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Episode 10 - Professor Hilary Bambrick
140 Plays11 months ago
In episode 10 of Doctorama AMA President Professor Steve Robson chats with Professor Hilary Bambrick.
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Transcript
The Last Chance Decade for Climate Action
00:00:00
Speaker
The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is saying that we're in what they're calling the last chance decade. And of developed countries, Australia is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Well, today I'm going to be speaking with someone who's leading the charge on science-based responses to climate change in this country, on Dr Rama.
00:00:26
Speaker
You're listening to Dr Rama with Steve Robson, bringing you the best of health, medicine and people.
Interview with Professor Hilary Bambrik
00:00:34
Speaker
My guest today is Professor Hilary Bambrik, an environmental epidemiologist who heads up the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health. She's been working on population health for more than two decades. Professor Bambrik, welcome to Dr Rama. Thanks, Steve, and please do call me Hilary.
00:00:52
Speaker
Look, fantastic. Thank you very much. I'm absolutely fascinated. What would make somebody pursue a career in epidemiology and population health the way you've done it? How did you get started and how do you find yourself here? Well, I guess I kind of fell into it. You know, like a lot of people, I went to uni not really knowing what I wanted to do and had a bit of a fruit salad undergraduate degree. But during that time I studied human ecology and
00:01:20
Speaker
One of the books that was prescribed reading was a book called Planetary Overload by Tony MacMichael. And that really opened my eyes. So that was published in I think about 1996, something like that.
Revisiting Climate Projections
00:01:35
Speaker
And look, it was an absolute revelation to me, the sort of the dire situation that the planet was in at that time. And it really was the moment that
00:01:45
Speaker
set the direction for my career. Subsequently, I went on to do honors and a PhD, and then, to my absolute delight, discovered that Tiny Mick Michael was at the ANU, had come back to the ANU, and I popped along to see him to introduce myself and told him I'd really like to work with him.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yeah, look, Tony was really an inspiring and towering figure. And I think it's amazing that you responded to something like that. If you think about it such a long time ago, because we didn't have the sense of urgency or crisis at the time, it obviously was an important thing for you to do something and take some action.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, look, I think, I mean, certainly in Australia, it didn't feel like there was much of a sense of urgency. And, you know, when we, you know, working on this in the sort of the late 90s and the early 2000s, we were making, you know, projections about what the 2020s might look like. And it wasn't really that different, you know, so we basically we got it wrong, you know, looking in hindsight. We didn't realize that things back then, that things were going to be picking up the pace quite so quickly.
00:02:54
Speaker
in terms of climate, but indeed in terms of the impacts on people's health from climate change already. I'm sure many of your listeners themselves would have experienced extreme climate events that they would never have suspected to live through when they were younger.
Australia vs. Pacific Islands: A Climate Action Comparison
00:03:10
Speaker
Yeah, look, I'm going to come back to that in a second. It's very clear that you've had an extremely rich career and taken a lot of really interesting, I guess, pathways as you've gotten to the career state that you are now. And you've done quite a bit of work overseas. And we've spoken in the past and you were telling me that you speak Ethiopian fluently and were telling me that the Ethiopian... Quite a stretch.
00:03:36
Speaker
The Ethiopian word for scrambled eggs. And I think I've got it right. Fer-fer, is that how you say it? It means mixed. Fer-fer is mixed. Mixed eggs. Tell me about your, I guess, the things that you take away from the work that you did internationally in countries like Ethiopia. Yeah, look, I've spent a lot of time, you know, several trips in Ethiopia, working in informal urban communities in Ethiopia.
00:04:05
Speaker
sort of on community-led adaptation to climate change. But I've also spent a lot of time working in the Pacific, including in remote islands. And I guess the kind of the big takeaway message from that is Australia is so far behind. We're still so far behind in terms of our thinking on climate change. You know, we really have at least an entire lost decade in terms of action.
00:04:30
Speaker
even just recognizing that climate change is a significant issue for Australia. So if you take the Pacific Islands, for example, they've had national adaptation plans for the last 15 years, and Australia's just beginning to work on
The Gano Report's Health Impacts
00:04:44
Speaker
one. So we're sort of well behind the eight ball, and it shows that we're really throwing away or wasting the privileged position that we have, given how wealthy we are as a country, how much intellectual capital we have as a country,
00:05:00
Speaker
to have not made any progress over decades when a number of countries who have much less wealth, much less capacity to respond is actually really showing us up for our lack of response. They've been well ahead of the game for a long time. I can imagine a lot of Pacific countries have relatively
00:05:22
Speaker
or an enormous vulnerability to a rising sea level. For example, they are relatively flat countries and they would have a devastating effect on the countries. You were one of the people involved in writing the extraordinarily prescient Gano report and
00:05:40
Speaker
We know that many of the predictions made in the report of which you were part of the group who created it are beginning to come through. How do you feel looking back at the work you did at the time, working with Ross and on the report and what you're seeing now? What does it evoke in you? So my involvement in that was very much contained to the health impacts assessment work. And it was work that was done very quickly on a tight budget
00:06:11
Speaker
And, you know, it was basically surrounded by caveats. So, you know, we only had the capacity to look at, I think, three different health outcomes where we know that climate change affects much more, many more health outcomes than those. And, you know, it also, again, it was quite some time ago, and I guess, you know, things, so that was in 2008, things weren't so, quite so urgent.
Challenges in Health Impact Modeling
00:06:40
Speaker
It also had a particular focus on the economic costs, so one of the things we looked at was things like the cost of hospitalizations and what might happen to those under various climate change scenarios.
00:06:56
Speaker
So, you know, it was a significant piece of work. And until this moment, you know, there's now a national climate risk assessment underway in 2023. But the last time anyone had it even a bit of a go was in 2008. So, you know, a very long time ago, the science has moved on in that time. And again, you know, as I mentioned, we only looked at just a few
00:07:20
Speaker
just a few health outcomes. And, you know, whereas climate change really, really affects many more. And we picked ones that were easy. And this is actually it's a it's a bit of an a common thing that happens not just in epidemiology, but in, you know, you know, any studies when you when you're looking at modeling what might be happening, you pick things that are easy to do when, you know, some sort of relationship is known already to exist and you can extrapolate from that.
00:07:47
Speaker
Whereas with climate change, it's actually well understood by people working in the area that the biggest impacts are actually the ones that are really hard to measure. So just to give some extreme examples, down the sort of more direct and very easy to measure end, we have a heat wave and certain numbers of people die. So you can say, okay, certain number of people, X number of people died from that particular heat event. So that's very easy to measure.
00:08:13
Speaker
But if you have something like ongoing resource depletion in an area, mass displacement of people, increasing conflict, violence, war, all of those, and there's sort of the social things that go along with that, those things are much, much harder to model in the future based on climate. It's much less more diffuse impacts and much harder to measure.
00:08:39
Speaker
Hillary, you're clearly one of the world's experts on the effects of climate change and the effects on the health of people.
Mass Displacement and Conflict Risks
00:08:51
Speaker
But as you were just speaking there, if we find that large areas
00:08:54
Speaker
of our planet become essentially uninhabitable. People have to go somewhere and that is ripe for massive refugee crises, for armed conflict and all of these things in themselves have an enormous conflict potential for ill health. Are you saying that it's actually really hard to even capture what may be the most important effects of all in our models and our predictions?
00:09:21
Speaker
It certainly is hard to capture in terms of quantitative work at this stage, but this is where the importance of imagination comes into play as well and being able to make connections and tell stories and to draw analogies from things that might have happened in the past or elsewhere on perhaps a smaller scale and being able to use your imagination to tell the stories about what things might look like in the future.
Storytelling Climate Impacts
00:09:51
Speaker
And I think that's a really important aspect of the work in climate change, and when we're trying to think about what the future might actually look like, because if you just look at the numbers, and particularly if you just look at averages, which is what people tend to do, you miss the potential to see what the extreme impacts might be. So for example, if we just looked at average rising temperature again, just to use heat, because it is so easy,
00:10:21
Speaker
If you just think, oh, average rising temperature, oh, look, one degree doesn't sound like very much, or one and a half degrees doesn't sound like very much. But what that actually does is that you get those much more extreme days that might be 15 degrees above average. For example, you get nighttime minimum temperatures that remain high, and so people's bodies don't get a chance to cool off overnight. So that in itself is particularly dangerous.
00:10:45
Speaker
those things aren't captured when you look at just the average changes over time. It's a bit catastrophic kind of thinking and almost sci-fi thinking when you start thinking about or imagining what the different futures might look like.
00:11:05
Speaker
But if we're going to be able to respond adequately, that's what the sort of thing we need to be doing and we need to be doing it now. Yeah Hilary, I think you're absolutely 100% correct about the, I guess the importance of narratives and people being able to understand.
00:11:21
Speaker
what these numbers that can often seem quite abstract mean to them.
The Spread of Climate Misinformation
00:11:27
Speaker
But narratives are also in a way almost like pandemics in themselves and we have narratives that are incorrect. We see the rise of myths and deliberate disinformation about the climate. Is this anything you have any thoughts on about why these
00:11:44
Speaker
climate furfies this disinformation about climate change and what we need to do seems to spread and take hold in the community. Yeah look it's something it is I don't think I've got any answers for you but you know just observations I suppose over over the last few decades is I found it extraordinary that climate change itself became politicized in Australia because you know conservative governments overseas recognized that climate change was a problem and
00:12:13
Speaker
The only sort of political issue is, well, how do we respond to it? You know, for example, very basic level, is it more of a, you know, do we rely on private money or public money to respond to climate change? You know, if you just want to break it into the most simple sort of political forms. But in Australia, the mere fact of climate change itself was politicized very early on. And I've found that working in this area, I found that extraordinary, the sort of the
00:12:39
Speaker
the blindness to the evidence. But I think it's actually, I mean, misinformation generally is a significant issue now, and particularly rising out of the pandemic. And I mean, I also, again, observations, I have zero data on any of this.
00:12:59
Speaker
So, yeah, absolutely zero data on any of this. But thinking about the people who were taken in by misinformation about COVID are also now ones who are particularly suspicious about climate change and the actions which might help avert climate change or help us respond to climate change. And it's almost like everything's being tied up in some massive government conspiracy
00:13:24
Speaker
And my favorite thing is that, you know, when people think that climate change is a massive, you know, a massive conspiracy between say the UN and WHO and academics and all the rest of it. And I have to say, you know, having worked with WHO, the UN and academics, there is no way you could get anyone to agree on any kind of conspiracy or to work together. So, you know, to me, that's the strongest evidence
Managing Multiple Climate Emergencies
00:13:51
Speaker
against the, you know, any form of
00:13:54
Speaker
sort of concerted duplicity, if you like, amongst these disparate groups working together. So look, I don't have an answer. I don't know what we do. I think we certainly keep plugging away and sort of getting the message out there. And I think as more and more people experience those extreme impacts of climate change, that in itself becomes very hard to deny, I suspect.
00:14:23
Speaker
You know, we've got, you know, vast parts of the east, eastern Australia were consumed by bushfires, consumed by floods. I mean, you know, we sort of had many things. And actually, that's something with climate change, too, that, you know, makes things very complicated and hard to predict, predict as those sort of compounding kinds of emergencies, cascading, compounding. You know, you can't, you might be dealing with bushfires.
00:14:51
Speaker
And then you might suddenly be dealing with floods in the same area or adjacent to each other at the same time. You've got these events happening over extraordinarily large areas. And so in the past, Queensland might have shared their fire brigades with New South Wales, but now everybody's totally stretched. And similarly, just even on a bigger scale and a much more global scale, the northern and southern hemisphere fire seasons, just to take that example.
00:15:18
Speaker
now overlap. And so that sharing of resources that used to happen during major catastrophes between North and South also becomes much more difficult as well.
00:15:26
Speaker
I agree with you. It's really hard to just not see what's happening right in front of you. I agree with you completely about the conspiracy theories. I mean, nobody can keep a secret in my experience. Finding somebody with whom you can keep a secret is such a luxury.
Urgency of Climate Action
00:15:46
Speaker
Most organizations leak like a sieve, so I'm amazed that people really, really believe conspiracy theories.
00:15:53
Speaker
Look, Hilary, it's very easy to become pessimistic and to take a gloomy, I guess, view of the future. But I'm going to ask you, I mean, can we be optimistic? I mean, can humanity still have a good future? I think we have to be optimistic. But I guess it's not that
00:16:17
Speaker
It's not a passive optimism or a passive hope. It's a really active, angry hope, if you like, something that spurs action. Personally, my journey in this area has been an absolute rollercoaster over the last 25 years, moments of real kind of hope and action and moments of utter despair. But I think, and yet I still get out of bed every day. And I think that there's
00:16:47
Speaker
Obviously, we should have done a lot more 20 years ago. But there is still time to do what we need to do now. As we said 20 years ago, the longer we leave taking action, the harder it's going to be, the more expensive it's going to be, and the more rapid it's going to be. And we're now at that point. So we do need to take quite significant action. It does need to be urgent. And it is more expensive.
00:17:17
Speaker
But it's actually much more expensive if we don't do anything. The cost to people's lives, to communities, to the health care system, absolutely off the charts if we don't actually try to manage climate change as best we can now. And I guess a really important fact to note is that every fraction of a degree matters. So every fraction of degree of warming matters in terms of its health impacts.
00:17:45
Speaker
its environmental impacts. However much we can limit climate change will be better than if we don't try to limit it at all. Hilary, it's very easy to feel overwhelmed in front of what seems like an existential challenge.
Personal Actions Against Climate Despair
00:18:03
Speaker
Are there things that people as individuals can do? Any advice for people at the individual level?
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah, look, I mean, I guess individuals make up collective action. So, you know, I've seen some, you know, some extraordinary brave work undertaken by individuals in terms of direct action, for example, to do with climate change and drawing attention to the crisis that we're in.
00:18:30
Speaker
We vote. We're lucky. We live in a democracy. We vote. We do have power to change, to lobby governments, to change policy. But I think one of the hardest things that we're up against is where the money is at the moment.
00:18:46
Speaker
Australia still subsidizes its fossil fuel industry, I think, to the tune of around $10 billion a study a couple of years ago, whereas if you actually remove those subsidies and, heaven forbid, transplant them into renewable energy, you could really change the shape of the market very, very quickly. There are things that
00:19:07
Speaker
we can do. In terms of individual action, one of the things, you know, there is a lot of existential despair, as you mentioned. And one of the things that does actually help people's mental health when thinking about, you know, in relation to climate change is taking personal action. And that might be something like writing to your local member. It might be standing on a picket line. It might be gathering with other like-minded people to work out what you might do.
00:19:33
Speaker
It might be, you know, helping to set up some sort of, I don't know, community micro-grid of, you know, for solar and things like that, things that will make communities much more resilient to climate change. So, you know, taking that personal action is actually personally beneficial as well as being, you know, if enough people do it collectively, you know, beneficial for, you know, in a broader sense as well.
00:19:59
Speaker
Hilary, it's been absolutely inspiring speaking with you today, and I'm impressed that you've been able to take time out of your busy schedule to speak with me. You've had an extraordinary career, and I'm sure there is so much more ahead for you academically and in the field. I'd like to talk again sometime, but I just want to thank you so much for giving up some time to speak to me today. Thanks, Steve, an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me today on Dr. Rama.
00:20:35
Speaker
You've been listening to Dr Rama, a podcast produced on Ngunnawal country by the Australian Medical Association. All rights reserved.