About the author: Nick Rowley

About Nick

Nick Rowley is an Adjunct Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network at the University of Sydney.

Nick is currently a strategic policy consultant to a mix of business and NGO clients in Australia and overseas. He also represents and works for the UK based Robertsbridge Group in Australia and New Zealand.

He has worked in senior government roles, including two years as an advisor to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair working in the Number 10 Policy Directorate.

His experience includes initiating high level policy advice, leading on new policy development and implementation through delivering complex projects.


Nick has focused for most of a decade on addressing the climate problem: since returning to Australia as a founding director of Kinesis: a firm driven by achieving measureable emissions reductions for public and private clients; and in 2011 working for nine months in the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency on the communication of the Australian government's Clean Energy Future package.

He was part of the team that established the seminal Stern Review into the Economics of Climate Change and for two years prior to the 2009 UNFCCC meeting in Copenhagen was Strategic Director of the Copenhagen Climate Council.

Website: https://theconversation.com/profiles/nick-rowley-10185

A global deal that drives good decisions: what success at the Paris summit should look like

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This is the final part of a three-part essay on the prospects for a global climate deal at the Paris 2015 talks. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Much like the internet, climate change is here, and as each day passes, it only gets bigger. This is true not only of the science – another year passes, greenhouse gas concentrations rise, and the warming and severe weather events intensify – but also of the human, political and policy response to the problem. There is always another international meeting to prepare for, a new report to digest, a new policy to consider.

It is the relentlessness of the problem that can drive fatigue. People feel they have heard it before. Policies have been tried, their success has been mixed, and the debate – certainly in Australia – is either nasty, or tired, or both. Continue reading →

Why the Paris climate talks won’t be another Copenhagen

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This is part 2 of a three-part essay on the prospects for a global climate deal at the Paris 2015 talks. You can read part 1 here.

For three years leading up to the last significant United Nations climate summit, at Copenhagen in 2009, I was the strategic director of the Copenhagen Climate Council. The purpose of this group – which included chief executives of major global businesses headquartered in China, Europe, and the United States, as well as policy experts, scientists and other leading academics – was to shed light on the importance of reaching a global climate agreement, and to define what that agreement should include. Continue reading →

The Road to Paris: three myths about international climate talks

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With only nine months to go before the most important international meeting on climate change since Copenhagen in 2009, what are the chances of success at this year’s Paris talks? What might “success” mean? And can the mistakes and challenges that have befallen previous meetings be avoided and tackled?

To help address these questions, let’s first dispense with three pervasive myths that continue to make the task of achieving an adequate global response to climate change harder. Continue reading →