Our careers can be defined by sliding door moments. For UNE alumna Dr Michelle Lim, one such moment propelled her onto the international stage and into the mountainous realm of the enigmatic snow leopard.
Michelle had completed a double degree in science and law plus honours by 2012, and was about to move to Melbourne when she received an unexpected email from Director of UNE’s AgLaw Centre, Professor Paul Martin, about a tantalising PhD project.
“I was about to start my first job and thought that maybe, maybe, I would work up to a PhD,” Michelle said. “Paul started talking about the project [on the legal and institutional arrangements for trans-boundary biodiversity conservation in Central Asia, linked to a United Nations/Global Environment Fund initiative] and when he mentioned snow leopards I thought I just had to do it.”
Michelle didn’t manage to see one of the notoriously elusive big cats during her travels, but she achieved something far more enduring.
“I always wanted to do something internationally with environmental law or policy eventually,” said Michelle, who is now a senior lecturer with the Centre for Environmental Law at Macquarie University’s Law School. “I really benefitted from the AgLaw Centre’s international outlook, interdisciplinary support and Paul’s fantastic global networks. The PhD allowed me to become a part of a wonderful community of global law scholars very early in my career. The honours project and PhD helped shape new possibilities for thinking about the law.”
Postdoctoral research at UNESCO’s Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee, Scotland, followed. Michelle later became the founding chair of the Early Career Group of the IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law (2014-2018) and a fellow of the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). In 2016/2017 she was named the Law Council of Australia’s Mahla Pearlman Young Environmental Lawyer of the Year and this year was appointed deputy chair of the newly formed Biodiversity Law Specialist Group of the World Commission on Environmental Law.
Today, Michelle remains active in international law and policy research dedicated to advancing our understanding of biodiversity and climate science. It reflects the growing recognition that climate, biodiversity conservation and human wellbeing are inextricably linked.
But working at this nexus involves constantly questioning dominant world views.
“The major challenge is the linking of human wellbeing to perpetual economic growth,”
“The major challenge is the linking of human wellbeing to perpetual economic growth,” Michelle said. “There is this idea that trickle-down economics will make the world a better place for everyone, when instead we need to think about how we can live more sustainably. Human development doesn’t require continued economic growth, but this view is so entrenched in economies, governments and the political rhetoric due to entrenched vested interests.”
IPBES7 plenary in Paris, 2019.
As part of her work with the IPBES, Michelle has contributed to global assessments of the current state of biodiversity internationally. “It remains possible to change current trajectories of biodiversity loss, but in order to do so we must act now and in revolutionary ways,” she said. “It’s about changing the underlying value structure; thinking about how the planet can be better off but also how there can be better distribution of the benefits people derive from nature.”
In The Conversation last year, Michelle wrote that while biodiversity loss was largely attributed to land-use change and species over-exploitation in the past, recent research suggests that worsening climate change will be the major driver this century. And not only can biodiversity loss worsen climate change; not all climate solutions will be good for nature.
In 2021 Michelle was one of 50 of the world’s leading researchers on biodiversity and climate who advocated four urgent and drastic “economic and societal shifts” at local, national and global scales to address the causes of both biodiversity loss and climate change. These included:
- Protecting and restoring carbon-rich ecosystems;
- Slashing carbon emissions across all sectors of the global economy;
- Increasing sustainable agricultural and forestry practices; and
- Eliminating government subsidies that harm the environment, such as those for burning fossil fuels.
“We are living at a time of unprecedented global environmental change but also global socio-economic change,”
“We are living at a time of unprecedented global environmental change but also global socio-economic change,” Michelle said. “Very undesirable futures are looming in the very near future as we transcend the environmental limits of our planet. Part of my work encourages thinking imaginatively about what the world could be and the legal instruments that will assist that. We need to leave space for a more desirable world and that demands diverse ways of thinking, but also hope – hope for something that is different to the current trajectory we are on.”
Postscript: For the record, the first time Michelle saw a snow leopard was at Canberra Zoo in 2010, a few months after she returned from Central Asia. “It was a surreal experience to be in the presence of such a magnificent being,” she said.
