Professor Kevin Anderson:

The Deputy's comments about leadership are absolutely key. This is something that I bang on about too. If we are looking for top-down leadership, then we are going to fail. Leadership is not about top-down, and it probably never has been, although it is a convenient model for us. It is much more of a messy relationship between bottom-up and top-down. There is nothing tidy about this. Ideas can multiply from an individual to a local club, to a local institution and to a local policymaker, and then, maybe, to a national policymaker, and this can then inform the development of some policies and an umbrella framework, which then changes how society operates. This has happened across the world for years, and it is a much more emergent process. When we see it like that it gives us a lot more hope that rather than thinking leadership is about a handful of, usually, wealthy white men around the world, it is actually approximately 8 billion of us in various ways demonstrating leadership in our homes, in our institutions and with our friends down the pub and then engaging with the local policymakers who can demonstrate leadership, and in wealthy countries in particular we have more chance of doing that. It is a much more messy partnership across all tiers of governance, from our homes right the way through to national and international government.

If one can see it like that, and recognise it as a much more emergent process, then it gives us much more hope because there are many more people that can feed into that debate. The key issue is about discussing it, not necessarily about agreeing. It is about trying to make changes and talking about how easy or how hard it was, what the problems were or whether it was much easier than expected. One starts the dialogue. It is from this dialogue that leadership emerges in a way that we cannot predict. If we go back three years to the spring of 2018, and thought who would be the real person to drive this forward, one might have come up with one of the great and the good, such as Obama or someone else. One would not have thought that it might be a 15-year-old Swedish schoolgirl. That probably would not have been a person's first thought. While she may not save us from climate change by herself, she is the catalyst for change that has emerged across a youth movement that has gone across much of the world

. We have now seen that engagement with other generations through the extinction rebellion movement and many other civil society movements. There is now a wider discussion on climate change than before. This is really very hopeful. Once we open the dialogue into wider civil society, we recognise that we get much more scope for change. That is where I really see us as policy makers trying to get that dialogue as an option, and not just that we would pass good ideas down, and that we would also try to learn bottom-up what those ideas might look like. Of course, climate change is ultimately culturally derived. The responses in China will be very different from the responses in Ireland. The responses in wealthy parts of Ireland will be different to the responses in the poorer parts. It is very cultural, and we must recognise that there is no simple answer that we can just play out across countries or even within countries. It is much more localised than necessarily top-down.