JENNY WOODWARD: South-West Queensland, flooding 6th to 23rd of January.  
Western New South Wales storms and floods 6th January onwards.  
 

DAN ILIC: It’s a rare day when Australia doesn't have a disaster unfolding somewhere.  

JENNY WOODWARD: Clarence Valley bushfire, 21st January to 12th February.  
 

DAN ILIC: Granted, it's a big place, but incidents of extreme weather events are also on the increase, all over the world.  

TOMMY: Attribution studies have confirmed that those extreme events have been many times more likely because of global warming. So the climate change impacts that were predicted are here. And all of these seems to be accelerating eating. 

DAN ILIC: Professor Tommy Weidmann there, confirming our worst inklings.  

JENNY WOODWARD: Tasmania east coast, severe weather event, 21st Feburary onwards. Tropical low and associated flooding in the East Pilbara, 4th to 11th March. 

DAN ILIC: What you've been hearing in the background here, is a log of all the disasters that have taken place in Australia so far this year, read by Australian longest serving weather presenter, Jenny Woodward. 

JENNY WOODWARD: Western Queensland rainfall and flooding 22nd March to 20th April.  

DAN ILIC: This online record kept by the Department of Home Affairs includes helpful sorting feature on their website which list the types of events they’re tracking: storms, floods, hail, tornado, bushfire, earthquakes, landslides - even meteorite strikes make an appearance. 

But there is something missing.... 

 ...And that something is the heatwave.  

NEWS GRAB 1: It’s great for the swimming. 

NEWS GRAB 2: Just beach, lots of beach. Lots of sunscreen. Lots of water.  

NEWS GRAB 3: Yeah, yeah it’s nice. 

NEWS GRAB 4: You’ve just got ot get the right formula. And that includes beach, water and shade.  

NEWS GRAB 5: We love it.   

DAN ILIC: Heat! We love it. Can't get enough of it, right? Bring on the summer. I wanna sizzle under that hot summer sun. 

But, do we take heat seriously enough? Is Australia’s best friend, really our worst enemy? 

I'm Dan Ilic and this is Preppers a podcast about climate change preparedness where we ask the question: are we getting ready hard and fast enough for the climate changes that are coming?  

In this episode - as each month that passes goes down as the hottest on record, should we all put heat at the top of our threat assessment matrix and prepare for it to get a whole lot worse?  

Historically, the money we’ve dropped on disaster recovery has outweighed preparedness spending by almost 100 to 1. Lately, the Government has twigged that if we spend a bit more on preparation, less will go out the door when the shit hits the fan.  

As a nod to this change of heart, the name of the former federal government’s Emergency Response Fund has been changed to the ‘Disaster Ready Fund’. You see what they did there?  Crafty. Clever. ‘We’re not responding! We’re getting ready!” 

But what does this makeover mean in real terms? Well, the Disaster Ready Fund has quadrupled the preparedness budget - from 50 to 200 million per year, for the next 5 years. Top ups from the states and territories will bring that annual spend closer to 400million. Sounds pretty decent... but when you consider the 3 billion we spend on direct disaster recovery – and the knock-on cost to the economy of 18.2 billion per year, that 400 million starts to look less like a delicious ice-cream cake and more like a boiled lolly that’s been booting around the bottom of your grandmother’s purse for the last 15 years. 

Okay - but before we get carried away, let‘s not look this gift horse too closely in the mouth. Afterall, the first round of the Disaster Ready Fund rolled out in 2023, which means prepping projects are underway all over the country right now. 

187 grants have been awarded for the kinds of projects you'd expect to see; upgrading water bombing tanks, maintenance of seawalls, better hazard warning systems, flood levee design, that sort of stuff. 

So, a big focus on fire and floods with a sprinkling of other things depending on the part of the country you're in; a bigger and better pollen forecasting system for Victoria, an up-to-standard cyclone shelter for Palm Island in Queensland. Enhanced radio communication systems for the Northern Territory.  

Heat does appear on the list this time: Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have projects that focus on assessing or reducing the impact of heat waves. 

But if it’s not something the whole country is prioritising, just how big of a problem can heat really be?  

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  Heat waves in Australia kill more Australians than all other natural disasters combined. So in Australia, they're you know, they are our deadliest natural hazards. 

DAN ILIC: Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a climate scientist with ANU, and an expert in heat waves. And in case you didn't catch that: heatwaves kill more Australians than all other natural disasters combined. 

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  And on top of that, it's insidious. So you don't necessarily die of heat. It might exacerbate an underlying medical condition that you have or cause heart failure or hypothermia because of your body's response to those extreme conditions. So it's not necessarily something that's measured directly, but it has a very big impact on health in Australia. 

DAN ILIC: A heatwave occurs when the minimum and maximum temperatures are unusually hot for a period of three or more days. The total of excess deaths recorded during heat waves number in the hundreds. That means many more people die during periods of extreme heat than otherwise would. 

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  So the most vulnerable to the health effects of heat waves are basically the old, the young. So, you know, you really young babies as well. And anyone with an underlying medical condition that's certainly who's most vulnerable now. But that may also start to shift to include young, healthy, fit people in the next few decades as well as we start to reach those really, really severe conditions. 

DAN ILIC: It's not just health impacts and death rates that show an upward trend during heatwaves.  A recent study by Macquarie University found that rates of domestic violence also increase when the temperature spikes. And research out of the US has observed that rates of 'hate tweets’ are at their highest on hotter days.  

Across the globe, the number of people exposed to heat waves has increased in the last couple of decades by about 125 million. That's a lot of irrationally angry and very very hot people.  

The news that 2023 was the hottest year on record won't have come as a crashing surprise.  

NEWS READER: All 22,000 residents of Yellowknife in Canada’s northwest territories have been ordered to leave.  

NEWS READER: For four days the Evros region has been battling fires on multiple fronts.  

NEWS READER: Shanghai authorities declared an orange heat alert.  

NEWS READER: Phoenix in Arizona has now done 16 days where the temperature has bene above 43 degrees.  

NEWS READER: Greif and anger growing, over what could be Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster.  

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  So you really only need to shift the average temperature by, you know, less than a degree Celsius, and you'll see a huge increase in the frequency and intensity of extremes. And that's precisely what we've seen. The globe has warmed by just under 1.5°C now, and you can see the drastic changes we've already seen in their frequency, intensity and duration basically everywhere in the world. And that's looking at data that dates back to at least 1950, sometimes a little earlier. 

DAN ILIC: Ah 1950 - the same year car ownership in Australia jumped by 68%. Oil fuelled postwar consumerism and its advertising juggernauts took hold of our throats and eyeballs and ear holes and wallets and haven't let go. As a direct result, the number of extremely warm days we experience here in Australia has increased threefold in just the last 20 years. 

So how much worse is it going to get? 

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  I can't provide a forecast saying that, you know, in January 2070 Sydney will see a heatwave that's 52°C. We just can't do that. It's not what climate science and understanding extremes in the context of climate change is all about. But we can say, for example, that over Sydney we have seen temperatures, particularly in the west, reach near 50 degrees in the recent past. 

It's very probable that heatwaves in the middle or towards the end of this century could very well exceed those sorts of temperatures.   

DAN ILIC: The latest intergenerational report - that's the one where the government dusts off its crystal ball and tries to predict what the impact of today's policies will be on Australia in 40 years time - that report predicted that there will be three times the number of 80 year olds in Australia in 40 years time than there are today, and I will be one of them. An officially vulnerable old man who may have eaten too many kebabs in his day: a sitting duck for heat and garlic sauce.  

DAN ILIC: Heat is one of those tricky things, like eating snails or jumping off cliffs for fun. You might think about it differently depending on where you live and what you’re accustomed to. While 30 degrees in Hobart might see everyone melting into their shoes, for a place like Dubbo on the western plains of New South Wales, even 40 degrees isn't considered a hot day. 

LIV STEVENSON: It's 29 degrees right now. I dare say it will continue to climb. We have seen days well into the 40s, though over the last couple of weeks. 

DAN ILIC: Liv Stevenson is sitting by the sparkling waters of the Dubbo pool, which she manages along with the aquatic facilities in the towns of Geary and Wellington. 

LIV STEVENSON: This is where everyone comes when it's hot. While it is chaotic, while the lines get long and the pools get full, that's exactly how we like it. 

DAN ILIC: The Dubbo Leisure Center is well equipped to deal with crowds on a hot day, with water slides, a big water playground and plenty of shade. So it's a no brainer that it attracts people from across the whole region. 

LIV STEVENSON: With those smaller towns, they have even less access, so they will get in the car for half an hour, an hour to drive here to give the kids something to do while it's hot as well. 

DAN ILIC: The pool isn’t the only place that Dubbo-ites makes a bee-line for a on a hot day.  

CATHERINE MCALISTER: We have the air conditioning company on speed dial because for us overall, if something's wrong with the air conditioning, everybody goes, we've got a problem.  

DAN ILIC:  Catherine McAlister is the Macquarie Regional Library Manager. 

CATHERINE MCALISTER: One aspect of the public library is that everyone can come. They could sit here all day if they want, but certainly the vulnerable parts of the community benefit the most from having a council facility that gives them some respite from whatever the environmental conditions are. 

DAN ILIC:  Like I said, heat is relative, for Catherine a hot day is 40, 42 degrees.  

CATHERINE MCALISTER: But once you get around 36, 37, that's pretty warm. And the library is a beautiful, cool place on a day like that as you can see today. 

DAN ILIC: The Dubbo Regional Council has been doing a lot of thinking about what the future holds for a place that's already seeing it’s fair share of heatwaves.  

TIM HOWLETT:  I grew up in Dubbo. I love Dubbo. We want Dubbo to be a place that everyone enjoys living, working and playing. It’s not necessarily the best environment to live in. If it's too hot and you can't really do anything. 

DAN ILIC: Tim Howlett is the Team Leader of Growth Planning Projects for Dubbo Regional Council. His particular concern is how to deal with a growing population in the growing heat.  

The current growth rate for the city is about 1% per year, but Dubbo is captured in the 20,000km area earmarked for the state government’s first ‘renewable energy zone’.  

The zone will see the construction of new transmission infrastructure, along with wind and solar farms to feed into it. It's expected to bring $10 billion in private investment to the central west region by 2030. 

TIM HOWLETT:  It’s approximately going to have about 5000 to 7000 construction jobs at its peak. So we do want to convert some of that employment into permanent residents. 

DAN ILIC: How to grow a city that can cope with the increasing rates of heatwaves is a challenging problem. So when researchers from the High Performance Architecture Project team at UNSW reached out to Dubbo Council, it couldn't have come at a better time. The university offered Dubbo a place in a pilot program, which would see the implementation and testing of the National Heat Vulnerability Observatory.  

The aim of the project is to measure Dubbo’s vulnerability to heat and help them figure out what to do about it. 

LAN DING:  It's a very exciting project because we know that urban heat is a big challenge. So what we are doing, we really want to work with state and local governments to tackle this challenge.  

DAN ILIC: Associate professor Lan Ding is the National Heat Vulnerability Observatory, or NAHVO, project lead. 

LAN DING:  The Heat Observatory provides an index - so it provides consistent and integrated approach to measuring and reporting heat vulnerability issues. 

At the moment there are too many studies, in particular, case studies have been done, but there is a lack of integrated, consistent approach to reporting and measuring urban heat vulnerability at risk.  

DAN ILIC:  When I say ‘National Heat Vulnerability Observatory’, you might start imagining dome roofed buildings with scientific apparatus pointed at the sky – but NAHVO actually takes the form of a website, which sucks in a huge amount of local area data, and transforms it into a map based, colour coded, heat tracking and busting digital tool. With a few clicks, decision makers can quickly understand how vulnerable their communities are, and what they can do about it.  

LAN DING:  Local governments really want to understand the mitigation options to support their planning controls - the cooling intervention options. 

They want to understand how those technologies can be utilised and how these scientific outcomes can help them.  

 
DAN ILIC:  One of the cooling interventions Lan is referring to have been dubbed: ‘super cool materials’.  Instead of building a house with dark roof tiles and bricks which absorb the heat of the sun, this new generation of materials reflect that heat – by quite a bit. When researchers measured the surface temperature of cool materials on a sunny 42 degree day, they were just 25 degrees. Pretty impressive. Dare I say, super cool. 

And if super cool materials are combined with other cooling strategies, like planting trees, it’s estimated that the reduction in heat could save around 10 lives per 100,000 people a year. And that’s what the NAHVO project is all about.  

Having teamed up with UNSW, Dubbo Council selected two areas which would be the focus for the NAHVO pilot: South Dubbo and South Lakes. 

TIM HOWLETT:  We've looked at both a well-developed area and an area that's being developed, so it'll be interesting to see as development occurs, what the what the data is showing. 

DAN ILIC: The project kicked off with UNSW students visiting the case study precincts with handheld temperature sensors, to get some baseline readings. 

TIM HOWLETT:  In November, the 2023 drones were flown over those precincts to get more detailed information and heat mapping for where the hotspots are, and the temperature sensors were installed on streets on street piles in those precincts as well, to capture data over the extended period of time. 

TIM HOWLETT:  So we're going to South Dubbo, which is one of the precincts where the temperature sensors have been installed. That's out by our existing built up area. And South Lakes is a newly developed and developing suburb.  

DAN ILIC: Driving through the streets of his town Tim asks the tough questions. 

TIM HOWLETT:  Can you ever have too many pubs? 

TIM HOWLETT:  So this sensor that we're looking at in South Dubbo, that's attached to a parking sign, at the front of, a childcare centre.  

DAN ILIC: This sensor is one of six in the South Dubbo precinct – it looks a bit like an upside down stack of dinner plates but it’s collecting a continuous stream of real time temperature data and uploading it to the cloud. 

TIM HOWLETT:  It's very technical and I don't understand it, which is good because we've got the university involved interpreted for us. 

DAN ILIC: Back at UNSW in Sydney, Dr William Craft, one of the NAHVO team, is busy doing just that. He's pulled the temperature data from the cloud and entered it into a spreadsheet containing all the information that will feed into the Heat Vulnerability Observatory.  

TIM HOWLETT:  So what you're seeing here on the left is all of the data that we've collected across a range of different categories that are used to determine and predict the heat vulnerability across the thermal energy and health aspects of our heat vulnerability index.  

DAN ILIC: This spreadsheet is the font of all heat vulnerability knowledge. It pulls data from all over the place to create a ‘digital twin’ of the case study areas. It contains everything from travel time to the nearest hospital through to how much energy households use on a hot day. And not forgetting the temperature data, which comes not just from the on the ground sensors and drones, but from the Bureau of Meteorology heatwave classification system.  

WILLIAM CRAFT:  So you can see here, for example, for South Lakes in this particular month, we had ten heatwave days. And we can also categorise the severity of that heatwave. 

DAN ILIC: Taken together, this very rich set of data creates a detailed picture of how vulnerable each case study precinct is. But spreadsheets aren't to everyone's taste, and this one has so many data points it can make your eyes fall out of your head. And that's where the Heat Vulnerability Observatory Index comes into its own. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  So we're trying to present the data in a way that's a little bit more user friendly, so that people that aren't data scientists can extract meaning, and they can inform their decisions based on actual data.  

DAN ILIC: NAHVO has a very friendly looking interface which you can navigate by clicking on the colour coded map of the city.  

WILLIAM CRAFT: So our ranking from 1 to 10 is colour coded from blue through to green to yellow to orange to red, to clearly enable users of our index to visualise very quickly and easily. Where are the areas that are most vulnerable to the heat? So, for example, if clicked on South Lakes here  just the month of January in 2020, we can see thermal has an index value of nine, which is red, which is quite high. 

We have vulnerability index value for health of nine as well. And then an energy index value of eight. So this particular area uses quite a bit of energy at a household level during this particular month.  

TIM HOWLETT:  So the paddock that we're currently looking at, it's got a development application in for approximately 650 lots. 

DAN ILIC: Driving around South Lakes with Tim, it's not hard to see why it's an area that's vulnerable to heat. It's a typical new housing development, lots of single story three bedroom houses on blocks that but right up against each other, very exposed to the sun. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  So we’re currently looking at newly constructed houses, predominantly brick veneer housing and all have dark roofs, all the houses behind us as well have dark roofs. All of the houses have brown bricks as well. Given this is a new area, the trees are only 1 to 2m high at the moment. They'll eventually grow taller, but that won't happen anytime soon. 

DAN ILIC: As we make our way past the lines of newly planted saplings, it's interesting to think that they also live a digital life in the tree canopy column of William’s spreadsheet. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  At the moment, with we've got it at 1% because the trees are still developing and still growing. 

DAN ILIC: We can understand exactly how many dark roofs there are. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  Approximately 65% of the dwellings, across this area in South Lakes having dark roofs. 

DAN ILIC: And when it comes to factors like health and income, which have a bearing on the number of hospital presentations, or whether someone can even afford to turn on the air conditioning, being this specific starts to make a lot of sense. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  We have a 19% of people considered vulnerable due to their age. 3% classified as a low income household. 

DAN ILIC: Pretty much the only thing that's missing from this data set is what Brian in number 147 ate for breakfast.  

So now we know what the heat vulnerability score is, what to do about it? 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  Then what we have done is run different scenarios using computational fluid dynamics. 

DAN ILIC: Ah yes, computational fluid dynamics. Do go on Doctor!  

WILLIAM CRAFT:  So it's a very, complex simulation software that we can use to then run hypothetical what if scenarios. For example, if we take this South Lakes area, we have here over on the right some of the different mitigation scenarios that we've integrated.  

DAN ILIC: The different mitigation scenarios are a list of strategies that councils might employ to help reduce heat. These include things like introducing water misting, using super cool building materials or increasing greenery. 

WILLIAM CRAFT:  So if we click on ‘increase greenery’ where we have increased the number of street trees, the colour dropped. So we had a thermal, ranking or value of nine once we clicked on increased greenery. So running our simulation and we see that thermal index value can drop to an eight. If we then click on the combination of different strategies, so potentially throwing everything that we can at it, we can say it drops even further to, you know, seven, which is, you know, an orange colour rather than a red. 

So that's kind of the end goal here is targeted at interventions and what we can do to prevent either hate getting worse or how we can adapt to it or build new communities that don't make heat any worse. 

DAN ILIC: These mitigation strategies can reduce surface temperatures in an area by as much as ten degrees. But when William talks about dropping an area like South Lakes from red to orange, it can mean by as little as a 1 or 2 degrees difference - which after all of this effort, doesn't sound like much. 

  

WILLIAM CRAFT:  When we consider larger scales a reduction of one degree can be quite significant across a large geographical area. When we're talking about extreme heat, that can have a huge impact on, you know, the health outcomes of, a particular person.  

It also highlights the fact that there's only so much we can do. I read something the other day that 15 cities throughout Western Australia were the hottest places in the world on that day. 

So it's only going to get worse, and some places are going to become basically uninhabitable, which is why it's so important to do what we can right now. And it may not seem like much, but all of these little actions, do add up. We just have to be as prepared as we possibly can for the future. 

DAN ILIC: When it comes to heat, Will and Sarah are singing from the same hymn sheet.  

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRCIK:  Best case scenario, when it comes to heatwaves 80 odd years from now is that they don't change much. And that would ultimately happen if we basically stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow. And that would just mean that they would be what they are now and just continue as they are for the next 100 or more years. The worst case scenario is that we continue emitting greenhouse gases at the rate that we are, unfortunately this is probably one of the most likely scenarios, and we just basically say heatwaves increase on average by a few degrees Celsius in terms of their intensity and just get longer. It's really hard to put actual figures around how long these heatwaves may be. But one thing's for certain the heatwaves that we've experienced now may nothing compared to what's to come in the future. We should be making changes basically now, in terms of how we live in hope within heatwaves. But I just don't think it's clear to most people how urgent making those changes are. We don't have any time left to lose. 

DAN ILIC:  Dubbo is awaiting the full results of the pilot study before they develop a plan for heatproofing the city. In the meantime plenty more councils are already knocking on Lan’s door interested having their cities added to the observatory.  

The goal is to scale up – Lan has her sights on 21 Australian cities – the more cities, the more data, the more meaningful and useful the tool will be.  

The case for prepping for heatwaves seems pretty clear. 

But as with so many things, there’s a catch. Because when our brains and budgets get busy preparing for the impacts of climate change, our focus can be drawn away from fixing in the underlying problem.  

GIOVANNI CUNICO:  The more we implement adaptation policies and solutions, the more we postpone the fundamental mitigation policies, right? 

DAN ILIC: Giovanni Cunico is a PhD candidate in the UNSW faculty of business. Just like climate scientists use computer simulations to model climate change, Giovanni uses computer simulations to model how humans behave when confronted with climate change.  

His research has found that adaptation or preparedness, can be bit of a double-edged sword; while it’s no doubt important to protect ourselves from extreme weather events, that preparation also has the effect of lulling us into a false sense of sense of security. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO:  When we implement adaptation policies, we create the side effect that we decrease the perception of the severity of climate change. What happens is that we put ourselves in a very risk pathway, because we will become more and more dependent on adaptation, because since we don't put into place fundamental solution, fixing the root causes of the problem, climate change will just get worse and worse, making us, on the one hand, more dependent on adaptation. 

Because the more severe becomes climate change, the more we have to protect ourselves. Of course it's important. It's necessary we develop a sort of addiction because if we stop adapting, we will perceive so much the extreme consequences of extreme events, we can stop it. So we will end up in a situation in which we have so many, so frequent extreme events that all our resources and efforts will be focused on that. And it's a trap because once you get there, you cannot get out anymore. 

DAN ILIC: To avoid getting trapped in this feedback loop, we have some choices to make. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO:  So when we talk about fundamental solutions we refer to mitigation. And there are two types of mitigation we can implement. Humanity entirely can develop technological solutions that allow us to keep our lifestyle based on consumerism, but at the same time completely reduce, almost towards zero, the amount of emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 

DAN ILIC: If this pathway sounds familiar, it's because it's the one we're on right now. The  renewables rollout is far and away the biggest show in town. The pitch is that we transition to solar and wind, we buy electric cars, we get rid of our gas cooktops and life continues more or less as it does now - which is where the problem of time starts rearing its ever-present head.  

GIOVANNI CUNICO: Because assuming we invest billions of dollars today for developing green technologies, it will take decades to develop them, and then decades to implement them. So this is the first pathway.  

The second one is the people change their behaviour and basically we consume less. Because consuming less means polluting less. That's the simple equation. The good thing of changing our habits, becoming more sustainable, is that we will have a positive effect on the environment today. 

And what we found is that what drives people decision is the perception of climate change. And when we implement adaptation policies, we create the sad effect that we decrease the perception of the severity of climate change. We perceive there's still time. And that's the tricky part. 

DAN ILIC: It’s no surprise that many of us are under the impression that we still have time. Sure, there are hurdles to overcome, but things are in motion; electric cars will get cheaper, the new grid will be built, the economy will transform, and we’ll reach our net zero goals in time... right? Is that happening?  

But even if we believe that Australia is on track, this is an international effort – and not everyone agrees that we’ll get to where we need to be. In fact, a growing number of scientists are saying we’re simply too late and too slow and we’re already bumping into 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  

_____________ 

It’s at this point that geo-engineers stepping into the fray.  

While Lan and her team at UNSW are working locally to reduce heat, there are researchers all over the world attempting to design technologies that could work at a global scale to cool the earth. 

My personal favourite is the idea of a sunshade, roughly the size of Argentina, which would be unfurled out in space, somewhere between the Earth and the sun, to filter the amount of solar energy that reaches our atmosphere, thus reducing the temperature. I can’t see any problem with that. That sounds perfectly fine. They’ll probably get someone very reputable to build it, you know – someone like Boeing.  

Other plans involve flying aircraft around the various layers of the atmosphere, spraying huge quantities of particulates into the air with the aim of increasing cloud cover to reflects the sun's heat back into space. 

Now, it might sound like Elon Musk has been let lose in the geo tech candy store, but there are serious people all over the world, spending serious time and serious money developing these projects, very seriously.  

And while they may show theoretical promise, they will cost billions to implement - and no one really knows if any of it will work. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO:  So basically, what we are doing is that we are betting on our infinite ability to develop technologies that can protect us, and we are risking our necks, because what if we reach a ceiling and then we cannot adapt anymore? 

This is just a global bet. It could work or not. We just we just don't know. 

DAN ILIC: Professor Tommy Weidmann agrees there’s a tricky tightrope to walk between expending resources on mitigation, or spending it on preparation.  

TOMMY: It's really a difficult balancing act because every dollar you spend, you can only spend once. And so, yes, it's completely understandable that we have to almost triage our response to climate change. We have to really think about where do we have the biggest benefit for society. 

And that's really difficult to establish because yes, we need to react to impacts that are immediate and imminent, and we need to help people who have been affected. But we also need to do everything we can to still avoid even worse climate impact. So anything we do in the way of adapting or preparing for climate change, but all of what we do cannot take away our resources and our focus on mitigating. 

And it's really important to stress that every fraction of a centigrade really matters. 

DAN ILIC: If, as Giovanni says, technological mitigation is either too pie in the sky – or rolling out too slowly - then it comes down to us to change our behaviours. But are we even capable of feeling the fear and doing it anyway? Maybe our brains are just not built for something as big and incomprehensible as climate change.  

BRIAN COOK: Humans have evolved to avoid those really hard types of decisions – Oh out of sight out of mind. Put your fingers in your ears and your head in the sand, because that’s really hard. It's going to be really expensive, really painful and it’s going to cause all sorts of chaos. 

DAN ILIC: That’s next time on Preppers.  

If you’ve found any of this interesting and I know I have, because, you know, I’ve been reading it and it is very – I'm going to be telling everyone about it. I want you to ell as many people about it as well. Maybe even, you know, write us a review, wherever you leave reveiews – it’ll help us in the algorithm.  

Preppers is a production of the UNSW Centre for Ideas - produced and written by Sabrina Organo, with production support by Cassandra Steeth. Sound mix and design by Julian Wessels. And presented by me, Dan Ilic. 

 

This episode was made on the lands of the Bidjigal, Gundungurra, Tharawal, Ngunnawal,  Ngambri and Tubbagah peoples. 

 

END