Climate change campaigner Bill McKibben blew through Dunedin this week on his ''Do The Maths'' tour, urging his audiences to confront the fossil fuel industry ''head on''.
A few days earlier, a report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency appeared to indicate that industry might be coming around to his way of thinking. The report warns the world is not on track to limit global warming to 2degC, and urges governments to enact policies to ''keep climate goals alive''. This from the organisation that represents big fossil fuel producers. Its prescription includes phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels and leaving some oil and gas reserves in the ground.
Mr McKibben was hosted in the South by the Otago Climate Change Network, a grouping of researchers at the University of Otago looking at what needs to happen next.
Among them is Prof Colin Campbell-Hunt, the head of the finance and accounting department at the School of Business, who says there is a template for tackling climate change.
In 2006, economist Lord Nicholas Stern issued a report in Britain assessing the risks that country faced and setting out a way forward.
His review estimated that if no action was taken, climate change could cost between 5%-20% of global GDP each year, forever. On the other hand, the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change could be limited to about 1% of global GDP each year. Climate change, he said, was the ''greatest market failure the world has ever seen''. Three elements were required for an effective global response: pricing carbon, policy to support innovation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies, and removing barriers to energy efficiency and educating individuals about what they can do to respond.
Nevertheless, Prof Campbell-Hunt says it is one of the best pieces of policy analysis he has seen. New Zealand needs to do something similar, asking what climate change will mean for the country, not just in terms of the physical and life sciences, but in the social, economic and political realms.
''It is a set of questions that in our view really need to be asked and there needs to be public discussion on them and [those discussions] need to be as well informed by good research as we can possibly make them, so the public can be pretty well informed and start to scratch its head and worry in the right sorts of ways.''
It would put the issue on the front foot.
''We have to get more than bad news out there. There is a classic result in decision theory ... that if you present people with a seriously frightening prospect, they just freeze.''
People need to be told how they can respond.
Initially, the Otago Climate Change Network hopes to do a scoping study. That would identify what work needs to be done, so an approach could be made to the Government to take it forward.
Prof Campbell-Hunt says he can only speculate at this stage what the scoping study might come up with, but it could include looking at an appropriate price for carbon. Taxes at the petrol pump, that amount to something of a proxy carbon levy, amount to just 89c a litre, but need to be many times that to trigger the sort of response that would start reducing carbon emissions.
''Whatever it takes to make carbon uneconomic. We really have to stop chucking carbon into the atmosphere very soon,'' Prof Campbell-Hunt says.
''If we had a sensible price for carbon, all of those relative scarcities would be reflected in every decision that everybody on the planet makes. That is an enormously powerful set of signals and we would respond to this challenge very quickly.''
It would shake up the global economic system, which relies on cheap transport fuel, with good and bad outcomes. We would be poorer in terms of our ability to consume, but quality of life might get a lot better, Prof Campbell-Hunt says.
''It is possible that for a town like Dunedin and a country like New Zealand, we would have more activities being done here locally, that are now outsourced to places like China.''
Dunedin is a good case study, Prof Campbell-Hunt suggests.
Big oil companies are looking to come here and would bring money.
''So we see the short-term economic benefits of that.''
The prospect of Dunedin becoming the ''Aberdeen of the South'' is one that might once have attracted him, he says.
''These days I might see it more as 'why would we want to connect the economy of this precious little town of ours to a dying industry, to a sunset industry?'. And if we don't want to do that, we need some bright ideas for an alternative.''
That might include attracting smart people and their entrepreneurial skills, people forced to migrate as a result of climate change - as predicted by Lord Stern.
''It is going to bite this town one way or the other, and we have a lot of control over that, or influence anyway.''
Another of the academics in the network is Dr Sara Walton, a senior lecturer teaching organisations and sustainability in the university's School of Business.
One project she has under way is looking at the future of work in Dunedin in 2030 and 2060. Working with the Dunedin City Council, surveys have gone out to key players in the local business community asking them what they think 2030 will look like. It is a future-proofing study, Dr Walton says, aiming to equip businesses to think further out than the usual five-year business plan.
''Underpinning that is the notion of climate change and some of the physical changes and some of the socio-economic ones that could come about by 2030 to do with climate change.''
Typically, this approach throws up a range of scenarios: a business-as-usual scenario; an idealistic green one; and then ''a whole heap in the middle''.
''We want to explore that grey ground and provide some really plausible pictures of what might go on in Dunedin, so businesses can start to think about the future quite seriously.''
The use of scenario planning has become more popular as a result of the realisation that big changes are coming, Dr Walton says.
There is little debate now in the economic and business worlds about whether climate change is on its way, she says. The debate has moved on to look at when to mitigate.