Asia Pacific Environment & Climate Change
It is impossible to consider a national or even regional focus for climate change because it is a global issue. Under the Asia-Pacific research agenda, Australia and Australian interests in the Asia-Pacific region are our concern with respect to Climate change. In other words, we wish to concentrate on how climate change is affecting us in Australia and in the other nations in our region. From a different perspective, how are Australia and the nations of the Asia-Pacific contributing to climate change through our economic activities and the application of technologies to production? Also, how well are we making progress in reducing our impacts on climate change by cutting green-house gas emissions and transferring to alternative non fossil fuel based energy sources? More importantly, how well are our political and economic systems engaging with the challenges of climate change by driving changes to make a real difference in a positive direction? How can we collectively take up the responsibility to deal with climate change in the region? Can Australia through its knowledge base, research and development capacity, coordinate cooperation across nation states in the region to address climate change and make a transition to an environmentally sustainable economy? Obviously, we will need to get things right at home before we can effectively convince our neighbours to act decisively to deal with climate change, which translates to – act closer to home first but think, campaign, advocate and act globally as well.
It is futile to approach a complex global phenomenon such as climate change from anything other than interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary directions. Therefore we invite postgraduate students and academic researchers from various disciplines across the university to join this research effort from all schools across UNE and from outside the university.
Tony Lynch from Philosophy and Politics alynch@une.edu.au and
Bert Jenkins from Peace Studies bjenkins@une.edu.au
both from the School of Humanities and have volunteered to be contacts for the research group. Please note that the school to which the contact people are attached does not determine the focus of the Climate Change research. Others from UNE in their respective disciplines who work in associated areas include
Robyn Bartel in Geography;
Neil Taylor in Education;
Nick Reid in Ecosystem Management and
Paul Martin in Agriculture & Law.
We have named a few people who we know are involved in various ways in environmental sustainability and climate change research. We wish to extend an invitation to these people and anyone else interested in collaborative research to address any aspect of climate change. We are being inclusive because climate change is multi-dimensional.
Climate change is posing many interesting challenges for researchers and in a sense requires a rapid response to a growing emergency situation. Changes in vegetation systems and their capacity to be efficient carbon sinks, habitat alteration, water scarcity, acidification of the ocean, green house gas pollution, melting ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, seal level rises, temperature increases, extreme weather patterns (floods, storms, droughts), loss of arable land, food security, environmental refugees, disease epidemics, resource wars, conflict over scarce resources, environmental education, sustainability education, environmental and ecological security, environmental philosophy, environmental ethics, environmental law, environmental politics, alternative clean-energy sources and new non-polluting technologies are all possible dimensions for climate change research. The main focus question is - how are we going work together to address climate change fast enough to avert disaster?