Comment by UNE Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brigid Heywood
As Australia's political class comes to grips with a net-zero world at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (CoP26) in Glasgow, the University of New England (UNE) is escalating its sustainability agenda.
UNE was established in the regions, for the regions, and it is the regions that have borne much of the brunt of growing climate extremes.
We need bold, positive outcomes from Glasgow, but the regions can't depend solely on the slow wheels of politics to grind out solutions. We also need to address climate-related challenges using our own independent resources. Both forms of action become more urgent with each passing year.
Despite the amazing resilience of regional communities – resilience is part of the rural Australian character – they are finding little space to recover between sequential natural disasters. As the room for recovery shrinks, cumulative stress mounts.
Research by UNE’s Professor Kim Usher and colleagues has shown that after the overlapping disasters of drought, bushfire and COVID-19, many regional residents have a disturbing sense that they have lost control of their lives.
The regions can't depend solely on the slow wheels of politics to grind out solutions.
From the beginning, the University's brief has been to provide its communities with knowledge and tools that offer agency to those who use them. This work starts with a commitment to the individual – our students, each of whom is asking UNE to help them on their personal learning journeys during complicated times – and extends to the global human community as we focus on the now-brief window of time in which to redress the damage to the biosphere that cradles us all.
These challenges are multi-scaled, and the partnerships that UNE’s educators and researchers engage with range across the same breadth, from local to international.
From local to international: addressing the challenges
To support Australia’s ruminant livestock industries in their drive for a carbon-neutral future, UNE developed and built the world’s best ruminant methane research facilities. That investment has already helped industry answer questions about whether specific feed additives can substantially reduce methane emissions from cattle (yes, they can) and continues to contribute to refinement of greenhouse gas modelling.
We are also working with industry to create genetic tools to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so that future cattle and sheep breeders can select for stock that naturally generate less methane (and because methane production equates to wasted energy, potentially be more productive too).
Here, and in other areas of research, UNE is drawing on the syncretic approach to knowledge that was embedded in its foundations. Professor Paul Martin’s recent appeal for better land stewardship as part of Australia’s climate change commitments is based on years of work drawn not just from UNE's Law school, but from economics, psychology, the agricultural and environmental sciences and, importantly, from farming communities themselves.
The Applied Agricultural Centre for Remote Sensing has mapped the nation’s tree crops, partly to support industry biosecurity responses in a warming world where pest threats are moving with shifts in climate.
Please join us in supporting a positive outcome from CoP26
Our Smart Regions Incubator (SRI) has for several years been dedicated to helping start-up business founders address local problems in ways that have global application. More than half of the winners at the recent NENW Business Awards were SRI founders.
UNE researchers are looking at the mental health challenges of rural and remote communities; at resilience during drought; more sustainable approaches to bushfire before and after the events, and at environmental responses to climate change.
This work is already undertaken in collaboration with industry and government partners. However, the university recognises that it is important to strengthen the conversations with its communities. Far from being a remote ivory tower, UNE focuses on linking with its communities to inform our work and theirs. Through these functional partnerships, we are better placed to deploy our capabilities on behalf of the regions to meet extraordinary challenges.
Glasgow CoP26 is a meeting of the global community to resolve a critical global issue. The outcomes will shape the lives and enterprise of our regions. How we interpret and address the growing environmental pressures upon us will decide our collective future.
UNE is your University and it is here to help build that shared future. Please join us in supporting a positive outcome from CoP26, whether it is as a student, partner or friend.
Find out more about some of the research and initiatives in which UNE and its educators, researchers and partners are involved, to address climate-related challenges:
- Future Fit: UNE Strategic Plan 2021-2030
- New MOU set to bring high-tech jobs to New England
- Project Zero30 launches household energy survey
- UNE’s first step towards a renewable energy future is complete
- Young people to be drivers of bushfire and climate resilience through UNE SRI’s Scorched Program
- The chronic fear of ecological doom: losing sleep over climate change
- UNE first Australian university to offer Bachelor of Sustainability
- Citizen science enlisted to help New England's lagoons
- For people and planet: a $900k global survey of pollinators
- UNE backing its communities to better deal with drought
- Burning for the bush: A rare study of Aboriginal cultural burning
