Speech: Anna Skarbek speaks on Climateworks’ Indonesia office’s five year anniversary

An edited extract from Anna Skarbek’s remarks on 17 June 2025, at a celebration of the fifth anniversary of Climateworks Centre’s Indonesia office, held at Wisma Habibie Ainun, South Jakarta. 

Selamat malam and welcome everyone.

I do wish to acknowledge our special guests tonight, including His Excellency the Vice Minister of Industry Faisol Riza and our Australian Government guests, Minister Counsellor Pak Jonathan Gilbert, thank you and your team who are here. 

And Pro Vice Chancellor and President of Monash, Indonesia, Professor Matthew Nicholson, and our Indonesia Board Member and Chair of the Purnomo Yusgiantoro Center, Filda Yusgiantoro – thank you so much for being here. And I will be thanking all our staff later too, for bringing us together here in this special venue. 

Importantly, I also acknowledge all of you, our guests here. 

You are why we are here. And you are here tonight because you are the people who have supported and worked with us at Climateworks over five years now here in Indonesia, and over 15 years in Australia since Climateworks was established. 

You are the people who we know can help drive and scale the transformations that are possible here in Southeast Asia’s largest economy.

We are focused on impact here, tonight and every day at Climateworks Centre. 

When we recently celebrated 15 years since Climateworks was established in Melbourne, we acknowledged that it was philanthropic foundations and Monash University that created Climateworks Centre to bridge the gap between research and climate action. 

We act as independent specialist advisors: convening, collaborating and producing expert analysis focused on solutions to climate action and how best to align them with national sustainable development goals. 

We seek to make sure that this knowledge is practical and relevant for decision makers who hold the power to take action at scale. So we work with government, business and the non-profit sector to help make it easier to adopt these actions and create the impact that we jointly seek through our shared goals. 

In Indonesia, we commenced our work here as soon as the Paris Agreement was signed.

Our board urged us to support Indonesia and the Southeast Asia region because we knew that the Sustainable Development Goals were signed at the same time as the Paris Agreement, and we knew this region had the opportunity to align its development path with the sustainable development goals and the climate goals at the same time. 

Of course, we know Indonesia’s growing economy has been tied to growing emissions, much like the rest of the region and much like Australia’s economy until recently. And we know that limiting the worst effects of climate change requires countries such as Indonesia to leapfrog fossil fuel development paths of economic growth, and to transition and embrace the low emissions growth paths. 

These joint goals can happen together while supporting a just society and a healthy environment.

We soon employed our local team here in Jakarta, beginning with Guntur Sutiyono, who came to Climateworks with a deep understanding of Indonesia’s policy and economic landscape. 

Guntur, it’s lovely to have you here with us tonight. 

In Guntur’s six years with the organisation, he grew the team to these nine in-country specialists that we have here in the room tonight – plus, four more joining soon, with half a dozen in our Melbourne office working on our Southeast Asia programs, led by our very talented Trang Nguyen, our Head of International Programs and Engagement, who is also here tonight. Our local team is also building on the contributions of our former Indonesian staff and it’s great to have all our alumni here tonight.

We are well-established locally, and I’m very proud of this team and delighted to be able to lead the work that they produce in collaboration with all of you and all of your teams. 

Together, we’ve pursued agenda-setting work with the Indonesian government; Indonesian industry, philanthropy; the non-profit community and university sectors here and the media.

To our partners and funders, thank you. It really is collaboration and partnerships that is how we can achieve these major goals of sustainable development and climate action. The progress that we will discuss tonight would not have been possible without your support. I’m very proud of the impact in Indonesia that we’ve been able to achieve with you. 

Some of this impact includes: in Indonesia, the National Development Contribution (NDC) will have an oceans chapter for the first time, which is informed by collective analysis from many organisations, including the Climateworks Centre’s Southeast Asia Framework for Ocean Action in Mitigation (SEAFOAM) Project. 

I’m honoured we have Professor Luky Adrianto and the SEAFOAM ISSG members with us, because it is through your expert engagement that we have been able to develop this analysis to show that seagrass and mangrove protection can contribute very significant carbon mitigation and climate benefits alongside the blue economy benefits of the ocean’s communities.

We are also focused on the energy transition. We are undertaking analysis of low carbon batteries supply chains in a study with Purnomo Yusgiantoro Center (PYC) and we will hear from Filda Yusgiantoro this evening, the executive chair of PYC and of course a Monash alumni also. 

Through the years we’ve provided executive education for Indonesian policy makers, with a community of practice on the just energy transition and, during Indonesia’s chair of the G20 and of ASEAN in the following year, we were proud to work with leading think tanks in Indonesia to bring new issues to the agenda. 

This included supporting new high level dialogue on how Islamic finance can support the just energy transition in emerging economies, including with Indonesia’s then Vice President, Pak Ma’ruf Amin and two ministers, the then Minister of Energy Pak Arifin Tasrif, and Ibu Sri Mulyani who is still Indonesia’s Finance Minister. This part of the dialogue was the first time that the Vice President publicly endorsed the use of Islamic finance for the energy transition. 

I thank all of the groups that worked with my Climateworks Centre team to help bring this analysis together and make it available, and engage senior industry and ministries to enable this knowledge to be shared into action.

Again, lasting impact that you have all enabled by working together with us. 

Through that period, we co-convened six side events related to the energy transition during Indonesia’s ASEAN chair. Working with those groups, I was very pleased to see how well these leading national organisations worked alongside our local team here in Indonesia.

Today, I’m pleased to say that we all signed an MOU – the six organisations – to continue to work together on the energy transition. And so I’m delighted that we have representatives from this collaboration with us tonight from IESR, PYC, IRID, IISD and CPD, who are all committed to sharing their complementary strengths in advancing Indonesia’s transition to a net zero economy.

It’s a credit to these local teams that we identify the complementary strengths, we work together, we avoid duplication and competition, and we enabled very senior and busy ministers and vice president to understand and adopt this knowledge. 

Looking ahead, we’re very excited, building on the strength of over half a decade here in Indonesia to look ahead for another half decade and more.

And we’re actually in the most important phase of our work: implementation at scale.

So we will continue our work on oceans and blue economy and we will continue our work on industrial decarbonisation. 

A key program is our place-based industrial decarbonisation program that we call Net Zero Industrial Precincts. It’s focussed on green industrial hubs and clusters, and developing frameworks for how we can work within existing industrial parks and zones, looking at these precincts and hubs to represent new opportunities and new investment with green critical supply chains and renewable energy demand and supply aggregation. 

I’m delighted to have had philanthropic support for this work for over a year and we now have the support to continue to design the future work along with, and including, two other potential funders. Through this support, we studied over 31,000 industrial facilities in 139 industrial estates to identify the places that have good prospects for renewable energy and industrial processing, with four industry subsectors in priority focus: iron and steel, nickel, cement, and alumina. We’re very excited to be progressing this work here in Indonesia alongside similar programs in Vietnam and Australia. 

To conclude, we remain optimistic and ambitious for our shared success in the shared goals of climate action and sustainable development. We are hopeful indeed that by 2045, Indonesia could be a net zero economy as shown in Bappenas’ recent scenario. We recognise this is a stretch forward from its current net zero 2060 target, and yet it would align with Indonesia’s centenary of independence.

We know there are many, many reasons to race towards net zero success in all our economies. We’re excited to be working with you, together, to achieve this. If we keep working together at net zero and our shared sustainable development goals, we are confident that these are goals that we can achieve. 

Thank you, terima kasih.

Read more:

Watch: