ISF at COP27

Dr Sven Teske:

My name is Dr Sven Teske. I'm an Associate Professor and Research Director at the University of Technology Sydney at The Institute for Sustainable Futures.

My research area are Net Zero Pathways and 100% renewable energy scenarios, specifically focused on industry sectors and developing countries. At the climate conference in Shar, El-Sheikh in Egypt, I will present two different research results.

One Net Zero Pathways for specific industry sectors, which serve as key performance indicator for the finance industry and the finance industry uses those key performance indicators which are basically based on the mission on an energy use in order to set target for their investment portfolio and assets.

The second presentation is about an energy scenario we did for Nepal. That energy scenario serves two purposes. One, it provides a practical plan how to expand sustainable and renewable electricity supply to improve the energy services in Nepal and secondly it forms a reporting for the United Nations in terms of the current and future greenhouse gas emissions.

Our research worked with the One Earth Climate Model is quite practical. So, what we provide is practical pathways for industries and countries how to decarbonise their energy supply and how to reduce energy demand.

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Juliet Willetts:

So, I am Juliet Willetts, a Professor and Research Director at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney.

I work on water and sanitation in Asia and the Pacific. At COP I’ll be presenting on the links between sanitation and climate change. So, we recently undertook a landscape study for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and this study looked at what some of those links are and how they can be addressed.

So, the links are clear. During flooding, toilets become inaccessible or sometimes they collapse. During droughts and water scarcity, women and children are traveling further to collect water for the toilets. Sewers become blocked or overflow into rivers and lakes. And in dense urban areas, you can have faecal matter that can spread into the streets and cholera and other diseases like that run rife.

The damage to infrastructure and the economic losses due to reduced health and productivity are significant. So, this study brings together the views of more than 60 organisations from city and national governments from international and local NGOs and private sector organisations from more than 25 countries.

Sanitation is a public service that’s a risk due to climate change and deserves more attention in climate policy dialogue. Hence, we developed this call to action launched at COP to draw more attention to the issue.

The call is significant because it lays out the absolute enormity of the challenge, to provide access to climate resilient sanitation services to 3.6 billion people that don’t have access to those services with many of them living in water stressed and flood-prone areas.

So, it confirms the risk climate change poses. Without access to this basic service, we can’t have resilient communities, resilient cities and a just world.

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