morenamills

Friday 20^th November 2015

Science denial in its various forms has numerous negative impacts on society, whether it be denial of vaccination, climate science, evolution, or so on. The most common response to science denial is to throw more science at people. However, presenting scientific evidence to science denialists can be ineffective, or even counter-productive. Instead, a growing body of evidence indicates the way to stop the spread of science denial is, counter-intuitively, by exposing people to a ‘weak form of science denial’. Decades of psychological research into ‘inoculation theory’ finds that by warning people of the threat of misinformation and explaining the techniques of denial, people can develop immunity to misinformation. This approach may hold the key to neutralising the influence of science denial.

John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland. He created the website Skeptical Science.com, which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. John co-authored the college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. He won an award for Best Australian Science Writing for 2014, published by UNSW. He is currently completing a PhD in cognitive psychology, researching how people update their beliefs in response to climate information. He also developed the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC), Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, released in April 2015.

John Cook – Making Sense of Climate Science Denial

Friday 18^th September 2015

How people think and behave is guided by their mental models, that is, their simplified personalized representations of the world around them. Mental models have been advanced as a way to understand a range of environmental decisions from natural resource management through to conservation decisions and sustainable behaviour. In this seminar researchers from across UQ will discuss how they have used mental models in their research and will highlight advantages and challenges of the mental models approach.

Speakers: Dr Duan Biggs (School of Biological Sciences), Dr Natalie Jones (School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry), Professor Helen Ross (School of Agricultural and Food Sciences)

Friday 26th June 2015

There is compelling evidence for a range of physical, mental and social health benefits that people gain from urban nature. In this talk I will provide an overview of our Brisbane-based research that explores how the opportunity to interact with nature is spread across society, who actually capitalises on that opportunity, and finally what ‘dose’ of nature is required to gain the health benefits.
Dr Danielle Shanahan is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences. While her research now looks at the link between people, nature and health, she is an ecologist at heart with a PhD in landscape ecology. She has also spent time working in the Queensland Government on strategic biodiversity and national park policy. She came back to research after realising that conservation is facing huge human-based issues in the future as public buy-in seems to be declining.

Friday 17^th April 2015

Policy-makers are increasingly interested in behavioral instruments which may help better manage environmental issues. These instruments account for people’s behavioural limitations, such as cognitive mistakes, or build on people feelings (e.g. pride, shame) towards the environment. They provide a low cost alternative to traditional economic instruments like pigouvian taxes that often work imperfectly. But these new behavioral instruments also face a set of challenges, including the difficulty to evaluate welfare effects, and to conceive a robust environmental policy based on context-dependent effects. The talk will illustrate this critical discussion with two behavioral schemes that have been widely implemented worldwide: “green nudges” and “corporate environmental responsibility”.

Nicolas Treich is research director at INRA, and member of the Toulouse School of Economics in France. His research concerns risk and decision theory, environmental economics and benefit-cost analysis. He has over 30-peer reviewed publications in economic journals on various topics including (e.g.) the Precautionary Principle, risk and insurance demand, the value of statistical life and climate policy. He has organized several international conferences, and has written various broad audience papers and reports on risk policy issues. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review.

Friday 27^th March 2015

To address environmental problems people need to change their behaviour. For example, people need to switch to renewable energy sources, buy sustainable products and reduce their energy consumption. In order to promote these behavioural changes we need to understand which factors influence this wide range of actions. In this talk I will focus on the role of values and identity as predictors of a range of pro-environmental actions. I will discuss strategies focusing on values and identity in order to promote a range of pro-environmental actions needed to reduce environmental problems.

Ellen van der Werff is a visiting scholar from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Ellen is part of the environmental psychology group at the University Groningen—the largest concentration of environmental psychologists in Europe—led by Professor Linda Steg. Her core research interests are in understanding the influences on people’s sustainable behaviour. Ellen works in interdisciplinary teams and has conducted projects with energy companies and waste recycling organisations.

Friday 13th March 2015
We use data from a 2011 household survey (12,202 households surveyed in 11 OECD countries) on individual environmental behaviour by the OECD Environment Directorate. The 11 OECD countries included were Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Indexes of households’ behaviour related to the environment in five main areas were created: waste recycling, water use, energy use, choice of transportation, and food consumption. The main variable of interest in our study is individuals’ perception about the seriousness of climate change and its role as a potential driver of environmental behaviour.
Sarah Wheeler is an Associate Professor of Applied Economics and an ARC Future Fellow at University of South Australia. She has over 80 peer-reviewed publications in the research areas of irrigated farming, climate change adaptation, organic farming, water markets, water scarcity, crime and gambling. She is an Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, an Associate Editor of Water Resources and Economics, she is on the editorial board of Economics and Agricultural Science and is the Chair of the Murray-Darling Basin working group of the Food, Energy, Environment and Water (FE2W) Network.

Friday 7th November

This talk will discuss the importance of market segmentation and provide an overview of a number of studies that Sara has undertaken where market segmentation was used for the purpose of achieving increased environmental sustainability.

Sara Dolnicar is a professor in the School of Business. Her core research interests are to improve market segmentation methodology and test and refine social science research measures. She has applied these interests to a range of applied research areas including sustainable tourism, environmental volunteering, and public acceptance of water alternatives and water conservation measures. Sara has (co-)authored more than 200 refereed papers, and has been awarded a prestigious ARC QEII Fellowship.

Friday 30th May 2014

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan (Basin Plan) is tasked with improving welfare by internalising the negative externalities derived from the past 130 years of policy development which has over allocated water resources to irrigators in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). Since the signing of the implementation phase of the Basin Plan in February 2014, there remains a small window of opportunity to influence both the final legislative agreement and the implementation review before Australia misallocates a large proportion of the $13 billion in public funds set aside to deal with water reform in the MDB.

This talk will argue three main points:1) In light of water supply uncertainty derived from climatic variability and climate change, that infrastructure investment programs will lock resources into inefficient production areas and possibly create a legacy of rural debt and failure; 2) By understanding the spatial and temporal nature of water rights and climate change influences on inflows that for $3.1 billion an optimal bundle of entitlements could be purchased that delivers the twin Basin Plan goals of increased environmental flows and salinity mitigation; and 3) The Basin Plan has a hidden gift of increased groundwater access that could shield irrigators from increasing climatic risk while potentially increasing the risk of long run aquifer degradation.

David Adamson started his professional life as the economist at the CRC for Tropical Pest Management and joined the School of Economics at The University of Queensland in 2004 to work on climatic variability and uncertainty impacts on water management in Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin. He has been commissioned to work on The Garnaut Climate Change Review and has recently completed a PhD reviewing the Basin Plan.