The Message Has Changed! (or, alternatively, ‘Housekeeping Tips from World Leaders’)

For years the core message preached at climate change conferences around the world has been ‘Time is running out…’. That message has now changed. At the EcoSperity conference in Singapore last week, in front of an audience of over 1000 world leaders, business heads and academics a new message was proposed. Subtly different in structure but starkly different in message: ‘Time has run out’. This conference provided the clearest presentation of the climate crisis I have seen. Yet the doomsday message was balanced by credible suggestions of ways forward. What was different was the urgency of the call to action. Three decades of talk has had no tangible effect on the rate of temperature rise. The time for talk has run out.

The link to the 3 minute tone-setting opening video for the conference is here: https://www.ecosperity.sg/en/2019-conference.html. The full conference is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo4aoLFlY_k. I encourage you to jump to 45 minutes to hear Dr Will Stefan from the Australian National University give his prognosis (is it a shame that his slides on ‘planetary boundaries’ are not visible on the video). Additionally go to 1hr 8min and watch Christiana Figueres, Former Exec Secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. She was awesomely brilliant, captivating the whole room. Her demonstration of the scale of the challenge before us, using just a single sheet of A4, is gloriously simple yet also terrifying (1hr 13min). I was less persuaded by her explanation (for non-scientists) of what exponential means, but she won me back when she unconsciously started channelling Monty Python with her discussion about coal (‘coal is dead, it is demised, it is no more…’)

Alternatively you could jump to 3hr 30 min and watch the section where water, which had not been discussed as yet in the conference, made it onto the agenda. This was a session I was honoured to have been asked to chair. When designing the session I wanted to do something different to the traditional conference discussion panel. Borrowing heavily (ok…, stealing outright) from the format of Radio 4s ‘Museum of Curiosities’ I gave my three expert panellists the task of imagining they were 50 years in the future and were proposing an artefact for the new Museum of Water. You can discover why a 300yr old abacas, a 200yr old piece of wood and a suspicious looking 0.5kg of white powder were chosen by Francois Fevrier (CEO Suez Asia), Dr Helge Daebel (Investment Director, Emerald Ventures) and George Hawkins (former CEO for DC Water and now founder of Moonshot Mission Partners) respectively. They had an artist at the back of the room doing cartoon summaries of each of the sessions and attached is our summary picture. What I like most about this is the fact that I have been given a surprisingly butch face (as opposed to my usual chinless wonder look) AND a full head of hair!

The EcoSperity (Ecology and Prosperity coming together) event flowed neatly into the annual PUB Singapore International Water Week conference. Last year 24,000 people attended SIWW. On alternate years (such as this year) PUB host a smaller, more intimate, specialist conference with 200 or so invite-only guests. The focus this year was Industrial Water and I had been asked to be the Convener/Chairperson. My role was to set the tone, summarise the speeches, provide informative/amusing/probing questions (delete depending on the speakers attitude) during the panel sessions and to generally make sure the whole thing kept to time. It is harder than it sounds. During the opening session I had to speak in Malay while introducing an Eid-inspired video on Kinship (‘Air dicincang tidak akan putus’). The secret is to pronounce the ‘Air’ part as Ah-eh, and after that you just run with it and hope for the best. This proverb translates into ‘Water does not break when you chop it’ and was accompanied by a lovely video on Muslim brotherhood. It was astonishingly relevant bearing in mind the Ecosperity message, and the global challenges we all face which will only be resolved if we work together.

I spent the whole of last week in South East Asia and on the Monday I had met with a local client. I was due to give a presentation to an audience of 40 or so people, and I had been told that one of them might be the Chairperson, a lady who was so well connected that she would almost certainly top the list of Most Powerful Women in Asia. Two minutes before I commenced my talk the audience filed into the room. I saw a middle aged lady dressed in a power-suit and assumed it was she. As I gave my presentation I focused my attention, charm and guile on this poor lady. It was only when we finished that I was directed to the real Chairwoman, a rather unassuming-looking lady who had sat quietly at a table at the back of the room. As we chatted she reminded me of my grandmother: clear-thinking, forthright, gracious.

She invited me to join her and her team for a buffet lunch, and as we sat chatting our conversation drifted away from water. Through a series of connections I still cannot quire recall we started discussing housework. I learned that in Asia housework is very much the domain of the female. I commented that actually I quite like ironing. In the Clark household ironing is a man-task. It is also an important part of my schedule when I am travelling. Fans of Die Hard 1 will recall that the hero John McLean overcomes jetlag by walking barefoot on a hotel carpet (before running around the building in a grubby T-shirt shooting lots of baddies). I have a similar routine: when I arrive at a hotel I like to take out all my shirts and crisply iron them (before sitting down in my underpants to clear my email backlog). It is an almost identical routine.

On sharing my love of ironing my new bestie, the Most Powerful Woman in Asia, was clearly not convinced of my sincerity. ‘Tell me’, she said in an enquiring and slightly accusatory voice, ‘how do you iron your shirts?’. Without hesitation I responded back confidently with the order my grandmother had shared with me some 40 years ago: collar, shoulders, sleeves, back, front. ‘Well done!’ she exclaimed ‘That is correct!’. Her confidence in me was restored. We then discussed vacuum cleaners (honestly we did!).

I truly hope to meet her again soon. I have a tip for dealing with stains on furniture I want to share with her which I think she might like.

Take furniture outside. Burn it. Buy new furniture.