Q&A

What are think tanks and what are their roles in solving global issues such as climate change?

Think tanks are generically nongovernmental organisations where people can do research and thinking about the problems that, depending on which think tank you are talking about, are being faced by society and come up with solutions that might have some degree of impact. Chatham house was setup just after WW1 to help provide a safe space for governments and industries to talk to avoid the sorts of problems and framing issues that led to the conditions that produced the first world war As a former academic myself and Dean at the University of Leeds, coming to a think tank is really interesting because even though I worked across government in an academic role for many years, and therefore had very good networks within government, because Chatham house has been working with governments for around 100 years to outline solutions to problems and identify the problems themselves, most days I have contact with senior government officials either with UK or other governments and brief them in ways academics and institutions can’t. Therefore, for me, as an academic, it’s really a position of privilege because my skills were really about putting together pieces of the jigsaw to paint the big picture, whereas most academics are incentivised to take a small piece of the jigsaw and study it in great depth However, by doing this you don’t see how the whole picture works and how the whole system works So, coming to Chatham house, I have much more policy impact and policy leverage as governments are actively seeking advice on thorny issues and I’m freed from some of the academic institutional constraints; usually you have to be a very deep specialist in a field, alongside writing papers and getting grants, to be successful whereas at Chatham house it is much more about understanding the big picture and coming up with interesting solutions for these problems. So that is kind of the world of think tanks and Chatham house is about geopolitics and international affairs, of which climate change being an important one. Other think tanks however may focus on things like security, economics or a whole range of different things. Chatham house is quite different from some of the think tanks that get press, in that we are scrupulously independent as a research organization; we don’t have political ideological leanings and we stive to occupy evidence based middle ground We are not a kind of advocacy think tank We are not promoting libertine views as some of the Tufton St think tanks do or we're not kind of driving a pro environmental agenda for the sake of advocacy. What we are actually saying is that if you think about the things that broadly shape international affairs and economics, if you think about risks that come from environmental degradation are becoming so central that they actually now underpin a good chunk of what governments are worrying about. As a result, the group I lead at Chatham house is by far the biggest research group within the house. We cover climate change, energy transition, circular economy, food, land, biodiversity, natural resources and so on The emergence of COVID is made more likely by climate change and environmental change, which has obviously been a huge shock to the economy. Then the war in Ukraine coupled with climate impacts, agriculture now has led to the good price spike. This has contributed to the cost-of-living crisis and the geopolitical situation in Ukraine is exemplifying the way that markets aren’t working to deliver resource security for households or for society. All of these things’ interact together and I guess mine and my groups job is to try and make sense of how we can transform the economy and politics so that those risks are minimised into the future and our ability to live peacefully on the planet. To answer your question directly, we do a lot of work articulating climate risks and what they mean from an economics, social, political and stability perspective and then we will use this information to try and find pathways to drive out climate change. We regularly brief the Cabinet office, the Treasury alongside foreign Commonwealth Development Office about how all these things interact with an aim to try and solve climate change before it gets out of control, which it is increasingly

What are the specific challenges that your environment and society programme tackles and are their specific ones that are the most difficult to grapple with?

Practically yes but in short no. We’ve got limited capacity so we can only target some things, but if you think about threats to the economy from environmental change you’ve got on one side issues such as COIVD and on the other side droughts and heatwaves and they’re impacts of things such as global supply chains. Alongside this, you have the impact of environmental change on conflict and stability. You have the impact of environmental change on people’s movement and immigration The impacts of climate change on financial flows out of the City of London and the trade environment in general In effect, the risks from environmental change interact at so many levels with the way in which the economy works, that ultimately it comes down to the primary question: ‘How can you build a sustainable and resilient economy in ways that do not threaten livelihoods and wellbeing’s in some way shape or form?’. There are two principal challenges that come along with this. One is ideological, in the sense that incumbent power is very powerful; the rich protect the interest of the rich; we can see that in the discourse around the new government, energy price caps etc. From a more technical perspective if you think about the way in which the economy works, we have a deeply embedded view that economic growth is good; as we grow the economy more, more people will share in wealth creation. Positive GDP implies exponential growth year on year. If you have exponential growth and its related to the consumption growth, which it is, this implies exponential consumption growth Most of this consumption growth comes from broadly harvesting natural resources in some way shape or form. Looking ahead, if you have a finite resource base with exponential consumption growth from that resource space it doesn’t matter however we choose to shape it, there will be some sort of Malthusian crunch and we are starting to live through that now. The demand for goods and resources exceeds our ability to supply those goods and resources. Then you end up in a situation where everything starts falling apart. When thinking about climate change, pollution, land degradation, biodiversity loss or the emergences of pests and diseases, these are all symptoms of pushing the natural resource base too hard. Fundamentally to have a sustainable economy, we have to think not just about structuring our economic thinking around GDP but instead structure it around thinking about societal well-being. This means internalizing the broad externalities that come from the markets; this requires us to restructure markets, put incentives and disincentives in the right place. No longer allowing profit making at the expense of environmental degradation to supply goods for consumption for short term gain. There’s a lot of big stuff kind of encompassed in this whole environmental sustainability agenda. This of course flows into geopolitics, as I said earlier. As the world becomes more driven by economic growth, less driven by international cooperation, it becomes more competitive, as we extract more and more natural resources and change the climate. It becomes more volatile. Further, all of these things interact together to create more geopolitical tension and looking ahead you can see post-Ukraine, different multilateral sets of alliances, a fractured world with trading blocks of broadly western and eastern nations and a whole range of other things that again will shape the economy If we carry on driving the economy hard, we just get into a vicious circle where everything starts really being under pressure. Current economic and political thinking, in the broad sense, isn’t accepting those risks. We as people and political systems, probably won’t accept them until something radical happens and we go through some degree of painful structural change that will be forced upon us. Because of incumbent power dynamics, we don’t want to tackle it up front. There’s a lot of green washing and marginal change. Just look at climate change; we’ve known since the 70’s that we’re on course for where we are now. Emissions are not going down; they’re still going up We are not going to tackle this issue until the world bites back and forces us to tackle this issue because it’s too difficult, I think from a political and economic position to do so.

As COP27 is fast approaching, what is Chatham house realistically expecting or hoping to come out of the conference and then how do you think leaders will view fossil fuel financing given Europe’s current energy crisis.?

There was a huge expectation before COP26 in Glasgow that we would make greater global efforts to tackle climate change. There was a lot of positive noise from COP26, but not as much action as we need to close the emissions gap. The gap between where we’re heading and what we’re willing to do about it. If anything, the war in Ukraine and subsequent fallout is undermining the ability of governments to act in a kind of business-as-usual sense There’s quite a lot, on a global basis, of backtracking on commitments or trying to soften commitments You only have to look at the kind of political dynamics in the UK, opening new licences for fracking and fossil fuel extraction. I think ReesMogg said ‘We need to use every drop of oil in the North Sea’. If that is a more kind of generic view from governments that today’s costs of living crisis is more important than the stability of the world, then we are in quite a difficult place because the longer we delay action, the more severe the action will have to be for us to live within an equitable climate. With respect to COP27, there will be a lot of discussion, about energy costs and energy availability. There's quite a push from some countries to drive forward transition to gas out of oil and coal because it's seen as a kind of transition fuel COP28 in UAE, of course is going to have quite a strong fossil fuel component to it Lots of countries in sub-Saharan Africa have got access to fossil fuel resources and, from their economic growth perspective, if there’s a market for them then it’s a good way of them a getting an economic value for development. So, there are a lot of wins against taking ambitious climate action, and I suspect there will be a kind of lukewarm response on the global level from society, civil society, the NGO community and citizens about the amount of progress that has been made. I hope that whilst keeping 1.5 alive, the strap line of Glasgow is still theoretically possible. I hope it will still be theoretically possible after COP 27, but I think it will raise a whole lot of issues about the role of gas in the future, the speed with which decarbonisation can happen and the other big thing that I think will be talked about, because obviously COP is in Africa, is who pays and the whole kind of loss and damage agenda. Should the rich world, who have largely created the problem to date, be doing much more to help the Pakistan’s of this world? Two months ago, there was excessive heat and now excessive flooding; many countries in the global south just do not have the revenue to adapt to what we know is coming. They don’t have the easy access to the ability to mitigate. I remember speaking to the Minister of Trade in Indonesia around 7 years ago who said: ‘For us as a country having rainforests does not contribute to our economy. If we convert the rainforests into palm oil plantations, we get rich”. The implications of that, which is the same for fossil fuels in Nigeria, is that unless we can provide revenue streams from the global north to compensate for not drilling oil or not cutting down rainforests, they will do that in the name of competitive economic development, in a rational sense But given the global cost of living crisis, given global inflation, the global north has no willingness or ability to give a trillion dollars a year to the global south. That famed 100 billion that was going to be on the table post Paris still hasn’t appeared. So that’s a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. In this current economic atmosphere, it’s not going to happen. It’s a bit of a gloomy outlook despite the fact that lots of economic evidence has been developed over the last years that the long-term benefits of transforming economies far outweigh the shortterm costs. But the short-term costs have to be paid for an if you’ve got no money in your pocket, whatever the long term benefits are, you can’t to it. That’s the kind of situation that the world is in at the moment.

Who should instantiate change? Should it be governments, companies or individuals who should be the ones getting change to happen?

There’s a lot of discourse that it is governments, business or citizens changing their behaviour but of course it’s none of them individually, its all of them together The thing that’s most obvious to me in the job that I’m doing, as opposed to when I was an academic, is that the political economy, the power dynamic of who’s actually in charge and who benefits from decisions is a major blocker of action. It’s a three-way relationship. Governments set the rules of the market, so design the structure of the market. Market actors act within those rules to make a profit and citizens licence politicians by electing them. Citizens also licence the market by buying the goods. So, you can’t have change by industry alone as they’ll make marginal changes with maximising profit as a motive at all times. The incumbent power dynamics will be that if they’re making a profit now, they’re not going to out that at risk to change things Politicians are leaning ever more towards just letting the market to do its thing, because that’s the way for the rich to get richer. Citizens are not ambivalent, but if you think about the electoral cycle in most countries; everything gets bundled up five years over five years into a question.

Do we go to the left or do we go to the right? In most countries, although some do, you don’t have an election or referendum very often. How should we tackle climate change? How should we tackle food system transformation? How should we deal with biodiversity? You end up with tribal politics every five years, which doesn’t really get to the hearts of these issues from a citizen perspective. Theoretically, it’s that citizens licence government to change the market and then the market makes a profit within the rule’s dynamic, but until all of those come into alignment then there will not be the appetite for significant change. Until something sufficiently bad happens where incumbent power is threatened Some of the chains that have been locking our current system get loosened and then we can start with not a blank sheet of paper, but more blank sheets of paper. At the moment we are flying this big jet plane of the economy and talking about changing it into a hand glider, or something like that as we are flying along. Of course, that’s a very difficult thing to do. If that jet planes crashes, it’s much easier to pull together the components to redesign the plane. But whilst its flying with all of the kind of problems of us being on that journey, it’s very difficult to transform. I however wouldn’t do this job if I didn’t have faith that humanity ultimately was not going to drive itself over the edge of a cliff. I think we’re getting close to the edge of the cliff. We might end up with the front two wheels hanging over the edge of the cliff, but I do think the benefits of us doing things in a radically different way are so enormous that ultimately, we kind of got to do it Maybe that’s just waiting for you guys to come into politics or take over as CEO of multinational organisations and change from inside. But I can’t believe, given the evidence, your generation are going to licence the continuation of the system that my generation and previous generations have put into place?