17:15-18:15
Forestry Lecture
Theatre 1
Forestry Building

Joint Seminar with the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Soil Science Society

12:00-13:00
Seminar Room
Hancock Building

Joint Seminar with the ANU Economics & Environment Network

Joint Seminar with the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Soil Science Society

Joint Lecture with CSIRO Land and Water

8th March 2007

Ecological Death - an Emerging Paradigm ?

Dr Val Plumwood. Visiting Fellow. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australia National University

15th March 2007

Making the Wentworth Group’s recommendations on land clearing work in practice

Dr Phillip Gibbons. Fellow. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australia National University

23rd March 2007

Making the Harder Yards: Environmental Policy Integration in Australia

Dr Andrew Ross and Dr Steve Dovers. Visiting Fellow, National Europe Centre. Fenner School of Environment and Society. Australian National University

29th March 2007

Future Trends in Soil Science

17:00-18:00
Forestry Lecture Theatre 1
Forestry Building

Dr Neil McKenzie. Deputy Chief, CSIRO Land & Water. NSW Branch of Australian Soil Science Society

Dr Neil McKenzie, is currently the Deputy Chief of the CSIRO Land and Water, and one of Australia’s leading soil scientists who has been the major author in several keynote publications on Australian soils, including “Australian Soils and Landscapes”, “Soil Physical Measurement and Interpretation for Land Evaluation” and the “Australian Soil and Land Survey Handbook”. Dr McKenzie instigated and manages the ACLEP program and is also managing the Australian Soil Resource Information System on behalf of the National Land and Water Resources Audit. He has been at the forefront of the application of new technologies to soil science including digital soil mapping, terrain analysis, pedotransfer functions and advanced statistical analysis, and has fostered and encouraged the use of these technologies in land resource survey applications such as agriculture, forestry and national policy. His views on the directions soil science is taking in Australia and the place of soil science in natural resource management in Australia will be of interest to all those involved in natural resource management in Australia, including fellow soil scientists and other natural resource scientists, together with policy advisors and administrators of natural resource management.

12th April 2007

The Social Impact of Climate Change: Understanding Social Responses via use of Scenarios and Implications for Governance

Dr Simon Niemeyer. Political Science Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

23 April 2007

Deforestation and catchment response in Timor-Leste: convergence of community views and science, or delusion?

Narciso Almeida de Carvalho, MAFF; Francisco Inicio MAFF; Alexio Leonita Amaral MAFF; Andrew McWilliam, ANU; Frank Tirendi AIMS; Professor Robert Wasson. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, Charles Darwin University.

10 May 2007

Infrastructure Support for Terrestrial Ecosystems Research: The TERN Project

Adjunct Professor Paul J Perkins AM. Fenner School of Environment and Society

The presentation will cover the project scope and  the science plan developed for this exercise as well as outlining the emerging  infrastructure platforms which will  provide initial investment opportunities.

The outcome is likely to be an Australian Ecosystems Observation Network (AEON?)  with a national centre for synthesis, data management functions and support / outreach, linked to regional hubs  and observatories along several adopted transects. The notion of some of these  being supersites will be discussed.

16 May 2007

Accounting for economic growth: the role of physical work from natural resources

Joint Seminar with the ANU Economics & Environment Network

Dr Benjamin Warr. INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France

  These criticisms of the neoclassical theory of production (functions) led us to seek an alternative, summarised in the REXS model (Warr and Ayres, 2006). Applying thermodynamic principles, we estimate the useful work from physical resources delivered to their point of use, to provide, for example, heat or mechanical drive. We use changes in time in the efficiency of conversion from available work (exergy) to useful work as a proxy of technological progress. We consider useful work as a factor of production (with capital and labour) rather than energy. Doing so we are able to calibrate models for the US, Japan, UK and Austria capable of reproducing historical rates of economic growth observed in the 20th Century, without recourse to assumptions of exogenous (and undefined) technological progress of total factor productivity. The resulting models are suitable for forecasting of future economic growth under alternative technology scenarios and strategies for sustainable development.

References

Warr, B. & Ayres, R. 2006. REXS: A forecasting model for assessing the impact of natural resource consumption and technological change on economic growth. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 17(3): 329-378.

Ayres, R. U. & Warr, B. 2005. Accounting for growth: The role of physical work. Structural Change & Economic Dynamics, 16(2): 181-209.

Ayres, R. U., Ayres, L. W., & Warr, B. 2003. Exergy, power and work in the US economy, 1900-1998. Energy, 28(3): 219-273.

17 May 2007

Farming Profitably in a Changing Climate - A Risk Management Approach

David Barratt. Senior Scientist, Bureau of Rural Sciences. Australian Government

There is still considerable uncertainty associated with projections of precisely how climate change will unfold in the future at regional and local scales where most farming management decisions are made. However, managing uncertainty associated with markets, advances in farming techniques, weather and access to natural resources is part of modern farming.  The threat of climate change merely adds to these uncertainties.

Adapting to such an uncertain future demands a flexible approach based on assessing, analysing and responding to the risks posed by a changing climate. What climate change means to individual farmers and industries is as varied and diverse as the range of farming systems in Australia.  The key to managing profitably under a changing climate is flexibility and adaptability to enable response to information and events.

Managing for climate risks may be the responsibility of producers and the rural industries themselves, but development of appropriate institutional frameworks and targeted scientific research and development can provide support. A coordinated effort in research and development of forecasting and management tools is needed to deal effectively with climate change.

31st May 2007

Connecting Nature and Culture: The Role of the Humanities

Dr Deborah Bird Rose. Fenner School of Environment and Society. Australian National University.

7th June 2007

Deep Time - Umbilicus of Consilience

Professor John Chappell Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

14 June 2007

Soil Fertility Management Towards Sustainable Farming Systems and Landscapes

Dr Maarten Stapper.

(1) why they are the way they are, and then

(2) how science and practice can help to actively manage soil biology to improve and maintain soil fertility, and achieve more sustainable, healthy and productive farming systems even on our fragile Australian soils in a highly variable and changing climate.

Monday 18th June 2007

Science, Policy and the U.S. Congress: Current Issues involving NASA, NOAA and Climate Change

Dr. Johannes Loschnigg. Former Staff Director, Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Committee on Science U.S. House of Representatives.

21st June 2007

Prospects for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: insights from tropical Costa Rica and India.

Jai Ranganathan. Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University

The future of tropical biodiversity hinges partly on realizing the potentially high conservation value of human-dominated agricultural landscapes.  The characteristics of these landscapes that promote biodiversity preservation remain poorly understood, however, particularly at the fine scales at which individual farmers tend to make land-use decisions.  We addressed this uncertainty in two ways.

First, we explored the use of a rapid remote-sensing method for estimating community composition in tropical agriculture, across many components of diversity (amphibians, bees, birds, moths, reptiles, and understory plants).  We determined whether observed changes in community composition correlated with an easily-accessible remote sensing metric, brightness, derived from a Landsat satellite image. We worked within an agricultural landscape in southern Costa Rica, where the land comprised a complex and highly heterogeneous mosaic of remnant native vegetation, pasture, coffee cultivation, and other crops.  We surveyed species communities within all major land-cover types.  Across all taxa, we found that patterns of species richness correlated with remotely-sensed brightness, suggesting the strong potential of this metric as a tool for assessing the conservation value of agricultural landscapes for biodiversity

Second, we asked whether tropical agricultural landscapes support a full range of native species over the long-term.  Recently-deforested countryside in the Neotropics can harbor much more of native biotas than previously thought, under appropriate conditions, but it is unclear whether this conservation value can be sustained over the long term.  We addressed this concern by investigating patterns of resident bird occurrence in an agricultural landscape within the Western Ghats mountain range in southwestern India, a global biodiversity hotspot. The landscape had a history of over 2000 years of continuous agricultural production and contained a spatially heterogeneous mixture of forested elements and agriculture.  Our results suggest that most of the pre-cultivation bird species pool still survived in the area.  In particular, the presence of agricultural systems with high structural complexity (in this landscape, betelnut palm plantations) and the retention of forested landscape elements were crucial for bird persistence.  Our findings suggest great potential for harmonizing agricultural production and long-term biodiversity conservation.

26 July 2007

A resilience approach to dryland development and desert knowledge.

Dr Mark Stafford Smith. CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems & Research Fellow, Desert Knowledge CRC/Land and Water Australia  

Drylands worldwide share a set of causally-related features such as climate unpredictability, low and patchy productivity, sparse and mobile populations, and distant markets and governance that we refer to as the ‘drylands syndrome’. These are particularly exacerbated in ‘desert’ Australia.  The past few decades have seen conflicting paradigms for dealing with desertification in these areas of the world, undermining the effectiveness of the Desertification Convention; however a set of convergent lessons have emerged from the many different disciplinary and sectoral approaches in recent years.  Building on these lessons, I shall outline the ‘Drylands Development Paradigm’, 5 key principles based on resilience ideas which can act as an analytical framework for drylands issues.  I shall illustrate these with two uses in Australia – a meta-analysis of land degradation episodes in Australian rangelands over the past century, and approaches to supporting Aboriginal communities.  I will reflect briefly on how these abstract principles align with the holistic (rather than dualistic) philosophies that emerge from traditional, environment-based cultures.

2 August 2007

Roads and tracks: ‘making up the coast’ of southern New South Wales

Dr Nicholas Brown. Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia

16 August 2007

The ‘Big Here and the Long Now’: Global forces for writing history

Dr Libby Robin. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University. Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia.

Space, in one sense, created the environmental revolution of the 1960s: NASA’s 1969 view of the Earth from Space gave the immediacy to the idea that there is only one Earth. This is the Big Here – we must think locally and regionally, but in a sense, we must also imagine ourselves globally, and the global perspective forces us to consider change simultaneously at many different scales.  Just as we think globally and act locally, we have to imagine time on a grand scale as we play out our individual human lifetimes, and this is the imperative of the Long Now – or history on many scales and for many purposes. I will consider the role of history-making for the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, now that anthropogenic factors can be shown to affect planetary systems of all sorts and at a wide range of scales. Describing changes to the Earth system over time demands understanding of the history of the biophysical factors, the human factors and, above all, putting the two together. While global warming has motivated an Integrated History and future Of People On Earth (IHOPE), a recent initiative of the Global Change community, there have been other cases where history writing across a Long Now has appealed to scientists. A growing awareness of global change and the triple bottom line of sustainability is driving a popular sense of the Big Here and the Long Now more broadly. The epoch of the Anthropocene demands that a whole range of new disciplines and interdisciplines consider history, and that historians, who have traditionally concerned themselves with the nation state, need to learn to speak at different scales.

23rd August 2007

The New Collaborative Environmental Governance

Dr Neil Gunningham. The Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

  The paper examines this new form of governance through the lens of three Australian case studies. Each of these studies involves participatory dialogue and deliberation, flexibility, inclusiveness, transparency, institutionalized consensus-building practices, and, at least to some extent, a shift from hierarchy to heterarchy. The paper examines the relationships between new and old governance, the architecture of these new initiatives, the particular characteristics which impact upon their success or failure, the role of the state and the importance of negotiating in “the shadow of hierarchy”, and the reasons, in some cases, for a substantial implementation deficit.

29 August 2007

The Globalisation of Environmental Codes of Practice in the Agricultural Sector: ‘scaling up’ or ‘dumbing down’?

Karen Hussey. Postdoctoral Fellow, National Europe Centre, Research School of the Humanities Vice Chancellor’s Representative in Europe, & Chair, ANU Water Initiative

30 August 2007

Recognising and rewarding environmental services provided by Indigenous people on the Indigenous estate: how to get a serious policy response from the Australian government?

Professor Jon Altman. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), The Australian National University

  The Indigenous estate constitutes an estimated 20 per cent of the Australian continent, twice the size of the conservation estate, and includes some of the most environmentally intact parts of the continent. This seminar explores the potential role of the Indigenous estate in providing environmental services including carbon abatement and biodiversity conservation, and the potential for payments for such services to serve socio-economic and cultural goals. It also explores possibilities for further integrating parts of the Indigenous estate with the conservation estate as currently occurs under the Indigenous Protected Areas program. Such integration will require serious policy consideration of how to mobilize and remunerate Indigenous stakeholders for provision of environmental services. The articulations between Indigenous affairs and environmental policy frameworks are explored and an argument is made for far better correlations between the two to simultaneously address Indigenous socioeconomic disadvantage and national policy goals of biodiversity conservation. To do so will be a win/win; to ignore this possibility will be yet another opportunity foregone, characterised as lose/lose. Some commentary is provided on a positive initiative resourced in the 2007-08 federal budget and the now potential disaster for ‘caring for country’ innovation following the introduction of ‘national emergency’ measures in the NT from 21 June 2007.

6th September 2007

Prospects for a Green Growth: Advancing and Resolving the “Growth” Debates

Michael Smith. Departmental Visitor, Fenner School for Environment and Society, Australian National University. Research Director, The Natural Edge Project (Hosted by Griffith University and ANU).

Over the last year there has been a significant shift in the debates about climate change and water issues in Australia. Thanks significantly to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, decision makers and citizens understand the need to achieve the IPCC’s recommended target of at least 60% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 . Al Gore outlined well the moral, humanitarian and security reasons for action on climate change. However he did not discuss the economics of climate change. There is still significant resistance globally in many nations to signing up to a Post Kyoto Framework largely due to fears on how it will effect economic growth. Both major political parties in Australia have failed to commit to short term greenhouse targets for Australia due to fears of harming economic growth. This talk will start by showing that such fears are unfounded. There is now a wealth of literature showing that deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved whilst maintaining strong economic and jobs growth. These studies show that economic growth can be significantly decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is a important result. (For further information see http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/60by2050.aspx)

But rising greenhouse gas emissions are just one example of an increasing environmental pressure. The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has shown that the resilience of the earth’s ecosystems is threatened by a wide range of rising environmental pressures. Therefore to achieve sustainable development we need to achieve rapid and significant decoupling of economic growth from all environmental pressures. Also it will be impossible to achieve such a major eco-restructuring of the global economy if vicious cycles of corruption, grinding poverty and global inequity are not also addressed. Social sustainability issues cannot be ignored. At numerous UN meetings over the last 35 years, many nations have committed to social and environmental sustainability goals. However, as this talk will show, to date few nations in the world have backed up these commitments with the scale and speed of action needed because of vested interests and fears that such commitments would harm economic and jobs growth. This talk will examine whether or not these fears justified?  Whilst climate change can be addressed whilst maintaining strong economic growth, what about a full transition to sustainable development? This talk will investigate whether such a transition can be done whilst maintaining strong economic and jobs growth?

Twenty years ago The UN Brundtland Commission Report Our Common Future argued that it could. In her Forward, Gro Brundtland argued that “What is needed now is a new era of economic growth––growth that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.”  In the late 1980s, the UN Brundtland Commission report was criticised for this. This talk will bring together, in a novel integration, new evidence and studies from the last 20 years to demonstrate that there are prospects for a new form of green “growth”. This talk will provide a wide range of evidence to demonstrate that it is possible to aim for a truly healthy society and environment whilst maintaining a healthy economy. This is the subject of the forthcoming 2008 Earthscan publication Cents and Sustainability: Making sense of how to grow economies, build communities and revive the environment in our lifetime (A Handbook for decoupling economic growth from negative environmental and social pressures.): which is based on Michael Smith’s Ph.D thesis “Advancing and Resolving The Great Sustainability Debates” co-supervised by Professor Dovers and Karlson Hargroves’s Ph.D thesis supervised by Professor Peter Newman. This book is being published to mark the 20th anniversary of the UN Brundtland Commissions report. For further information see http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/centsandsustainability.aspx

6th September 2007

NSW Branch of Australian Soil Science Society

17:00-18:00
Forestry Lecture Theatre 1
Forestry Building

Soil and Land Monitoring Plans for NSW

Greg Chapman. Theme Leader - Soil and Land Condition Monitoring, Evaluation & Reporting Department of Environment and Climate Change.

The NSW Government through its Natural Resources Commission has set  a number of natural resource targets to guide Catcment Management Authorities in thier activities and resource allocation.  The two land related targets are:

• improvement in soil condition, and

• increase in area of land being managed within its capability. 

The  NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change has been charged with monitoring progress towards the targets as its highest soil and land priority.  Accordingly a multimillion $ project has been funded to establish systems for setting up a soil and land monitoring system by the end of June 2008.  Soil indicators include the five national matters for target: Wind Erosion; Water Erosion; Soil and Land Salinity; Soil Acidification and Soil Organic Carbon, as well as Soil Structure Decline and Coastal Acid Sulfate Soil. Field pilot studies have been completed for the measurement and evaluation of each indicator. 
  Methods are being devised to determine best methods of landscape stratification, collection of land management  and land use change information and assessment of land and soil capability.  Data bases are being prepared and designed to assist with field collection and data storage.

13 September 2007

The National Water Initiative – a contested policy

Daniel Connell, Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University

When they approved the National Water Initiative in June 2004 the States and Territories agreed to develop water plans that would restore over-allocated hydrological systems and protect those not yet in that condition. The NWI committed them to a two part program. First they had to work out for each hydrological system what was needed to maintain environmental sustainability at whatever level of modification was defined as acceptable taking into account social and economic factors in addition to environmental. Second they were to establish robust arrangements for water trading to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs involved in managing the water that remained for production. As part of this package the NWI was intended to establish a framework within which water entitlements would be clearly defined and the uncertainty previously created by political and administrative interventions would be minimized. However, a recent project, Sustainability Limits and the National Water Initiative, funded by Land and Water Australia, has found very little evidence that water plans and management regimes with these characteristics are being developed.  In practice, as has been the case ever since major irrigation development got under way in the 1880s, ministerial discretion continues to be at the core of the process used to define the volumes available for allocation. The NWI was meant to replace the long established administrative system with a rights and responsibilities based system. This does not appear to be happening. What does this mean for the future of Australian water management?

20 September 2007

A changing global carbon cycle

Pep Canadell. Global Carbon Project CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research Canberra, Australia

The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is the single largest human perturbation on the earth’s radiative balance contributing to climate change. Its rate of change reflects the balance between anthropogenic carbon emissions and the dynamics of a number of terrestrial and ocean processes that remove or emit CO2. It is the long term evolution of this balance that will determine to large extent the speed and magnitude of the human induced climate change and the mitigation requirements to stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations at any given level. In this talk, I’ll show new trends in global carbon sources and sinks, with particularly focus on major shifts occurring since 2000 when the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 has reached its highest level on record. The acceleration in the CO2 growth results from the combination of several changes in properties of the carbon cycle, including: i) acceleration of anthropogenic carbon emissions, ii) increased carbon intensity of the global economy, and iii) decreased efficiency of natural carbon sinks. I’ll discuss in more detail some of the possible causes of the reduced efficiency of natural carbon sinks. All these changes reported here characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger than expected climate forcing, and sooner than expected.

15 November 2007 Midday

Petroleum visions: East Timorese opinions about how their petroleum revenue is managed

Jenny Drysdale, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

The East Timorese people imagine a better future in which the riches from the Timor Sea will reduce their poverty. Timor-Leste now has over $1.5 billion worth of revenue in its Petroleum Fund but the quality of life for most has not improved. Why? Because Timor-Leste's institutions wear the hallmarks of Portuguese colonisation and Indonesian occupation, its formal institutions are weak and destructive institutions, like corruption and nepotism remain. The 2006 crisis and the ongoing violence rocked the weak foundations of state and the world wonders whether Timor-Leste is yet another victim of the 'resource curse' that has destroyed countries such as Nigeria and Nauru.

To avoid the resource curse, the Fretilin-led Government of Timor-Leste established conservative, and potentially sustainable, mechanisms for managing Timor-Leste's petroleum revenue. This research presents the opinions of a range of East Timorese decision-makers, foreign advisers and civil society about those plans, and cross-checks those opinions with the policy directions of the new Xanana Gusmao-led Government.

Jenny Drysdale recently completed a PhD at the Fenner School of Environment and Society entitled 'Sustainable development or resource cursed? An exploration of Timor-Leste's institutional choices' (available for download at http://cres.anu.edu.au/~jenster) and is the moderator of the Timor-Leste Studies Association's e-list (www.etstudies-aust.org).

This seminar will be recorded and available for download from the web at http://www.etstudies-aust.org/Seminars.html

Apologies for any inconvenience - the venue for this seminar has changed.

13 December 2007 Midday

Assumptions and reconstructions: are eucalypt tree-rings a potential source of climatological and hydrological data?

Matthew Brookhouse, Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University

Climate variability significantly affects the functioning of Australian ecosystems and the availability of essential natural resources. Consequently, Australia's biota and human population are potentially vulnerable to changes in climate associated with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Australia's southeast is particularly vulnerable due to the large demand for scarce water resources and the presence of climatically sensitive ecosystems in areas such as the Australian Alps.

Whilst understanding the impacts of climate variability is fundamental to anticipating the impacts of climate change, the absence of long records of climate, river flow and ecosystem function constrain progress towards such an understanding in southeast Australia. Whilst dendroclimatology has the potential to facilitate description of natural climate variability and its hydrological and ecological consequences southeast Australia's dominant tree genus, Eucalyptus, rarely features in dendroclimatological studies. Furthermore, in previous unpublished dendroclimatological studies no significant correlation is evident between variability in tree-ring width and instrumental records of climate. These results appear to confirm the widely-held assumption that eucalypts hold no potential for dendroclimatology.

In this seminar I will examine dendroclimatological potential in eucalypts via examining the principles dendrochronology. I will argue that the methodological shortcomings of previous studies, not a fundamental property of eucalypts, explain previous results. I will support this argument with a case study of climate sensitive tree-ring data from snow gum (Eucalyptus pauciflora) at the alpine treeline. The results of this case study indicate that eucalypt tree-ring data have an unrealised potential for the reconstruction of past climatological and hydrological reconstruction in southeast Australia.

Tuesday 18 December 2007

River basin analysis and modelling as basis for the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive - Vision, Reality and Perspectives

Dr. Martin Volk. Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, UZF, Leipzig, Germany

Examples of research projects on integrated river basin management to support the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) are presented. The author introduces to interdisciplinary development of methods and tools for planning, process and measurement control for river basin management with GIS and models, which includes visualization, scale-specific and participation approaches. Results show for instance that the implementation of the WFD is facing economic problems. In addition, differentiation of scales and landscape characteristics is needed as well as an improvement of data availability and suitable measuring and monitoring programmes. Finally, the author presents some model developments that could help to improve spatial distribution of processes in models.