax on domestic flying, I mean the UK is small, we don't need to be flying in the UK. But so if we had like, yeah, if the cost was much cheaper to travel lower carbon modes, then I think you know we would see people at least starting to shift away and we've had discussion around frequent flyer levy as well and actually that's quite popular. So the public are pretty much behind is one of the most popular net zero policies that we found in our research is the idea that you kind of ramp up the tax that the duty that is that the passengers would pay the more flights they take per year. If you take one flight there's like hardly any tax, if you take sort of three four five like it starts to become incredibly expensive. And so it means that yeah maybe you could take a flight every couple of years or something and that would be that would be okay but that you just start to think about whether you really want to take a lot of flights. There's lots of things we can do to yes maybe take the occasional flight or ideally travel by other modes but just maybe not to the degree that people are just enabled and encouraged to do at the moment. Sure, don't want to be promoting any newspaper but Henry Manson the Financial Times this weekend at a great feature on rail travel in Europe. And he has announced that he's not flying anymore. He's not going to take flights at all ever. And he has a, I don't know if he said at all ever but he's given up flying and but he has a terrific very informative piece on rail travel in Europe. And of course, the length of time it takes to get from from one from from one destination to another is a key factor for people. Fortunately, one of the things that came out of the piece that he wrote was the cost, you know, it's it costs 500 quid or something for him to get from London to I think it was Budapest round trip. And I don't have the piece in front of me but I mean he said Ryan air was like, I don't know, 43 years or so 43 pounds. So that's the I suppose a measure of the of the challenge and Anna Davies is professor of geography in Trinity College, and she says leadership from government is clearly significant to support climate action. But what role do you see the private sector playing in changing behavior towards a low carbon future. Yeah, yeah that's that's an important point I think I mean I like I like to see the kind of like the three key elements of a transition being government absolutely has to lead but they can't do it without the public and businesses. And businesses are important because they create the products and services that we consume as consumers and so they will and they but they will only innovate and invest in greener products and services. Government support them and provide really clear policy signals that this is the direction of change and we can see that that's working quite well in terms of electric vehicles in the UK and some of the countries, because the government has said by 2030 we are banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars so manufacturers know right that's the that's the rules of the game. That's where we're heading for and so they invest heavily in electric vehicles and everyone's kind of moving in that direction but we don't see the same thing happening in other areas like retrofit insulation or kind of energy and other sectors where there's just, there's no clear sense of what the government is kind of expecting whether there would be any support for businesses that move in that direction so that the businesses are absolutely critical to the transition but they need in turn to kind of have some support and motivation from government. I think you said somewhere somewhere else that the real lesson from COVID-19 and is it's not so much that you can just adopt things and you can just read it across and say look great that work that work that work let's just do it for time change. But you said, if I hope I'm not misquoting but you said that look the real lesson is a bit more subtle that politicians and governments should realize that they actually have more room to maneuver with the public than they think they have. In other words that there is a greater openness and willingness to change amongst the public than perhaps politicians give people the credit for. And that's because politicians that I know myself because I was one, they tend more often to be pulled back by people and sectors and so on that wants to slow things down or perhaps stop things in their own interest. Then they are ever really motivated by those who are pushing forward and pressing forward for change all the time. So, but you said I think you did say that look the real essence of politicians perhaps just be a bit more give the public a bit more credit for what they're willing to do. I think that's absolutely the case yeah I think what we see is that actually the public is ahead of governments in many countries when it comes to climate change they want more action they're frustrated that the government isn't doing more. And yes, we need to kind of make sure that it's done in a fair way in a way that manages costs cost is a concern to the public, particularly at the moment so yes. It's not that there's carte blanche to do anything but the public really do want the government to do more and they will change if they're given the right support the right sort of degree of leadership and so on so I think yeah. Have some confidence that far from avoiding behavior change as is the current approach, people are very happy to play their part. Okay, and we're just on two o'clock and we all promise people that we finish at the time we say we finish and I'm sure you've other things to do as our viewers and participants have to thank you so much for fascinating and really interesting analysis of this point because you know we are kind of a presumption abroad that like you just would just take on board the lessons or sometimes that awful word learnings, which I hate, I don't think learning is now but anyway, but take on board these these and then just move forward it isn't as simple as that, I think you've demonstrated that it isn't as straightforward as that, but there's a huge amount that we can benefit from and understand in relation to behavior and the willingness to change from observing and from just recalling what's happened over the last couple of years. Thank you so much for that analysis for being so clear and for for fielding a number of our questions, we've all found it extremely interesting. So thanks so much Lorraine for your time, and thank you all for your tennis this afternoon of your participation as always, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.