Charles Lee is the Director of Te Tumu Whakaora Taiao - Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Waikato. He is an Antarctic scientist, and previously served as the Co-Principal Investigator for the New Zealand Antarctic Science Platform.
Tell us about your current role, and where you are in the world.
I am the Director of the Environmental Research Institute at the University of Waikato and also an Associate Professor in the School of Science.
I am based in Kirikiriroa, where I’ve lived for over twenty years. I was born in Taiwan and received most of my education there, and I have also spent significant time in the United States and China. Those experiences give me a strongly international perspective, and I tend to think about environmental challenges at a planetary scale.
I am a very practical, evidence-driven person and have been accused of being hyper-rational. My work focuses on questions with real‑world impact, particularly where science can inform decision‑making.
Although I enjoy science fiction as an intellectual escape, I approach climate challenges without assuming magical solutions—only evidence-grounded, economically practical, and scalable actions.
What was your journey to becoming involved in the climate sector?
I have been an Antarctic scientist for most of my career—so far, anyway, and I don't really see that changing in the near future.
Through my leadership roles in multiple international research projects on Antarctic ecosystems, including the flagship ecosystem project for the New Zealand Antarctic Science Platform, I became keenly aware of the complex yet highly uncertain changes being driven by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Unlike some of my fellow Antarctic scientists, however, I think about aspects of climate change that present near-term (over the coming decades) challenges to natural and built environments beyond Antarctica. In turn, this has focused my thinking on what can be practically done to mitigate climate change at scale and what prevents those actions from happening.
What's something new that you're working on or interested in at the moment?
Like many people before me, I have come to believe that climate-positive action is not primarily limited by science or engineering.
In many areas, our ability to act is already well ahead of our willingness or capacity to implement (e.g., wider deployment of photovoltaic panels). The barriers are often social, economic, legal, regulatory, and institutional, rather than purely technical.
I have a strong dislike for the term “climate crisis.”
Climate change is urgent and serious, but calling it a crisis creates the false impression that there is a decisive (likely magical) intervention that will return things to normal. There is not, not least because "normal" is what caused climate change in the first place.
Climate change has been more than 200 years in the making, and mitigating it will require comprehensive changes in how we generate, distribute, store, and manipulate energy. The task is not to “solve” climate change in a dramatic moment, but to shift human civilization onto a more durable, lower-risk trajectory over time.
That is where my current interest lies: not only in what technologies exist, but in why capable societies fail to deploy them quickly and intelligently. I am especially interested in how we train decision-makers to think in systems, weigh evidence, understand trade-offs, and act at the scale the problem requires.
I am deeply optimistic about human ingenuity and resilience, but optimism has to be paired with institutional competence.
What do you think is the role for New Zealand and New Zealanders in achieving action on climate change?
New Zealand’s role is not to solve climate change through the scale of its own emissions, but to demonstrate what practical climate action can look like in a high-income, geographically dispersed, food-producing society.
In that sense, New Zealand has several natural advantages. Its low population density makes distributed renewable energy (i.e., solar and wind) a plausible option, supported by a national smart grid. New Zealand is necessarily reliant on road transport, but its relatively open vehicle market makes it a useful proving ground for zero-emission vehicles and the supporting infrastructure.
New Zealand’s farming systems are already among the most efficient producers of animal protein globally, although there is still massive room for improvement.
New Zealand has also been a direct beneficiary of carbon emissions over the past 200 years, and it has a moral imperative, as well as a strategic opportunity, to lead by example in reducing its per capita carbon footprint.
New Zealanders can lead by example, rather than grandstand, and build a scalable, sustainable model of a net-zero economy.
