The CSIRO is taking on Australia’s tough research challenges

CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall. Photo: Oscar Colman

Australia’s goal to reach net zero is, in many ways, a personal one. It will be easier for some; harder for others. Industries like electricity generation are well on their way and know what technology they need to eliminate their 30 per cent share of our emissions; others require technologies that are currently too expensive, haven’t been tested at scale, or may not even have been invented yet. But regardless of our different journeys to net zero – we all have to go there together.

Three of Australia’s hardest to abate industries are agriculture, aviation, and steel. These are industries that touch the lives of every Australian, but the impacts of transitioning them to net zero will be felt most in the regional centres that have grown up around them.

Regions like the Pilbara in Western Australia and Gladstone in Queensland have developed as economic powerhouses on the back of fossil fuel industries, the same fuels that fly us all over this wide brown land and around the world. Port Kembla on the south coast of NSW has been making steel since 1928, supporting an estimated 10,000 jobs in the region. And across the nation, there are more than 85,600 farms, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and of course, feeding us all.

These regions have seen job losses over the years as hard to abate sectors have been impacted by a range of factors, from droughts and floods to international competitors to dwindling finite resources. They don’t need yet another challenge – they need an opportunity.

That’s why CSIRO launched a national mission called Towards Net Zero. Working with partners in government, universities and industry, the mission aims to reduce emissions in three of our hardest to abate industries by 50 per cent by 2035.

The mission is focused on co-development not just of technological solutions, but on innovative opportunities for reinvention. We want to help these communities to create innovative new industries that reinvent and reinvigorate these regions as they so rightly deserve. A realistic and planned transition to net zero emissions creates a wide range of positive and environmental and social benefits, including new industries and jobs suited to regional areas – that’s what this mission sets out to do.

Our seemingly impossible challenge is to lower emissions across multiple sectors while growing our economy and protecting our communities at the same time, but it can be done. For example, supporting Indigenous livelihoods through savanna burning projects or planting programs that support biodiversity as well as offset carbon.

About 14 per cent of the world’s emissions come from livestock, so humans can eat, but Australian science is solving this seemingly impossible problem by creating a unique Australian product called FutureFeed, a cattle feed supplement that reduces emissions that’s now being sold around the world. FutureFeed lowers emissions but not profits, so farmers are embracing it – a great example of using innovation instead of policy.

Co-development is at the heart of CSIRO’s missions – large scale, impact-focused scientific and collaborative research initiatives that bring together government, industry and the wider research sector to solve seemingly impossible problems.

Since announcing the missions program in 2020, CSIRO has now launched six collaborative missions with a combined co-investment of $359 million from CSIRO and our partners – and growing.

Those missions are already making progress towards ending plastic waste, growing a $50 billion hydrogen industry, fighting drought, defending our Agrifood exports against fraud, growing future protein sources, and moving towards net zero.

Solving our greatest challenges cannot be done by any institution alone, but our program of national missions gets Team Australia on the field to tackle them. Missions bring universities, government and industry together around problems that are wickedly hard to solve, but solving them with science creates new economic, social and environmental value for all Australians.

When John F Kennedy announced the moon mission in 1962, he said: ‘We choose to do these things because they are hard.’ Today we don’t have a choice – missions seek to solve problems that we must solve at all costs. The scale of these challenges dwarf that original moonshot, but, by joining together in that same spirit to achieve these missions, we can propel Australia forward into a better future.

Larry Marshall is chief executive of the CSIRO.

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Read more: Stories from Research Magazine 2023