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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Antonia to talk about National policies and how science may or may not in some cases potentially inform them now Antonia this is something that intrigues you and I can tell why you're laugh at what you're thinking why does it Intrigue you so when I was studying at University I was doing some research
that I was h in would end up in front of policy makers because it was about reducing our carbon emissions related to energy production that was kind of what got me onto the subject of this is I guess how scientists influence policy it's not like I was commissioned by the government to do the research it was research that researchers in the area thought would be of national interest and so that was what was my PhD research topic and also my masters visitation topic so I guess that means you care
quite a lot about how the nation as a whole is working towards mitigating the potential disaster of climate change that scientists keep talking about but it feels like we're kind of not really getting there as quickly as we should which a lot of scientists seem to be saying anyway and you want to know like what else could we be doing yeah this actually kind of relates to one of our previous episodes about activism and science mhm but then yeah we should also touch on how does science help with
government anyway um but now I work with companies to try and reduce their carbon emissions so trying to put that into action and sometimes their policies are influenced by what the government policies are so it's all full circle so yeah it sounds like you spent most of your career doing something at the intersection of policy and science with climate change I guess that's kind of similar to what I've been doing because I mean I've said quite a few times and a lot of research with the nuclear
industry and I've worked in Academia doing that as well uh so these are like nationally important topics and they're quite controversial sometimes in the public eye yeah like when I was running my research group at University there was a really strong emphasis from the University that scientists can influence National policy in different ways but you mentioned that you're aware that government policy affects what companies do so tell me a bit more about that yeah so before it becomes policy the
government releases something C of consult ation they say we have some ideas about what we're going to change and we want to gather views from different areas I don't think it's actually restricted to just scientists but you'd think if you're a scientist researching that area you might think ah this would be a good time to mention something that could be affecting the whole country after the consultation is finished government goes okay this is what we've learned and this is what
we're going to then Implement based on that but the thing is there are a lot lot of consultations happening in one given time yes I noticed this as well I don't get how you meant to know about them I don't think you can just pay attention to the government website of consultation coming up because there are that many on that many different topics yeah when I looked there was 108 open at the moment some of them were very Niche some of them were very specifically
about some local area what they were going to do with it so I don't know do you put like a Google alert on it you can sign up to alerts on the government website and hope that your key words will show up but it's yeah I don't know how how you know apart from just you L you spend time doing that which is what some people in my company do is they have an eye on what policies are coming up how it might influence companies that we work with and then prepare strategies or you know responses
to help customers be aware of this yeah yeah I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of paying attention to what's going on and just checking back periodically also maybe I do wonder if people in government reach out to say hey this is consultation you people are experts in this thing you might want to consider putting a response in the University I've worked for the Institute I was part of they definitely responded to these things occasionally individual
researchers responded as well so you can do it either as yourself like I I'm a scientist this is my knowledge or is a group of scientists from an organization I've seen it through profession profal bodies so like the energy Managers Association sometimes spot things related to energy saving or Energy Efficiency and we'll say hey this might be good to respond to yeah and having talked about this for a few minutes now I think it's probably worth defining what a policy is before we carry on
talking that's a good point from my understanding policy is a plan or a guideline to how we want something to be run or behave my my main knowledge Bas is about climate change the policy was how we would go about addressing climate change whereas you then legislate and make legislation which turns that policy into law and therefore enforceable okay so I see policy as this sort of this this broad thing here's what we need to do as a whole and then this is specific here's what happens to you as an
individual or as a company if you don't work with us to deliver on this policy but I guess you could have a national policy that is isn't necessarily backed up by legislation as well which would mean companies don't necessarily have to follow what the policy says and I guess that means as a nation that just means we failed at something that we've committed to even if we didn't realize it yeah so that is that is a really interesting idea yeah climate change policy has actually been legislated for
by the climate change act 2008 and it set a legally binding Target for the country to reduce its emissions by 80% by 2050 and it was the first globally to set a legally binding Target oh so we kind of paved way we're the Trailblazers for saying legally we will do this yes the question is though how is that going to be enforced is the government going to sue itself if we don't mean the targets which is kind of an issue right now and you would like to think that those
targets were designed to be feasible based on evidence but I think because there are so many entities things that contribute to climate change it's really difficult to get to the point where you say well this part of the nation needs to do this this part of the nation needs to do that here's how we all come together I suppose whether the government can sue itself is probably something for legal people to explain and I'm not one of those no me neither but speaking of explanations
there is something that I've helped with when I was doing research at University to help explain things to non-experts and these were post notes from the Parliamentary office of Science and techn ology so these summarize complex topics and they're often science-based ones and they do it for an nonexperts so they can be used to brief like government officials on key facts on a particularly interesting or challenging thing yeah I've actually come across them that was one of my first
interactions with a post note was I found one from the early 2000s about the life cycle emissions of different energy production methods you'd think since it was there from so long ago it meant it was really easy to make climate change policy but no it's a it's very complex topic but I imagine it's very useful for government because I read that there are over half a million civil servants yeah that seems like a lot to me so I did some work in the civil service for a
while but it was like a very small part of it so I was in a government department and sort of providing them with advice as a member of their team when I was doing this research at University the people I work with there they explained that um there are actually very few scientists in the civil service but they are smart people and they rely a lot on translation of these complex topics and they really value having experts explain things to them so they can see how something will
affect society which I was quite reassured by they they were really really Keen to learn and they knew they obviously knew a lot already that's really good yeah I said think this is really good yeah I can help so it was like you know they might have a broader view or they might see the societal impact but they might not know specifically about the latest widget coming out of nuclear waste yeah and to be fair there are things they don't necessarily need to know about it you
don't really need to know how I can cut apart a material and do a load of analysis on it to tell you how it might behave when it's being exposed to radiation say they don't need to know the detail of that they just need to know the answer yeah yeah but then that makes me think if you're not an expert on a particular thing how do you make laws about it like you know no makes me think years ago about Theresa May she didn't understand how data security worked but was trying to legislate that
all internet service providers must provide a back door for the government to make sure that the government can access data if it was you know of National Security that sounds quite a sensitive and complicated topic that I wouldn't want to comment on no I guess that's where it it comes down to the individual doing their research and having the right resources to hand to be able to understand it the bit that I was told from the people I work within the civil service is that the civil servants
themselves not necessarily toes me but people that work in a government department they have to kind of wait for time in front of parliament to present something that they think should be a legal change and they do spend a lot of time pouring over the legislation by the way and they have to sort of present the evidence for it as well from what I was told I might be misremembering this slightly but there are also these things like the government office for science
which commissions research that would be useful for government so I can see how they commission a piece of research and the civil servants would make use of that and fit it with what they understand of legislation and then use that to help explain or support policy I guess that is one of the ways that research gets funded at universities is you know it gets identified as something important and something that could influence the future running of the country so they'll say right maybe we
should put some money towards understanding that topic and I guess I mean when I did my PhD I didn't really see how little old me could possibly make a difference but it's just one day at the point isn't it you spend three years collecting like one or two bits of data actually be used to help support something the government can do and there are like hundreds thousands of PhD students doing this but I guess that maybe is one mechanism that funds research at universities but there are
others other resources like um the House of Commons and the House of Lords libraries that can also be used as resources for people in government to learn or gather information about science that may affect what the nation does yeah actually part of the research for this episode I was looking at if there was a specific research paper that led to the climate change act 2008 and someone had helpfully written an article about this and put it on the commons Library the commons Library article
cited three main influences on the climate change act one of them being friends of the Earth's campaign called Big ask a couple of other research papers the Stone review on the economics of climate change and the International Panel on climate change fourth assessment report on climate change basically a bunch of research on climate change fair enough but one of the key pieces I think is interesting is in the ipcc's report they said if globally we reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 then we
would avoid the worst effects or irreversible effects of climate change and that is now part of the law in the UK I guess that's a result of lots of different actors or organizations or entities influences whatever you want to call them that are all saying the same message that's explaining this is the consequence if we don't do this and it's terrible and that's what gets put into law yeah the ipcc is International Panel and lots of researchers coming together
to make modeling and prediction models to find out what could happen and present different scenarios so that turned into legislation with the climate change act and then there are Regulators that help uphold various limits that are set right I assume they can help set legislation too like if The Regulators recognize there something extra that needs to be done they can then report back so they'd have these various safety or quality limits that they set for a reason yeah Regulators do monitor
quality and set limits that is something to take into consideration in some areas of the environment but in the case of climate change it's not fair enough maybe we should move away from climate change for a bit then because there are obviously other parts of science that aren't just about climate yes it's just what I know most about yeah I mean I know there are Scientific Advisor to the government because again I've worked alongside some of them I'm making myself I'm really
important now and I didn't really do a lot I was just one scientist out of many but there were things like in the covid-19 pandemic where there were rapid response teams and a lot of what we did in the pandemic was heavily influenced by science to stop the spread of the virus the rule of six was one of those from the rapid response team based at Imperial College yeah they seem to do a lot of modeling didn't they to say if people intera in this way then the transmission rate does this so if you
want to keep the transmission rate below one you have to tell people to do this and you have to have it enforced yeah and they explained that if you keep the R value below one that it means that the spread won't increase and eventually the uh level of infection will die out yeah they are value being um the transmission rate that's right isn't it you think we' remember this it was only a few years ago we all became an armchair expert on a pandemics and I thought that was a
really good way of putting science into the public eye and showing here's how science is important and how it affects your life it means this if you don't do it people die man it's a very extreme example bit off topic but I notice on time do is which is what we use for the podcast is today is handwashing day that was also another bit of research that doctors noticed people that wash their hands after surgery before going on to another patient saved lives too you've
got to wonder if that was as rapid to become an inbuilt behavior for clinicians and people as it was for responding to the covid-19 pandemic because that was like a really rapid response wasn't it the whole world suddenly mobilized to come together to do something and I think the research I'm talk about came from like the 1900s when we just about understood how soap worked yeah and some people still don't wash their hands yes and so we all had lessons about singing happy birthday to
wash our hands some ofous me I don't remember that that was great that the government responded quickly based on Research I do wish that that happened in other areas such as climate change where the climate change committee who was put together following climate change act to follow our progress towards our 8% Target by 2050 they review how we are doing and set a carbon budget every 5 years and they've noticed that the next Caron budget that they forecast for we are not going to meet that and it
doesn't seem like there is enough policy in place that would lead us towards that towards not breaking the law so Decades of research and we're still just almost carrying on as normal there have been some changes but they're not enough it sounds kind of similar to what I'm aware of from the nuclear industry because there's a committee on radioactive waste management which does a similar thing to the climate change committee but obviously advisers on radioactive waste
and they come up with strategies to advise the government on what we should and shouldn't do and we're still trying to figure out what to do with the waste and there's a reason for that because a lot of people don't like the idea of nuclear waste and we need to find a community willing to host it and that's very important part of um government policy for a good reason I think it's part of the democra IC process yeah but then I guess you have to wonder well if
people want to carry on doing what they do and they don't want to change their behaviors to help with um the recommendations of the climate change committee then we all die yeah I'm being very uh Grim this episode well is that difficult thing of some people debate Politics as a sport but then politics does affect all of us if people can't decide what to do with the nuclear waste we're still producing it so it's just going to be a bigger problem uh inally we've gotten a lot more efficient at how
we manage nuclear materials in general and react new reactors are way more efficient than the old ones so they'll produce less material compared to the amount of energy they'll put out but there's still that perenium problem of all this Legacy waste from an industry that 70 years old we need to do something with it we can't just keep managing it as we are now it would just be better according to scientists to bury it under the ground essentially put it back where it came from and put it
far away from people but then you need to find the right geology to do that which means you need to get a community involved that might have the right geology do you think more science and science communication with those communities would help or do you think there are other factors I think there are other factors there are things about just what you believe and a lot of the time no amount of telling someone about science is going to change what they fundamentally believe but there are
other ways that your beliefs might be shaped over time by you know talking to like people around you if all your peers are suddenly saying yeah we need this thing in our lives you might be more likely to listen or you might start to see other benefits from talking to other communities uh you tend to find that people that live near nuclear license sites they understand how nuclear can help them because it provides jobs and security and they don't really see anything going wrong with where they're
working either yeah because they're so familiar with it it's not a scary thing over there they deal with it every day and go you know when accidents happen they're not as bad as the worst ones that is what gets publicized in the news and things yeah they see nuclear operations happening every day so they understand that one thing going wrong doesn't mean everything goes wrong it's generally a very safe industry and it operates so many different principles of safety and has so much regulation so
many things to say you're definitely doing this in the best way possible right and I guess that's also how other types of researchers can help not just science researchers but social science researchers in understanding science communic how our understanding influences our uptake of new information yeah and there's a lot of research in that area as well so when you were saying there aren't that many scientists in the Civil Service I'm part of the government communication area as well because I
work for a National Lab and they have a lot of Behavioral scientist helping to shape how you talk about something really complex and Technical or sensitive to people that have a different point of view or aren't as aware is someone in the industry so I don't know how that would fit into your comments about climate change and how Decades of campaigning and research still isn't making much difference though I guess these a two slightly different things I think they are it's
kind of almost like the slow nature of emissions and the changing of climate there are so many factors to it one that I keep thinking rather negatively is just people don't want to change yeah that is what we tend to find people are happy doing what they do unless they can see how something would make their life easier or better um so always think that chip and pin that a lot of Nations don't seem to use it but it seems to happen naturally in the UK it's a lot easier to
pay for something using a credit card or a debit card by just putting your card into a machine and typing in your PIN rather than having to sign for something and now contactless or NFC even more so exactly Natural Evolution that just makes it easier and easier to go about your day yeah whereas climate change and radioactive waste don't directly affect your day today yes so I feel like we've talked a lot about all these different ways that re search can be used by
government from consultations to government libraries and whatever else but now we're talking about the general public yes and how they can Lobby MPS to bring particular topics to light and then get time to discuss them in Parliament exactly I've met my local MP a few times I know always really busy but they always seem to have time to actually listen to you and respond to your query I find that's interesting I've not met mine I have written some letters to them over the years is and
yeah I get a response sometimes I think they're a stock response cuz I'm on a particular sort of like campaign and so they probably got an influx of people writing the messages I bet they Trend how many people they have talking to them about particular topics and they'll see if it is really a concern for their constituents I can't say that word properly you know what I mean consti make an act on it thank you so we're giving everyone if you're in the UK anyway an action to consider whether you
would want to contact your MP about something that's important to you to see if you can affect a law change I hope it's for the better not for something selfish that is true well then would they listen I I still think you need some evidence to back it up so if you're saying something that all these other committees and reports and the researches at government and all of their many different ways of communicating with experts to affect policy you need to be kind of saying the
same thing they are it sounds like if there isn't this really big mass of people it's not the right term either something doesn't have any momentum behind it it won't go anywhere it's maybe a better phrase yeah and and yeah obviously yeah there are topics that the evidence isn't necessarily hard evidence but maybe it's a very emotional story and that sometimes drives policy yeah I guess there's one final thing I want to say on that because it relates the nuclear industry some Nations don't have
nuclear power because they had a referendum they asked their constituents to vote on whether they should or shouldn't have yes I heard about this Australia Australia so Austria had a referendum in 1978 in the public very narrowly voted against having nuclear power after they'd started to build a nuclear power plant and it still sits there to this day 50 years ago it's never been fueled yeah it's used as a a training um ground for nuclear operators elsewhere in the world interesting but
that's very good example of how even though some experts say this is a really good thing and your Nations started to do something you can influence National policy so there you go how do you feel now about how science influences policy Antonia because this is your interest initially uh I've just kind of h a whole load of techniques for influencing or roots to influencing government at you at first it sounded like you had to be an academic to be an influencing voice
on science but through my work I've seen that it doesn't have to be you know someone academic can be professional body that puts their voices together so all these chartered Engineers saying something but also even if you're not necessarily in the foreground there are people working behind the scenes providing information to hopefully make the best decisions for running a country which seems to be a combination of this is the science behind it or the the technical justification and here's what
people want the two seem to need balance oh yes and I guess that is the perfect note to end it on the views expressed in this podcast belong enti to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and
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