Spotlight on Dr Ida Kubiszewski

The IGP is delighted to announce that, beginning in January, 2022, Ida Kubiszewski will join the team and take up the position of Associate Professor in Global Prosperity. 

Ida Kubiszewski is currently an Associate Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Research Professor and Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Solutions, at Portland State University.

Assoc Prof Kubiszewski was a climate change negotiator for the country of the Dominican Republic, following adaptation and loss & damage. She was a delegate at the 19th through 21st Conference of Parties (COP19 in Warsaw, Poland in 2013; COP20 in Lima, Peru in 2014; and COP21 in Paris, France in 2015).

Here, she talks about her projects to tackle the climate emergency, misconceptions around climate change and actions we can take for a safer future. 

How is a new conversation about prosperity relevant to our response to climate change?

I believe that climate change is a fundamental question in our prosperity. As our natural systems are thrown into chaos, so are our lives. Whether it’s through struggling with increasing natural disasters, fighting for basic natural resources such as drinking water, mounting tension over land use changes, growing inequality within communities due to access to resources, or just the underlying stress of an unknown future, climate change is impacting our prosperity in a detrimental way.

How do your current projects tackle the climate emergency?

I’m working on several exciting projects that are trying to tackle the climate emergency. Currently, many of them focus on agriculture. Until recently, I was the CEO and am currently on the advisory board, of a company called Downforce Technologies (DFT). DFT provides reliable data on the health of natural capital on land and of the soil below, using just remote sensing data. By understanding the true health of our land, especially agricultural land, we can begin to not only reduce land degradation, but also begin to regenerate the land. This is especially critical for the agro-financial sector, as their returns are directly tied to the health of natural capital.

I’m also working on a grant through The Australian National University, looking at the integration of natural, social, human, and built capitals. Using a system dynamics model allows us to understand the whole system, improving farm resilience, farm management, and economic decision-making and providing nature-based solutions.
 

Is there a misconception about climate change you want to address?

I believe that one of the biggest misconceptions is that future will be worse than the present, or that we’ll have to go back to living like we did in the 1900s. But the future we live in is up to us. Who we elect, how we consume, and other daily decisions allow us to choose the future we create.
 

What policies do you think are ‘low-hanging fruit’ for tackling climate change?

Measuring what matters is one of the first steps, and probably one of the simpler ones, we need to take, to tackle climate change. Most academics and some politicians already realize that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not a good way to measure progress. However, no consensus exists on how to better measure genuine progress of a society. Understanding how the social/ecological system works, how it connects with human wellbeing, is an initial step around which a lot of research has been done. Putting it all together can allow coming to an agreement at the international level on better measures of societal wellbeing is the first step. If we are measuring what matter, we will begin to prioritize good and not bad, choose leaders that can move us in the right direction, pass policies that benefit all, and create a society we all want to live in.
 

If global conferences like COP have not yet made enough progress, and ethical consumption is too little, what other actions can people take to improve our chances of a safe future?

The COPs deal with one scale, that of the sovereign nation. However, climate change needs to be tackled at all scales, and that includes households, neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions. We as individuals can make an impact on each of those scales, to a larger or smaller degree.