Cultures in Conversation Blog

Climate and Biodiversity

Cultures in Conversation | Climate change in the classroom, living room, street and beyond

Ocean vs teaspoon

By Reshma Mehra

I grew up in India in the 1980s—life was green. Cloth bags were the order of the day. There were no supermarkets, no weekly shop. My mother and grandmother reused plastic bags until holes rendered them useless. I had enough, and all of my clothes fit into a small armoire. I had very few plastic toys. All of our food came straight from farm to table. We traded in our Limca and Thums Up soda bottles for 5 paise each, and we repurposed empty Black Label bottles for our filtered water. We never thought about being ‘environmentally friendly’; it was just the way we did things. We were no different to most other middle-class Indian families.

By the time I was in my 20s and employed, my satisfaction with a ‘comfortable life’ had lost its lustre. I acquired scores of shoes, more outfits than there are days in a year, a nice car (a new one every couple of years, please), and stuff. So much stuff…

In recent years, I’ve become less acquisitive, more conscious of my environmental footprint and that of my family. I make sure to recycle whenever I can; we only have one car; we do our best to avoid single-use plastics; we don’t print unnecessarily; we use fans as much as possible; we compost what we can. In short, I try to do my best to keep my environmental impact as small as possible.

I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly informed but I consider myself environmentally conscious and I believe that each considered action contributes to the greater goal of climate change. But since I attended Climate Change in the Classroom, Living Room, Street and Beyond, the first in a series of talks and interventions programmed by Alserkal Advisory for Expo 2020 Dubai’s Programme for People and Planet, I feel an existential paralysis. Have all my efforts been for nought? Where and how do I (as an individual) figure in the solution? Or is the problem so big that it’s beyond redemption?

Half-measures

In the climate change debate, accusations roll off the tongue. We blame developing nations and their drive to catch up with the developed world, to keep growth rates high and their stock market indexes higher; we consider anthropogenic neoliberalism the culprit; the West admonishes developing nations’ dependence on coal and oil; developing nations retort on the inherent double standard in the West’s position.

As Ambassador Lumumba Di-Aping delivered his presentation on the realities of our times and the inextricable intersection between climate change, waning biodiversity and dubious social justice, one thing quickly became clear: all our efforts thus far have been half-measures.

On the other side of the world, the Conference of the Parties 26 (COP26)—ostensibly a watershed moment in the race against climate change—took place from 31 October to 12 November 2021. The world’s largest, most productive, and most populous nations convened “with an updated plan that… reflect[s] their highest possible ambition at that time.” Harking back to the Paris Agreement (the lauded outcome of COP21): when representatives united in Paris in 2015, the majority of the world’s countries agreed to work together to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, aiming for 1.5 degrees. More notable is what they didn’t agree on: an actionable framework or detailed set of rules enabling them to achieve the agreed target — the “Paris Rulebook.”

Also featured in the laundry list are items such as “accelerate the phase-out of coal,” a directive that countries like India stand firmly against, arguing that weaning India off coal too fast would come with terrible human costs. Di-Aping drove the point home in his indictment of the colonial hegemonic systems that fueled much of the developed world’s progress, asserting that “the history of biodiversity loss and the advent of climate change is a…history of global injustice, oppression and dehumanization.”

That history continues to play out on the global stage in the climate crisis. Ramachandran and Pai, authors of Why India Can’t Wean Itself Off Coal, call it “rich-country hypocrisy,” by which developed nations continue their dependence on fossil fuels while calling on developing nations—who allegedly rely on fossil fuels to give their people a fighting chance to lift themselves out of poverty—to slash their reliance on them. As youth climate advocate Lara Rudar put it in her response to Di-Aping: “The climate crisis has exacerbated decades of injustice towards historically marginalised communities and is deeply intertwined with racial injustice.”

Dinner Table Conversations

When I told a friend and colleague I was writing this response to the session, she shared an article. The author contends that in all climate change discussions, we tend to obfuscate the relationship between culture and climate, whether it is to understand how culture has contributed to the climate crisis or how it might, in turn, be impacted. That got me thinking about the ways in which, over the past few decades, our cultural practices—“our everyday sets of largely unexamined assumptions and daily patterns of life”—have contributed to the climate crisis.

Our immutable desire for more than we need coupled with our desperation for convenience has left us with few clean solutions. Have we, as individuals, bought into the neoliberal agenda and the acquisitive mentality to an extent beyond repair? At the very least, we seem to have ignored the climate crisis so long that our best option is to choose the least destructive of a myriad of bad options.

Dinner table conversation these days revolves around the damage wreaked by our solutions. "Think twice about electric cars because the environmental cost of making an EV is much higher than that of making your petrol-run car.” “Want to use cool seal on your pavements? Watch out—they radiate heat, raising the ambient temperature by up to 7 degrees warmer.” “Recycling at home? Are you sure you’re doing it right? One slip could ‘contaminate’ your entire recycling load.”

It can be better

In a response to the IPCC Working Group 1 Report published on 9 August 2021, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres made a rallying cry: “The solutions are clear,” he said. “Inclusive and green economies, prosperity, cleaner air and better health are possible for all if we respond to this crisis with solidarity and courage.”

Di-Aping’s position echoes Guterres’, despite acknowledging our gross ineptitude at having made any meaningful progress on climate justice so far. Lara Rudar and Alla Semenovskaya, as representatives of the youth, also stood out as voices for the historically marginalised and ignored. They stand up for the rights of all of humanity, even as they stand up for their own right to climate justice and all that goes with it.

It’ll never be the way it was, but it can be better than the way it is.

And so I wake up from my paralysis and resume my half-measures, doing my bit to mitigate the deluge of devastation, one teaspoon at a time. I’ve also said a silent prayer that the most powerful people in the world rise to a call for “their highest ambition”—set the ‘possible’ aside.

Space

Cultures in Conversation | Never Be Lost: Learn to Read the Stars

Never Be Lost: Learn to Read the Stars

Govind Dhar

Alserkal Advisory has curated a programme of talks and artist interventions that aims to build, exchange and challenge the ways in which we experience the buzzwords of the age: space, learning, the environment, resource security, tolerance, health, knowledge, agriculture and travel. As the culture locomotive in EXPO2020’s bid to bring the world together, the programme acts as a staging point for the pressing conversations that bind us across the globe.

The topic to cap off Space Week was ‘Never Be Lost: Learn to Read the Stars.’ Alserkal urged us to think laterally about the stories that have bound stargazers from ancient times, and what looking up at the heavens has meant to humanity across ley lines and boundaries, oceans and coastal divisions.

Maori Astronomy and the Future

To start us off, the avuncular, hoodie-clad, Rangi Mātāmua—an academic, stargazer and professorial storyteller on Maori astronomy and star lore—told us, in perfect campfire tones, how the stars formed the very fundament of Maori history, culture, and religious practice. Farming, navigation, timekeeping, proverbs and sayings, and even how homes were built, were based on knowledge of astral movements. Ancient Maori looked up at the sky to work out season, month and day, recording every visible event such as meteors, the change of seasons, harvest times or the spawning of flora and fauna, as markers of time and precursors of the future.

Dr. Mātāmua noted the arrival of ‘new settlers from Europe in the 1800s’ as a polite explanation for why this system of ancient knowledge was lost in favour of the solar-driven, Gregorian calendar. He heralded an ‘uprising, a reclamation, and a renaissance’ for knowledge of Maori astronomy due to a new generation of New Zealanders wanting to know more about their ancestral traditions.

"The great symphony"

Shaking up proceedings next was the verbally calisthenic Mashhoor Ahmad al-Wardat, professor of astrophysics at the University of Sharjah. Dr. al-Wardat pitched us headlong into a series of ancient facts, star charts, and mythological nomenclature from the perspective of ancient Arab astronomers. He demonstrated that a measuring tape of either 108 moons, suns or earths could be used to divine not just the distance between these celestial bodies, but at times even their diameters, adding, “This is the great symphony created by Allah!” He gave us a crash course on navigating one’s way out of the desert, treated us to a whistle-stop tour of Arabic names for star patterns and days of the week, and poetic wisdom for the places one must avoid taking livestock based on astral observation.

The Sea and The Stars

From Australia, Duane Hamacher—associate professor of cultural astronomy at the University of Melbourne—talked to us about the wisdom gleaned from stars in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Much like Dr. Mātāmua’s Kiwi stargazers, Dr. Hamacher lulled us with soothing tales about seafaring ancient astronomers who used the stars to hunt, fish, plant seeds, and harvest, and how the path of the stars could presage everything from the migration of the dugong, to when turtles would lay their eggs. All of this, he told us, was thanks to Tagai, a southern sky deity responsible for creation, whose body formed a swathe of star constellations in the Southern Hemisphere. He told us of Uncle Segar Passi, an indigenous Australian elder who is said to possess knowledge of ancient astronomical wisdom, encoding it in his world-famous paintings, including that meteors are a sign that spirits have been captured and are being taken from this life to the next.

Poetry about the Night Sky

Nujoom Alghanem, Emirati artist and poet, concluded the evening by holding audience members spellbound under a (planetarium) roof of stars with a poem read in turns in Arabic and by Sally Mousa in English, with a performative flourish of the two reciters orbiting the audience, meeting finally in the middle by the end of the poem. Ms. Alghanem’s poetry was a tapestry of the natural world, ‘tears of meteors,’ ‘deserts rising on the shoulders of the wind,’ ‘guardian stars’ and ‘mountains of stories.’

The common thread between speakers this evening was their belief in the power of the heavens to give us a deeper understanding of our shared ancestral history. Their narratives start from the belief that before there was language or nationality, borders or walls, our connection to the earth and to each other came from simply looking up. Despite the observable differences between us as a species, the stars offer a common spiritual centre from which we have perhaps forgotten to read.

Urban and Rural Development

The City at the End of the Rainbow

Govind Dhar

In the bowels of the Terra Auditorium in the Sustainability Pavilion at EXPO2020, Alserkal’s third talk for its Cultures in Conversation series contemplated the invisible thread of community-building in cities, specifically how public spaces are used, claimed, co-opted and transformed, and how citizens contribute to building a city. With thinkers and practitioners from England, South Africa, Mumbai, Bahrain and Kuwait, spanning the worlds of city planning, art advisory, and conceptual and practical architecture, we were treated to highbrow narratives, as well as lived experiences of community building and intervention, from around the world.

Executive Director of Alserkal Advisory, Vilma Jurkute, opened the discussion with a series of stark facts. “The number of people in urban areas is projected to increase from 55% to 68% by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa. Cities account for 75% of total resource consumption and at least 70% of energy-related greenhouse emissions.” In engaging multi-disciplinary urban planners and interventionists, Ms. Jurkute hoped to “encourage a departure from fixity, embracing the incomplete form,” and consider the potential and invisible forces within the notion of what a city could be, including culture, art and creativity.

Cultures in Conversation | What Makes a City: Dimensions of Culture and Possibility of Community

Dreamscapes and Spirituality

Charles Landry, the famed “big thinker” behind the iconic 1990s urban planning manifesto, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, kicked off proceedings. Mr. Landry is famous for his antipathy for bureaucratic and regulatory structures, suggesting that they stymie the flow of ideas that would lead to happier, re-enchanted spaces full of wonder and ‘a generosity of spirit.’ “The pandemic taught us that civilisation is the thin film of fragility we wrap around the chaos of order,” he said. He cited the ‘15-minute city’ concept by Carlos Moreno as a real example where work, home and play would become accessible within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride.

Delivered in a city famed for its complex road networks and the world’s tallest building, Mr. Landry’s address urged that it was better to have a hundred things done well, rather than one large structure imposing itself on everyone, with walkability to and from places of gathering, rather than driving there.

The People are the City

BARD Studio’s Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty from Mumbai took a contrasting approach, suggesting that urbanism in cities is a metastasising yet nurturing narrative that cannot be approached from an exterior or top-down diktat. “The world imagines cities through tools of maps, statistics and data,” said Ms. Gupte. “We’d rather think of cities as constituted of expositions of small forces…Tenements, one-foot shops, building extensions, the homeless looking after shop wares, where day shops close and a night shop opens, where people occupy unregulated spaces and become aspects of the city structure.” “Cities aren’t docile things,” said Mr. Shetty. “Cities happen; they’re not made. I don’t think policies influence cities; it’s the other way around.”

History Cleaves the City

Stephen Hobbes of Trinity Sessions in Johannesburg was tasked with a community-building project in Noordgesig, a township so impoverished and marginalised during Apartheid that it wasn’t even documented on spatial planning maps — a sticking point for the 50,000 or so people living there. The Trinity Session found a rallying point for the people of Noordgesig in the form of social activist icons Mama Betty Glover and Ma Vesta Smith, whose stories galvanised artists into painting murals of them across public walls and spaces under the banner #ArtMyJozi.

Success is a Double-Edged Sword

Ali Ismail Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen of Civil Architecture were tasked with interventions to rejuvenate so-called unused spaces in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In Bahrain, the duo revitalised a former palm grove with floodlights and benches, creating an inexpensive intervention to encourage people to gather there. “The intervention was successful during the art event, but was a failure because workers went away,” said Mr. Karimi. “The workers have now returned because we didn’t remove the benches. Extended observation has been one of the nicest things – success and failure ebb and flow.”

Tolerance and Inclusivity

Are Nations Built on Tolerance or Empathy?

Govind Dhar

His Excellency Dr. Zaki Nusseibeh, Cultural Advisor to the President of the UAE, and Her Excellency Noura Bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, UAE Minister of Culture and Youth, spoke to cultural strategist and editor Myrna Ayad about tolerance as the foundation of nation-building in the United Arab Emirates, and its vital importance to the dream of a multi-cultural and multi-faith society of founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

Defining Tolerance

HE Noura Al Kaabi urged us as global citizens, residents and Emiratis to focus on mutual respect. HE Zaki Nusseibeh said he did not like the word tolerance, preferring to think of it as empathy: “Is it religious and spiritual? It’s all these things.” He cited Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, referring to empathy that teaches us to respect one another by understanding each other’s suffering.

The panellists cited Sheikh Zayed as an icon of tolerance. “He maintained a focus on education and culture as an intrinsic part of building a society,” said HE Zaki Nusseibeh. “To be able to have close to 200 nationalities living together in harmony in UAE demonstrates that tolerance is the very foundation of the UAE.” HE Noura Al Kaabi added: “He was selfless, inviting people into the country to share their expertise but also to make it their home, so they felt like they belonged.”

Tolerance Requires Women

“Women have always held a central role in our society,” said HE Noura Al Kaabi. “Children are heavily influenced by their mothers, and education starts at home.” HE Zaki Nusseibeh agreed: “If we had more women negotiators, I can assure you we would have better peace treaties. Tolerance requires women at the helm.”

Cultures in Conversation | Openness and the Path to Prosperity

A Divided World

When asked about a divided world, HE Zaki Nusseibeh said, “There was a time when I thought we were moving to a safer community, toward a global village, more accepting of each other and our differences, but societies seem to be breaking apart into tribal groups and closed chambers.”

Social media has become the double-edged sword that builds a global conscience, but also fuels radicalism, violence and hate. “We are in an age of virtual extremism, of virtual shame, taking things out of context, of cancel culture,” said HE Noura Al Kaabi. “We would rather go back to Sheikh Zayed’s edict of focusing on goodness.”

Hope is a Poem

Danabelle Gutierrez, having lived almost half her life in the UAE as a poet, actress and photographer, recited three poems about tolerance, multiculturalism, and her love for the UAE, including Bodies of Water, a piece inspired by Pacita Abad, and Ode to the Love of my Life, a paean to the UAE.

The Everyday Classroom

You’re Going to Need More Concrete

Govind Dhar

The latest Cultures in Conversation (CIC) event for EXPO2020 saw ‘The Everywhere Classroom’ engage volunteers in an interactive half-hour session of a game developed by Carlos Páez at the Latvian pavilion. “The idea stems from a five-year-long exploration of the intersection between theatre and game design,” says Páez. “We found a new mode of participation that allows people to talk to each other in ways that are nonverbal, that can transcend language and culture.”

Rules of the Game

The scenario: a mountain village on an alien planet has been destroyed by wildfires. Volunteers would play one of two games (‘educate’ or ‘build’) while collectively using a mobile game to forage for, and trade resources with virtual travellers.

Building a New World

The groups engaged earnestly in the collecting of materials, trading, and attempting to rebuild the village, guided by a mysterious voiceover that told them when they had become too greedy with concrete or too low on wood.

End Game

“When you play most games, you’re playing them individually,” Páez told me. “Here I wanted people to work collaboratively.” In getting strangers to cooperate towards a common goal, the Everywhere Classroom certainly creates the conditions of a goodwill bubble for people to navigate an imagined problem — though a little more theatrical urgency, or genuine conflict over scarce resources, might have deepened the lesson.

Travel and Connectivity

Big Vapour is Watching

by Govind Dhar

Speakers Mary Ellen Carroll and Renee Cummings crashed through the roof of the DP World pavilion — the former via parachute, the latter via a digital videogame avatar, unable to travel to the event in person. Mary Ellen Carroll (aka MEC) held down the fort by discussing her 20-year career of socially activist and conceptual commentary using architecture, infrastructure or even policy, as art. Her everlasting quest is to investigate the question “What makes a work of art?”

Renee Cummings’ work looks at remedying AI that has been trained on data that mirrors the past, where historic discrimination — algorithmic bias or injustice — is set up to repeat itself. Mary Ellen Carroll’s works have utilised technology, land, performance, photography and architecture at scale to make us question authority, injustice and discrimination, including Credible Fear (2019), which used a blockchain auction to support detained immigrant families at the US border, and Indestructible Language (2019), a solar-powered neon sentence atop the Schoolhouse in Glasgow for COP26 reading ‘It is green even in the dark.’

MEC also spoke of ‘Ethical Imagination,’ a project as part of the Visions 2030 incubator programme, wherein she developed a crypto token in a blockchain registry of ideas. Asked whether art must have real-world utility, Carroll replied: “Well, it can have that utility, but the premise is that the work of art has only to be itself. It doesn’t have to have any other kind of function.”

Global Goals

Throw Your Hands Up in the Air

by Govind Dhar

Alserkal Advisory commissioned a performance by the feted SIMA Dance Company at the Sun Stage, Opportunity District, responding to the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015. Only 16 of the signatory 193 countries are on track to achieve all SDGs by 2030 with a score of over 80 percent.

Call to Fair

A troupe of dancers in form-fitting black tops and billowy beige skirts performed three pieces combining devotional, balletic, and hip-hop dance motifs, backdropped by the oudh and the wails of the qawwal, dancers throwing their hands up and looking heavenward. Choreographer Alaa Krimed, founder of SIMA, entitled the work ‘The wider the vision, the narrower the phrase’ — a possible nod to the loftiness of the UN’s goals against the narrow constitutions of political will.

Glass Half Empty

The Economist took a pessimistic view of the 169 SDGs when they were first announced in 2015, calling them ‘Biblical,’ ‘unfeasibly expensive’ and ‘stupid,’ while the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Brookings Institute called them ‘on track’ and ‘achievable.’ The SDGs may be intensely ambitious, but if 8 out of 10 signatories are over the 50 percent mark, the glass is already half full.

Health and Wellness

Art is Only as Good as Art Does

by Govind Dhar

The seventh edition of Cultures in Conversation slowed its usual pace to reflect on health and wellness via a series of art practices, preceded by a soundscape and screening by artist collective 3 137, described as ‘a multi-sensorial artistic intervention that creates a critical narration around the contemporary culture of wellbeing.’

The Slow Lane

Curator and writer Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, joining from Paris, spoke of being inspired by the Buddhist principle that nothing comes of individualism, and that all events co-emerge, manifested by interdependent actors. Her work focuses on establishing collective authorship with other artists and stakeholders for projects such as I Cannot Work Like This (2018), and she argued there is a therapeutic aspect to artistic practices in situations of injustice and crisis.

Pop-Up Nourishment

Paky Vlassopolou, of the artist collective 3 137, highlighted personal projects centred on feeding attendees, including Hello Mrs Ramsay (Things Don’t Change That Fast) (2017) and Practising Pleasure Where Possible (2018), sculptures based on ancient breast-feeding apparatuses conveying the contradictory notion of women as caregivers counted out of classic economic productivity models.

Justice

Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi continued the thread of discussion on seeking restitution, change and justice — from the unconditional return of lands, waters and relics to indigenous peoples of Australia and Canada, to genuine representation of indigenous, trans or LGBTQi+ individuals in positions of power in museums and galleries.

Seeds of Rebellion

Co-founder of The Other Forest, Beirut-based Adib Dada’s sustainable architecture work concerns reforestation in and around the Middle East. “Don’t wait for the political class to change or help,” said Dada. “Go directly to the community. Do it yourself.” His organisation had covered over 3,500 square metres of land with self-sustaining greenery in Beirut.

Food

The World’s a Greenhouse After All

by Govind Dhar

At the end of Food, Agriculture and Livelihoods Week at Dubai EXPO2020, Alserkal Advisory orchestrated a Pecha Kucha of eight innovators, thinkers, scientists, and food advocates at the Australia Pavilion, each delivering an idea in 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide. The talks were capped off with a curated journey by author Deepak Unnikrishnan dubbed ‘This is Not a Food Tour,’ spotlighting Suleimani tea, samosas, mango rice, and parripu vada around EXPO2020 grounds as a tribute to the UAE’s migrant population.

First, the Bad News…

900 million people starve each year — 55 million of whom live in the MENA region. The current agribusiness model produces 1.3 billion tons of food waste annually. Between 15,000 and 20,000 litres of water are required to produce one kilogram of meat, versus 100-300 litres for potatoes. A third of the food produced in the world does not reach the consumer.

Silver Linings

Andrea Provenzano offered the conceptual Black Almanac, a hybrid system of industrial and eco-friendly farming methods. Tansha Vohra of Boochi led a degustation of ants, black soldier flies, crickets and worms, noting that 2 billion people worldwide eat insects. Salma Serry’s Sufra Kitchen delves into forgotten recipes to see how food informs identity. Selma Abualia at Producer’s Market aims to cut out middlemen between farmers and customers. Daniel Solomon’s EroeGo salvages rejected crops to reduce food waste.

Follow the Science

Mario Bernardi’s Farmelody helps farmers study and improve their livestock’s gut flora to cut methane emissions. Mark Tester of Red Sea Farms introgresses the DNA of hardier desert species into crops like quinoa, trying to decrease the water needed for one kilogram of tomatoes from 350 litres to just 20.

Water

Water, Water Everywhere, but Fewer Drops to Drink

By Govind Dhar

For its final talk at EXPO2020, Alserkal Advisory presented a collection of inter-disciplinary discourses on water, curated by Nada Raza, director of Alserkal Arts Foundation, spanning spoken word and video art, professorial research on Indian river systems, pearl diver songs, and overfishing, culminating with a five-course tasting of sustainable fish dishes by Chef Geraldo Thomazini with Dr. Aaron Savio Lobo at the Brazil pavilion.

Water Music

The talk opened with a video and poetry piece by artist Himali Singh Soin exploring the Victorian belief that the world was heading for a glacial apocalypse. A discussion with Ghazi Faisal Mulaifi and his collective, Boom Diwan, followed with Minarets — jazz fusion peppered with Arabic and English singing and verses from Rumi, with percussion from the Mayouf Mejally Ensemble, one of the oldest pearl-diving music ensembles in Kuwait.

Resisting the Tide

Dr. Vikrom Mathur, researching the Indus and Mekong rivers, said glaciers had melted faster in the last four decades than in the last 700 years, pointing to the Aarhus River project in Denmark as a model for how a polluted river could be cleaned and rehabilitated.

Who Owns the Flow of Water?

Jeanne Lassus and Shahana Rajani researched the embodied cartographies of the Indus River, documenting the upheaval to river communities under colonial control of the delta, of which only 10 percent now remains.

Heads or Tails for the Win

Aaron Savio Lobo, a marine conservation scientist, described how Indian trawler fishing for prawn and langoustine picks up about 530 additional species, most discarded as ‘trash fish’ though edible. He noted that 46 percent of our fish comes from farms, and diversifying those farms could strengthen ecosystems and fight invasive species.

Food for Thought

Dr. Mathur said he was tired of the damning conclusions of the science and data, and the solutions, which he said had been known to us for decades: “I’m more interested in awareness becoming a movement and then behavioural change. How we convince people to change the way we live and consume is what we have to think about.”