Ms Anna Skarbek - Researcher Profile

Anna is helping business and government identify the most cost-effective technology to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

“There are many pleasant surprises,” Anna explains. “There’s more available to us right now, sitting under our noses, than we realise – and it’s not as expensive as we thought.”

ClimateWorks is in collaboration with Monash University, which provides their operational support, and major Australian philanthropic organisation the Myer Foundation, which provides funding.

Through ClimateWorks, Anna provides businesses and governments (federal, state and local) with independent data that allows them to assess upfront capital costs, ongoing operational costs and the ongoing operating savings of such environmentally friendly technology. 

For example, she recently worked with the National Australia Bank (NAB) to look at potential savings in the retail sector. 

“Based on [the major Australian Stock Exchange-listed retailers’] floor space and energy use, we measured what would be the average that they could save using available technology - it adds up to a billion dollars a year by 2020.” 

NAB subsequently ran ClimateWorks’ data through their own financial models. The bank found that if the major Australian Stock Exchange-listed retailers added savings from their reduced energy use to their bottom line, “it would be the equivalent of doubling their current revenue growth targets”.

Anna is currently applying to households the same research on energy saving strategies that ClimateWorks has previously conducted into business and government. She has identified that households have many of the same challenges as businesses: “There’s a high upfront cost to some technology, even though over the life of the asset it will pay for itself.” 

She suggests initiatives such as the ‘Pay As You Save’ system in the United Kingdom, which allows households to repay loans on green household technology at the same rate as the savings that the technology provides. In Melbourne and New South Wales, commercial building owners will soon be able to access a similar program. 

The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro provided Anna with some of her inspiration to use her undergraduate degrees in law, and in commerce, for the environmental cause. 

“Rio created the ability to think about this environmental challenge through a business angle, and the legal angle as well, with the subsequent Kyoto Protocol.”

She is ultimately hopeful about our prospects of reducing the effects of climate change, and she cites recent history for precedent. 

“Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve had an information revolution, and now we’re heading into the environmental (or clean tech) revolution. When we look at the huge leaps that society has taken through technology, I think that it yields great hope that we can take another great leap. 

“In the mean time, it is impossible to say we will not cause more harm. I’m spending my life working as hard as I can to try to prevent us causing too much.”