Events for 23/09/2021 - 26/05/2021

For many years, Melbourne has dined out on being recognised by The Economist as “the most liveable city in the world;” and is now second to Vienna. While this global recognition is a source of great pride and an excellent marketing tool – is this measure of “liveable” fit for purpose, when considering the residents of Melbourne? Drawing on almost a decade of research, Professor Billie Giles-Corti will consider: What is a [...]

Human pressures on the planet as a whole – the ‘Earth System’ – have now become so great that scientists have proposed that we have now left the Holocene, the geologic epoch that has been humanity’s accommodating home for the last 11,700 years. It’s proposed we’ve entered a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, characterised by extremely rapid changes to the climate system and the biosphere, driven primarily by a range [...]

The 2021 Howitt Lecture Presented in partnership with the Geological Society of Australia (Victoria Division). Associate Professor David Kennedy is a coastal geomorphologist who specialises on the impacts of climate change, storms, tsunami and sea level rise on coastal landforms, particularly coral reefs and islands, rocky shorelines (cliffs and shore platforms) and estuaries. Surveying using total stations and remote sensing (eg. LiDAR) technologies are central to his research, which is combined with [...]

Australia installed more renewable generation in the last three years than in the thirty years prior. It seems that every week a new renewable energy record is smashed. Yet despite this, Australia has the highest per-capita greenhouse emissions of any advanced economy, we’re on track to miss our Paris Agreement commitments and we’re nowhere near achieving net zero. How did we get here, and how can we turn it around? [...]

In a ‘post-truth’ society, fuelled by soundbites and status updates, opinions and personal theories are often presented with unwavering certainty but remain untested. In this climate, it can be confusing when we hear from scientists reluctant to deal in absolutes, who instead engage in conversations about ‘degrees of certainty’. In the world of science, a ‘theory’ is the closest something may ever come to being ‘the truth’. To understand what [...]