24 November 2022, Sydney – On Wednesday, November 23, Climate-KIC Australia celebrated five years of climate impact together with our network of collaborators.
A lot has happened in the climate ecosystem, nationally and internationally, since Climate-KIC Australia first officially opened its doors. Given the pace of change and the momentum we’ve gathered towards creating transformations in our system, we wanted to give space to gather into the same space those who share our ambition and our mission: our collaborators, others who are active in the space, and those whose work we admire.
The event centred around a timeline detailing the major events that have shaped the past five years in terms of our work – the major international events, national events and milestones within Climate-KIC Australia. We saw that the past five years have been characterised by more frequent disasters, increasing geopolitical instability, and rising polarisation, and yet also by increasing energy and investment behind climate action, more deliberate efforts to collaborate deeply and more ambition to make change happen.
The timeline showed how all of these forces interacted with one another, making it complex to understand where and how to intervene to make the greatest impact.
This validated our approach of working with partners on multiple, connected levers of change such as finance and investment, technologies, policy context, the flow of new information and insight, human behaviour, value chains, business models and culture.
In a fireside chat with some of Climate-KIC Australia’s close collaborators, we reflected on the work we have done together over the past five years, and what that means for the future.
Monica Richter, Senior Manager of Low Carbon Futures at WWF reflected on the power of radical collaboration as a means to creating the paradigm shifts we’re looking for. Monica has worked with Climate-KIC Australia since the beginning; together we established the BRC-A and supported her with the establishment and running of MECLA.
Sharanjit Paddan, Principal at Finity, spoke about the role of finance and investment as a critical lever of change for climate action, and the value that Climate-KIC Australia provides in orchestrating collaboration. Sharanjit has been recognised as Insurance Leader of the year in 2022 and worked closely with us on the Climate Measurement Standards Initiative.
Gloria Chan, Director at the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, discussed how joining forces across heavy industry and hard-to-abate sectors has an enormous potential to facilitate and speed up action in that space in Australia. Gloria has been working with us in the Australian Industry Energy Transitions Initiative.
The chat concluded with some reflections from Chris Lee, Climate-KIC Australia’s CEO and Michelle Zucker, Research Fellow in the Future of Collaborative Governance at Arantzazulab, on what we can learn from the European context, and how we can build on the past five years to create further impact, paradigm shifts in resource mobilisation, implementation of place-based transformations and radical collaboration.
Our systems innovation approach is grounded in learning by doing and we’ve learned a lot over the last 5 years. Moving forward, we will continue to learn how to effectively change systems, at scale. We are grateful for the support, trust and openness of our collaboration network as we look forward to the next five years and beyond.
