Seminars

7th December 2016

Prof. Schmuck will speak about the sustainability transformation in German villages (185 bioenergy villages have been initiated by his Göttingen university team) and about the sustainability transformation in German universities (for example about his sustainability centre at university Goettingen, about a German wide students’ network for sustainability, and about a master curriculum on sustainability management initiated by him).

These concrete activities are embedded in theoretical considerations regarding the role of science and universities in the sustainability transformation of our societies, including psychological aspects of sustainability and myths and misbeliefs of the industrial era and ways to overcome.

Peter Schmuck is professor of psychology and sustainable development at University of Goettingen and at the University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde. He is a scientist and practitioner who is engaged in several German communities for renewable energy solutions and further sustainability projects.

Date: Wednesday, 7th December 2016
Time: 12 – 1pm
Room: Room 314/315 Planning studio
Location: Steele Building (Building 3), UQ St Lucia 

Friday 7^th October  2016

 Community involvement is essential for addressing the issues of global change, whether it is encouraging individuals to reduce their water and energy use, or building support for policies necessary to tackle the big environmental issues. This seminar will use examples from water-related research to explore a series of questions: How engaged are Australians in water-related issues? What are the social and contextual factors that influence environmental engagement? And can we intervene to build greater environmental engagement?

Angela Dean is a Research Fellow in School of Communication and Arts, UQ and Senior Research Fellow, BehaviourWorks, Monash University.  Her current research, supported by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, focuses on Engaging Communities in Water Sensitive Cities.  Her research interests include exploring pathways to environmental citizenship, and how the experience of nature can influence environmental citizenship 

Angela Dean – How to build environmental citizenship – insights from quantitative research in Australian communities

Friday 6th May 2016

Effective conservation relies on willing participants to implement conservation actions.  Thus, there’s emerging research on how to identify ‘conservation opportunities’ in order to create or exploit windows of opportunity to achieve conservation goals.  Conceptualizations of conservation opportunities place emphasis on social, political and economic aspects of conservation.  Here I discuss how we have tackled understanding the social and economic dimensions of conservation opportunities in the Daly catchment, NT.  I describe research undertaken over a period of 5 years culminating in spatial planning for conservation in the catchment that draws together stakeholder preferences relating to life in the catchment and willingness to participate in different conservation actions.

Dr Vanessa Adams is a conservation biologist and is currently a research fellow at the University of Queensland.  Her research applies economic concepts and social consultation to make environmental policy more effective. She is also an adjunct staff member with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University and the Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods at Charles Darwin University.  Vanessa was raised in New Mexico (USA) but currently calls Australia home.  She has worked in a variety roles ranging from actuarial analyst for global consulting firm Mercer HR to research scientist at universities.  She spent a year as a Fulbright scholar conducting research at University of Queensland (2004-2005) and returned to University of Queensland in 2015 for her current research position.

Vanessa Adams – How does the social and economic context influence conservation decisions? The case of the Daly Catchment

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.