DAN ILIC:  On the very edge of the rugged northwest coast of Tasmania there's a very tall cliff. And on top of that cliff stands a very tall tower, with scientific apparatus strapped all over it like giant barnacles. This is the Kanaook, Cape Grim Baseline air pollution station, and since 1976, its job has been to measure the composition of our atmosphere. 

RAY: It was set up as the Australia's contribution to the international effort to monitor carbon dioxide initially, but now that's grown to include various properties of the atmosphere, including aerosols, solar radiation, etc. It would be more than 100 different gases measured there.  

DAN ILIC:  Ray Langenfelds is an atmospheric scientist with the CSIRO. They manage the baseline station alongside the Bureau of Meteorology.  

There are similar stations in remote locations dotted across the world - all part of the World Meteorological Organization-Global Atmosphere Watch – a network that stretches from Antartica to Hawaii to Canada.But the air that's gathered at Kannaook, Cape Grim is special. 

RAY: The significance of the geographical location is that wind is blowing from the west and southwest, which is the prevailing wind direction, and so the air is traveled the thousands of kilometers before lost or need land, and therefore it's very well mixed, it's very clean, and there is nowhere in the world that you get a better measure of how the global atmosphere is changing and has changed over nearly 50 years. 

DAN ILIC:  This is some seriously A grade air - and it's providing the whole world with a baseline measure of how we're doing on greenhouse gas emissions. 

RAY: Our group’s work is really all about tracking the change in atmospheric composition, and using those measurements to understand the processes that are changing the atmosphere. And if we do understand those processes, then we're able to predict how the atmospheric composition might change in future. That information, in turn, would be used by the climate modelers to make forecasts about how our climate might change. 

DAN ILIC:  Six times a year, several tanks of this fancy-pants air are collected and shipped to Aspendale on the outskirts of Melbourne, to be stored in Australia's very own air archive. 

RAY: Okay, so this is our main air archive room, and we have a large number of stainless steel cylinders stacked up here on the rack. 

DAN ILIC:  The cylinders look a bit like scuba tanks – shiny, fat scuba tanks – They’re stacked floor to ceiling like wine and organised by year.  

Madame, would you like to try this 1997 bushfire?  

RAY: So this one here is our very oldest. That was the first air archive tank filled at Cape Grim. That was April 1978 when it was filled. The CO2 concentration was something like 330 parts per million. And now in 2024, we're up past 415 parts per million or so. So there's been quite a large change in CO2 concentration over that period. 

DAN ILIC:  This archive is the most utilised resource of its kind in the world. When partner laboratories discover a new gas in the atmosphere, the first thing they do is order samples from these tanks and reconstruct an atmospheric history. 

RAY: This will give you some idea of their relative contributions to global warming, and how it's changed over time. 

DAN ILIC:  As the country that plays host to the most important baseline station in the world, you'd think Australia would be well across what our own emissions are. But the fact is, we don't really know. 

RAY: The way it’s being done at the moment is based on a lot of assumptions about how much is being emitted from different processes, different activities. And one of the things we would like to do is to set up some additional stations around Australia where we could put instruments to continuously measure the air, and that would make a very big difference in Australia being able to accurately define its emissions. 

And of course, Australia has obligations to report its emissions to the United Nations. So that's something that we could do better than we do now.  

Air is a soup of very large number of different gases. I don't know how many there are, but there would be thousands. We just take it for granted don’t we? It's there all the time around us and we breathe it constantly. 

But we probably, unless you're in the business we're in, you don't sort of stop and think about what it's made of and how important it is for us and for the planet. 

DAN ILIC:  I'm Dan Ilic and this is Preppers, a podcast which asks the question: are we get ready hard and fast enough for the climate changes that are coming?  

In this final episode, we'll take a look at how we do or don't think about climate change – and how that thinking informs our behaviors.  How can we better confront the difficulties that lie ahead to mentally and emotionally prepare – and perhaps even do something about it.  

ANTONIA GUTERRES: We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.   

DAN ILIC:  With the UN Secretary General's attempts to motivate the world with snappy affirmations like this, you'd think we'd all be busy at our crafting tables, Bedazzling our protest placards. Yet understanding the science and how close we are to the point of no return hasn't made that much of a difference to how most of us are going about our lives.  

To be fair, there's a couple of wars going on, a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis, an epidemic of violence against women - plus, everyone has ADHD.  There's plenty of worries to be getting on with.  

Besides, we voted in government on a climate ticket but still only the boomers can afford to buy EVs. So what the hell else are we supposed to do? What’s the right course of action? And is it all just too big for our lizard brains to handle? And when is the next Bridgerton coming out?  

And if no one can tell us exactly what effect climate change will have on us, and when, how are we even supposed to think about it? 

TOMMY WEIDMAN:  Everything we measure and everything that we model has uncertainty. And as scientists, we are used to live with that. We know that still we can make certain statements about where things are going, even with that uncertainty. But in the general public, it might be difficult to interpret it that uncertainty and also the time frame, because climate change is something that's still happening relatively slowly. 

DAN ILIC:  Professor Tommy Weidemann suspects that the way our brains process climate change has a lot to do with how we process time.  

TOMMY WEIDMAN:  Our personal timescales are within days or weeks or maybe a couple of years. That's where we plan our activities. That's where we feel comfortable. That's where we live. Looking ahead to something that is only even ten years away - we find that difficult. And if then also there is some uncertainty of how this will play out, then that's even more difficult. 

So yes, there is a problem in translating this into what does it mean for everyone? And also into action and what can we do. 

DAN ILIC:  One of the things that makes climate change such an amorphous mess is that we're in uncharted territory. We can't know what the future will look like, because humans have never before threatened to turn the planet into a permanent hellscape – and just how bad it gets depends on what we do right now.  

And as Tommy said, we’re not great at processing things that may happen somewhere off in the future - plus there are hundreds of variables at play. So how to make sense of it all so we know how to prepare? 

DAN ILIC:  This was a problem the IPCC was trying to solve when it came up with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways - a set of five possible future scenarios, which use the time-honored tradition of storytelling to do what stories have always done best: teach us lessons and warn us away from danger. Be careful what you wish for. Don't accept gifts from strangers. If you kiss a frog it will turn into a real estate agent.  

These visions of the future, push policymakers to ask: what could the consequences of our decisions be? And do we really want to go there?  

Each scenario pairs a description of the world around the year 2100 with an estimation of how far the temperature might increase over pre-industrial levels between now and then.  

The best-case scenario is called ‘Taking the Green Road’. It imagines the world achieving net zero by around 2055, with governments prioritising health, education and wellbeing over growth. Essentially, it’s a shift toward the de-growth vision Mark Diefendorf described in episode two, and it's the only scenario that offers any hope that we might stay under 1.5. In this future, the temperature sits somewhere between 1 and 1.8 degrees.  

‘A Rocky Road’ is all about regional conflict and taking care of one's own backyard, especially when it comes to energy and food security. Environmental concerns are a low priority. Well-being and equality are out the window. In this world, we continue to emit carbon at current rates until 2050 when emissions start to fall. We fail to reach net zero by 2100. The temperature range likely with this scenario? 2.1 to 3.5 degrees above pre industrial levels. Alarmingly, this is not the worst-case scenario when it comes to warming.  

That gong goes to ‘Taking the Highway’. This scenario puts all its eggs in the markets and technological innovation baskets. It’s a human centered future, with a focus on improving health and education – but, an energy intensive, fossil-fuel-based economy leaves us with triple the emissions by 2075, temperatures somewhere between 3.3 and 5.7 degrees above preindustrial levels, and a belief that technology will dig us out of the encroaching desert sands. It is going to be hot! 

Just how this kind of information is understood in the real world, not just by politicians, but by your average citizen is of interest to researchers working in the climate psychology space. 

BEN NEWELL: So my name is Ben Newell. I'm a professor in the School of Psychology at UNSW and I'm also the director of the Institute for Climate Risk and Response. 

DAN ILIC:  Ben's background is in experimental cognitive psychology, which means he's interested in how people understand risk and make decisions. 

BEN NEWELL: I have been increasingly interested in how that applies to our understanding of climate change, and what that means about the kinds of changes that we will need to see in our own behavior in order to adapt to the changes that are coming. 

DAN ILIC:  Ben and his research team wanted to understand what people make of these IPCC scenarios. 

BEN NEWELL: What we did in a set of experiments was just give people those kinds of projections and then ask them, what do you think? So do you think that three degrees is more likely than one degree? Do you think that they're all equally likely? And when you see a projection and it has these wide intervals around it, what does that actually mean? Because to our minds, that level of uncertainty is important to try and reconcile. What does that mean for, you know, my willingness to take actions and learning things. 

DAN ILIC:  The research found that you can split people into three distinct groups pessimists, optimists, and maintainers. 

BEN NEWELL:  So the majority of respondents thought that we would maintain the status quo. About 60% said, we're going to carry on as we are. And then about 20% thought, no, that's going to be best case and 20% thought it's going to be worst case. 

DAN ILIC:  As benign as ‘maintaining the status quo’ might sound, it’s not a great outcome. We don't reach net zero by 2050 and we push past tipping point temperatures. So, in all, 80% of respondents think that one way or another, we're going to hell in a handbasket. 

At the top and bottom ends of the data, another pattern emerges.  

BEN NEWELL: We also found that the pessimists were the younger people in our sample, and they optimists were the older people in our sample. As Alice, my coauthor, said, you know, they’ve caused the problem and now they don't think it's a problem. 

CANDICE BOYD:  When it comes to young people. They very much feel let down by an older generation and they feel let down by government. Part of that is seeing that an older generation doesn't have to live with the changes that young people are going to have to deal with. So an older generation in some ways is allowed to not care, because they're not going to live long enough to really see the impact of their behavior now.  

DAN ILIC:  This is Doctor Candice Boyd. She sits in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne. 

CANDICE BOYD:  I'm also qualified as a clinical psychologist and my interests are in the geographies of mental health and wellbeing and climate related mental health. 

DAN ILIC:  The formal recognition of a connection between our mental health and the threat to our environment started to emerge in the 70s when an Australian environmental philosopher by the name of Glenn Albrecht is said to have coined the term ‘eco anxiety’, which in 2017 was formally recognized by the American Psychological Association. 

CANDICE BOYD:  A sense of environmental doom. And that's the dimension of climate anxiety that we understand to be fear related. And I guess closer to our understanding of anxiety, as well as a kind of anticipation that things are going to go wrong in the future.  

The young people that I work with describe have a kind of, sense of, helplessness and hopelessness in terms of the future and also in terms of what they can do about it, that the problem is so big that there's no point in them doing anything about it. That hopelessness is actually closer to what we understand to be depression rather than anxiety. 

DAN ILIC:  One of the possible solutions for this sense of hopelessness is to look to environmental success stories.  

CANDICE BOYD:  Eco inspiration is an argument, really, that we need to rebalance the climate change narrative, that the doom and gloom narrative is the one that dominates. But there are lots of examples where nature has recovered. Something like the ozone layer is a very good example, where we were concerned that that ozone depletion was something that was going to have a permanent effect on our atmosphere, and yet we have made changes to what we put into the atmosphere, and that has allowed the ozone layer to repair itself. 

DAN ILIC:  It's these sorts of examples that can potentially alleviate climate anxiety.  

CANDICE BOYD:  We can within that, also see that there is hope and that there are changes that we can make and that those changes can have an impact. 

DAN ILIC:  Another approach is to repair the severing of our selves from the environment that modern life has brought about. 

CANDICE BOYD:  Post humanism is about understanding human beings in relation to the environment, but it's a bit more than that. It's that we are the environment, that we are nature. We're not apart from it. And in lots of ways that the climate change problem has come about, because we treat the environment in the Western world as something to be exploited, something that we've become disconnected from because of our lives being so indoors, so sedentary, so dominated by digital technology. 

So this is where we get some really nice clues from Indigenous people and Aboriginal people in Australia. It's about having, understanding of this country not just being on country, but actually being country. We are a country and that we are all country. And while we haven't grown up with that as our understanding that really that climate change narrative needs to change to encourage us to see our environment and nature as something that we need to nurture and take care of, not something that we need to be afraid of, not something that can hurt us or damage us or threaten our survival. 

DAN ILIC:  That our relationship with the natural world is a touch out of whack is something that's not gone without notice by experts like Tommy. He agrees that in order to tackle climate change, a realignment of our values is in order - it's an opportunity for a kind of ‘mental reset’ to pull us away from consumption and toward the things that matter. 

TOMMY WEIDMAN:  Now, of course, everyone wants to have a decent lifestyle, but I think in developed countries we have reached a point where we are going beyond - households have several cars, several televisions, several toilets in the same house. And I think what we should be looking into is whether there are other ways of achieving a level of satisfaction and well-being, a certain standard of living that is acceptable. And that should be really for everyone on the planet. 

DAN ILIC:  Tommy appreciates that this is easier said than done. We are all embedded in a system that requires us to earn money, to pay our bills, to service our mortgages, and getting off that treadmill may not sound realistic.  

TOMMY WEIDMAN:  It has become entrenched in our culture, in our way of thinking, in our way of governing, in our way we behave. The idea of trying to break that circle can only really work on a societal level that we are happy to do with less, but have more time for family and friends. And if that comes from the bottom up, then I think also politicians and governments will find it easier to follow. 

DAN ILIC:  Within the limits of our lives it can be hard to know what to do - if we even think that taking action is necessary, what should we do? What's enough? Should I stop flying? Give up my car? Stop eating meat? Lie down in the middle of the road. Or just sit in the corner and repost mems about the environment – when really IM having a panic attack!  

BEN NEWELL: People's understanding of that, the impact of different actions is not great. How many burgers do I not have to eat before I can drive my car? Or whatever the calculus might, might be? And it's really hard to compute those numbers and it's hard to communicate them. But I think many people probably are aware of the things that they can be doing, but they're too costly. 

If we want a car, we'd all probably like to go and buy an electric one, but we can't. They’re too expensive. And so that's a that's a pretty simple economic answer about incentives. You make things easy, you make things cheap, you make them, you know, readily available. 

You reduce the frictions that are involved in, in taking them up. But that's only going to get you some way. It might also be related to the psychological motivations. It might be something to do with me thinking my own action is just not going to be enough to make a difference, and so there's no point in me doing it. 

I think where the question for me becomes very interesting is whether: if I'm taking these actions at an individual level, does that give me the sense of efficacy that then pushes me further towards wanting to vote for, wanting to get on board with those more system level changes? 

Or am I fine to do everything as normal, not make any personal sacrifices? Because I know that doesn't actually make any difference. But I'll vote for the big policy change -which down the track will have an impact on me, especially if one of those policy changes is, you know, there's going to be a frequent flyer tax. If you're going to have a personal carbon budget that you have to adhere to each year or something like that. and that trade-off is psychologically fascinating. 

DAN ILIC:  Another psychologically fascinating factor is fear. Does talking about how bad things might end up and getting some ice-cold terror running through our veins, a help or a hindrance when it comes to motivating action? 

BEN NEWELL: Often people will say, ‘Oh, no, you don't want to overwhelm, you don't want to scare people because it will it will demotivate them. It will lead to this sort of spiraling of disengagement’. A colleague of mine in, UQ, he  was very much of the opinion that he didn't see the evidence on that when it came to the climate debate, and that actually, I think the phrase he used was, you know, “Striking fear into people's bellies” was what we really needed to do to start action and not sugarcoat it. But that doesn't mean that the future outcomes are not still very uncertain.  

And it doesn’t serve us well to say everything’s going to be rosy or everything’s going to be disastrous. It’s acknowledging yes, there's uncertainty in the pathways that we’re going to take but we need to get to a point where people can have a tolerance of the uncertainty knowing that there are things that we can’t define at this point. 

But I think there is now a recognition that action needs to happen, that the actions that they can take as an individual are not going to be sufficient. But do we still need people to be at that place of accepting that society needs to change more broadly, and therefore their individual actions are going to be helpful and contribute towards that and understanding, you know, the moral case for taking action. So it's not just that you make it easy, but you make the reason for doing it, you know, fully understood. 

And that's what we should be focusing on, not the apocalypse. 

DAN ILIC:  Articulating the moral case for taking action is a challenge that UNSW professor of philosophy Jeremy Moss, has taken up. 

JEREMY MOSS:  One of the greatest unfairness is that climate change is that people who are already poor, who don't have access to clean water, reliable electricity, easy access to jobs or clean air, or who struggle with the basic necessities. Their lives are likely to be made worse by the impacts of climate change. 

DAN ILIC:  For Jeremy, the fact that Australia continues to knowingly contribute to the cause of this suffering by digging up huge amounts of fossil fuels means that we have a morality problem that we simply don't acknowledge. 

JEREMY MOSS:  It's a little like if someone was to say to me that they're feeling murderous today, and I said, well, ‘Look, it's your lucky day I've got a gun for sale’. And I sold it to that person. Then it's pretty obvious that while they're a murderer, I'm complicit in their murder because I knowingly sold them a product that I knew that they were going to use to commit a murder. And selling fossil fuels is a bit like that. That gives you, as a country, some sort of complicity in the harms that are created when other countries burn out fossil fuels. 

DAN ILIC:  What this means is that exporting countries like Australia, the US, Canada and Norway ought to take responsibility for the harms their products cause. 

JEREMY MOSS:   Now that responsibility might translate into different things. It might mean that we need to cut emissions quicker and deeper in our own countries. It might mean that we have to aid other countries in their mitigation efforts, or it might mean that we need to contribute to a loss and damage fund or help other countries adapt. But what's clear is that selling a product that you know is going to be used in harmful ways when there are alternatives does give you a complicity in that harm. 

And that might be a hard thing to convince people of. But I think that's where the moral arguments take us. 

DAN ILIC:  Australia has not pledged to the loss and damage fund that was announced at the World Climate Summit, but it has committed around $400 million to help the Pacific adapt and prepare for climate change. But when you compare this figure to the 12 billion a year handed out in fossil fuel subsidies, it may well leave you thinking about drops in oceans.  

JEREMY MOSS:  Australians have to demand that governments change their focus in that regard. Ultimately, large groups of people acting together is how things change. I think the duty you have as an individual is best fulfilled by contributing in some way to some sort of collective action. 

DAN ILIC:  As we've gone about making this podcast, the call for collective action is something we've heard again and again, particularly from those on the scientific front lines, like heat expert Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick.  

SARAH: What I do is pretty depressing. I completely understand that. I know a lot of people get upset and incredibly overwhelmed, but that's not what I want them to do. I want them to get angry, really angry, and then incite some sort of change from that. So yes, we have the power to reduce our own carbon footprint and make our own adaptation. But we also have the power to change public policy. And we need a lot of people who are willing to campaign and vote wisely to do that.  

SHAYNE GARY:  If we knew how to start a revolution in changing behaviors toward sustainable lives, then we could do it. 

DAN ILIC:  Shayne Gary is a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at UNSW Business School. 

SHAYNE GARY:  But the truth is, we don't know how to do that. It's not giving people the science because that has not stimulated action. So what is it? What are those levers and interventions and how do you build? How do you start to build a revolution? 

DAN ILIC:  This is one of the sticky questions Shayne is trying to answer, along with PhD candidate Giovanni Cunico. Giovanni and Shayne are using computer modeling to try to unpick why humans often behave like climate change isn't a thing. One of the factors that Giovanni thinks is impacting our motivation is the on-off nature of extreme weather events. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO: We have extreme events for a time that becomes much more quiet then after a few months, extreme events - and actually people forget. So once we adapt, we sort it out, good. Let's move on. But if the pressure was more constant, we would have taken different approaches because human behavior is driven by these pressures. So once we perceive these pressures of climate change, we will take actions. 

We don't want to get there. We want to intervene much before...  

SHAYNE GARY:   ...Before the pressures build to the point where it's too late to maintain the terrific quality of life that we've got. Not the standard of living, not the economic standard of living, but the quality of life. Clean air, the ability to go out and enjoy a warm summer's day without burning up. And we don't know enough about how to activate that process. 

DAN ILIC:  Giovanni takes heart from the fact that this isn't the first time in recent history that the world has had to take dramatic, collective action. Covid anyone? Anyone remember that?  

GIOVNANI: Think about Covid, right? We changed from night to day  

SHAYNE GARY:  Massively. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO: Our lifestyle just so quickly. 

SHAYNE GARY:  Because we were so afraid of the consequences. 

GIOVANNI CUNICO: So we know we can do it. We just don't know how we can decide to do it. 

SHAYNE GARY:   But the infrastructural change is much bigger, right? So we were able to change our behavior by simply staying at home. But the sort of replacement in the sociotechnical system in which we operate day to day - the massive change that needs to happen across that system in order to, you know, support ongoing life is massive. We have to change fundamentally the way that we think about progress and advancing society, and that you're not going to do it temporarily. It's not going to be just a month or two months or three months that you're going to do. This is the rest of your existence is quite a shift. The motivation has to be very high. 

DAN ILIC:  How it is that we decide to do something? That we don’t just have a panic attack when we see footage of the Amazon on fire, then go back to eating our Venezuelan steak? How do we become motivated to change our minds in a way that translates into practical changes?  

These questions bring us full circle - back to where we began in episode one – to the research that shows that 80% of us a worried about climate change and only 10% prepare.   

So, how to get people to change their behavior – whether it’s to mitigate our own carbon footprints, or change to prepare for extreme weather events that are becoming more common?  

Researchers all over the world are trying to find the key to unlocking our motivation - and Brian Cook is one of them. 

BRIAN COOK: The long term projections are just terrifying, but the short term nature of our political system means no one really wants to deal with it. 

DAN ILIC:  Brian's an Associate Professor with the University of Melbourne. Among his research areas are climate change and human behavior, or inaction, particularly when it comes to preparing for flooding. He describes himself as a ‘geographer of risk’. 

BRIAN COOK:  If you look at risk management more generally, the state wants to devolve responsibility to the individual. Now, in that context of kind of neoliberal development of responsibility, we have a situation where we want to encourage individuals to take personal responsibility for their household. 

DAN ILIC:  To date, encouraging householders to take personal responsibility to prepare for disasters has largely been left in the hands of the emergency services. The kinds of things they want people to do are relatively simple: keep your gutters and drains clear. Install a flood guard. Discuss an emergency evacuation plan with your family and have a grab bag at the ready.  

You might be familiar with the radio ads, news items, billboards, or pamphlet drops that are used to encourage people in disaster prone areas to make these kinds of preparations. But while these methods of communication might increase awareness of risk, as the Red Cross research suggests, they don't seem to change behavior. 

BRIAN COOK:  We come up with some information you think people should need. We put it in front of them somehow, and then we expect the enlightenment to do the hard work of prompting change. 

DAN ILIC:  Having spoken to a lot of frustrated emergency service personnel, Brian decided to take matters into his own hands by starting a research initiative called Community Engagement for Disaster Risk Reduction, or CEDRR (cedar), for short. 

BRIAN COOK:  I sometimes describe CEDRR as really rigorous common sense. 

DAN ILIC: CEDRR opts for one of the simplest approaches in the book: listening. The hypothesis was that by engaging with people as individuals, getting them talking about their own experiences with risk and disaster, a relationship would form; participants and researchers could ‘learn together’ - Identifying what actions participants might be curious about and might apply.  

So, Brian and his team of researchers chose a flood prone area of Victoria and started knocking on doors. 

BRIAN COOK:  As much as possible. It looks like two friends having coffee and kind of chewing the fat. I think in this current world that we're in, we naturally crave human connection. So it began very much as I like, let's do this partnering and listening and see what happens. 

DAN ILIC:   A CEDRR engagement is not about telling people how to prepare. Instead, it's about getting people to actively engage in the idea of preparedness by answering a set of questions about their perceptions of risk and their experiences with disaster. 

BRIAN COOK:  The person is all that matters. And so, for example, the first question of our engagement is what kind of risk taker are you? And it's kind of a weird question, but what it does is it signals from the outset that it's about them. It also frames the engagement as a reflective activity. It's very much them telling us their story. 

DAN ILIC:  Having knocked on over 10,000 doors and talked with over 3000 people, Brian found that this method of engagement does a lot to shift the dial. 

BRIAN COOK:  So if you do the hard work of knocking on doors and building a relationship with people, what we see is a lot of learning done and a lot of action done. Those people who participate in the initial engagement and the follow up engagement on average, tell three more people about the experience and talk about flood management. What we're getting from the depth is not only actions at the household scale and learning, but a spillover effect as it diffuses through a community. 

DAN ILIC:  It took Brian and a 25 strong team of researchers many months to gather enough data to find that, scientifically speaking, CEDRR works. But knowing how much people power and time this kind of engagement takes does raise questions about cost and efficiency. 

BRIAN COOK:  This is slow research. Listen to people and build that relationship. Follow up with them. Care. Those are not things you do quickly, but I think it carries really important implications for how you go about doing community engagement. Because if your ultimate goal is risk mitigation, then you have to kind of look at the process that brings you to risk mitigation. 

That involves a lot that involves some cognitive change. It involves a reconsideration of your values. It will involve different relationships with other people. It will involve capacity and intentions. And all of those sorts of processes require a meaningful, trustful interaction. The economics of it mean it actually makes more sense to do the hard work of listening and engaging with people, even though the assumption is that delivering pamphlets is cheap and easy. It's so inefficient that you might as well just light them on fire. 

DAN ILIC:  While CEDRR focuses on the individual and mitigating small scale disasters, Brian is well aware of what major flooding looks like and has his eye on the bigger, long-term picture. 

BRIAN COOK:  What we're facing is a situation where, because of human nature and bad governance, we painted ourselves into many corners, right? So we have existing assets, capital in these silly locations. That could be bush fire, Blue Mountains kind of communities. It can be the entire east coast of Australia and its flood risk and how we respond to that will say a lot about us over the coming generation. 

Do I have faith in the ability for us all in this country to recognise the implications of what we've done over the last century in terms of urban development and make the really expensive, really hard decisions around retreat, around picking winners and losers? Sooner or later, just the costs of flooding will force that. Would want to bet on it? No.  

So for me, I think the next big thing is, hey, while we hope for a collective societal level response, you can also do these things at your household scale and be better off because you won't feel smug with your house flooded blaming the government. It's just going to suck. So if you can take these actions to mitigate that event or mitigate the smaller scale events, then you really should. 

DAN ILIC: The idea that we’re failing to confront the scale of the problems we’ve created for the planet and ourselves is pretty bleak. But when you look into the heart of darkness, you’re going to see... well, darkness. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look – and it doesn’t mean that we can’t come out the other side better prepared, whatever that might look like for you.  

TOMMY WEIDMAN:  The way I’ve solved this conundrum for myself is I think hope is something that's not just a state of mind, but it's also something that we can create actively. That is something that is almost like a conscious decision - an attitude that can be adopted. And it's something that helps us to think more clearly and also to think creatively of possible solutions - and to talk about it I think that’s really important aspect as well.  

MEGAN EVANS: A lot of people are experiencing grief. And the more that we are honest with ourselves and each other about the grief that we're experiencing, the more opportunity there is for each of us connect over that grief and to seek support with each other and to find joy with each other in living well on a fucked-up planet. 

MARK DIESENDORF: We do not know whether we have already crossed a climate tipping point into an irreversible state. All we can do is hope and work really hard to reduce our climate impacts. The longer we leave action, the more likely that we will cross not just one tipping point, but a whole series of tipping points from which there is no return and the earth becomes uninhabitable. 

JEM BENDELL: We have this ability to see what's going on in the world and communicate with each other And yet, of course, that doesn't mean that we're all waking up to reality because understandably all of us, to a degree, want to see the world in a way which makes us calm down, makes us feel we belong, makes us feel capable. 

SARAH PERKINS KIRKPATRICK: If everyone reduce their emissions, for example, that would make life a whole lot easier. But also everyone needs to adapt in their own way and there's a lot of onus on the individual to do that. But I'm hoping Australia, we've got at least the ability and the resources to adapt to what's to come over the next eight years or so. 

MIRI (MARGARET) RAVEN: I'm also not convinced that, like, we need to exist here on the planet as humans. I'm not saying that we're not important. I'm saying at some point in time we'll be done and at some point, probably Earth will die. And that's just the reality of living things. Everything dies. Stars die. We are just a star. So at some stage we will die. And I think we just have to come to terms with that. And this is us coming to terms with the fact that we can't always rely on the things we've relied on. 

DAN: My name is Dan Ilic and this has been Preppers, a podcast that has tried to answer the question. Are we getting ready hard and fast enough for the climate changes that are coming? 

And the answer is in some ways, yes. And in some ways no. Whatever the answer, one thing's for sure. We need to keep asking it of ourselves, our neighbours, our families, our elected representatives. Because, as John the prepper put it, oh so well. 

JOHN: We cannot survive alone. We need each other. 

DAN ILIC: Thank you so much for listening to Preppers. If you found it at all interesting, please tell someone about it. Tell them it's really uplifting and well worth their time.  

Preppers is a production of the UNSW Centre for Ideas - produced and written by Sabrina Organo and presented by me Dan Ilic. Production support from Cassandra Steeth and sound mix and design by Julian Vessels. 

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

It's been an absolute privilege to host this podcast. And if I could leave you with one thing: get yourself a ‘go’ bag and make sure you put the following things in it. You need a woollen blanket. You need some water. You need four bean mix. Also, can I suggest some candles. Lithium battery solar panels. Also put in a map and a compass, a map and a compass and some bandaids. You need some bandaids. 

END