Professor Ross Garnaut presented the final report of the Garnaut Climate Change Review to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on 30 September 2008, the morning of the largest ever one day points fall on the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, the histories of the financial crisis and climate change policy have been closely linked. Amongst much else, they have been linked by the challenge that Governments have faced, in Australia, in the United States and elsewhere, in formulating policy in the national interest alongside an extraordinary presence of vested interests in the policy making process. This lecture analysed the past year’s history of policy-making on climate change in this difficult context, and assess the prospects of the world developing a satisfactory response to the risks of dangerous human-induced climate change.

Listen to Professor Garnaut’s 14 September lecture here.

Photo by: Darren Boyd, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU