Comments are being sought on the new (2009) Victoria Green paper on Climate Change. Read more here
The OEP’s Director Simon Batterbury attended the Society for Human Ecology’s conference at the University of Manchester, UK in June ‘09. He gave a paper in a session on ‘Directions in Human Ecology Education’ using the example of the University of Melbourne ’s OEP, which was set up in the 1990s by Prof. Mark Burgman and others. [...]
A new initiative, Safe Climate Australia has been launched. The University of Melbourne’s John Wiseman is one of the founding members and the launch in Melbourne in July ‘09 included talks by Al Gore. The initiative links research to policies and technical innovation on dangerous climate change affecting the continent. http://www.safeclimateaustralia.org/
Rob Adams has produced a plan, funded by the Government and the City of Melbourne, to halt urban sprawl. Read about it in The Age http://www.theage.com.au/national/highrise-plan-to-halt-the-sprawl-20090429-angx.html.
The Achieving a Sustainable Campus website has now gone live! This is an initiative driven by Property and Campus Services. Check it out at http://sustainablecampus.unimelb.edu.au/.
A very useful perspective on the need to teach about, and engage with, the primary environmental challenge of the century. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/20/goodstein
Australia’s emissions reduction targets have been announced in a White Paper (15 Dec 08), and the target of reducing national emissions by 5% over the next 11 years (with a possibility of deeper cuts to 15% if other nations follow) has attracted considerable surpise and critical commentary. Much deeper cuts were expected of one of the only [...]
A composite ’sustainability index’, based on the original work of the Bruntland Commission but updated and extended, has been developed using 22 main indicators. The SSI (Sustainable Society Index) assigns scores to nation states. The methodology and tables, developed by two analysts in the Netherlands, may be found here and are discussed in the online Enyclopaedia of Earth, [...]
‘Reduction Festival’ is the environmentally-themed creative industries festival dedicated in its debut year to short film and video content. The festival runs from the 10th October to the 19th October 2008 and encompasses film competitions as well as screenings and events.
http://reductionfestival.wordpress.com/
www.oxfam.org.au/canvas
Climate change will affect everyone, but it will affect poor people in developing countries first and most dramatically. Increasingly intense and erratic weather events (such as storms, droughts and tidal surges) are causing unprecedented land degradation and crop failure which are hurting livelihoods, increasing food shortages and forcing people to relocate. Unless we act now [...]
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