Climate Network events
Upcoming events
The Climate Network will be holding monthly informal catch-ups for members, from 10-11am on the third Thursday of each month. Come along to Writers Block (in the Borchardt Library, Bundoora) to meet colleagues on campus who are also passionate about climate action.
Past events
Trobe University has made impressive strides in its commitment to be carbon neutral by 2029 and we are ranked No. 4 in the world for work towards realising the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The Climate Network’s new series ‘The Way We Work’ explores what else we can do to further reduce our carbon footprint.
Our first webinar discusses the concept of the Green Lab. The laboratories on our campuses are the university’s largest energy-consuming and resource-intensive facilities. We therefore have to critically look at changes that can be made to reduce their contribution. As part of this effort, Professor Andrew Hill’s lab is currently certifying as the first My Green Lab in Australia. My Green Lab is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the sustainability of scientific research. In this session we hear from three speakers that are involved in the certification.
Speakers
- Bob Fynan (Environmental Adviser – La Trobe University)
- Rachael Relph (Chief Sustainability Officer – My Green Lab)
- Eduard Willms (Postdoctoral researcher – Hill Lab)
On Wednesday 4 March the La Trobe Climate Network hosted a conversation between Professor Ross Garnaut, and La Trobe’s Professor Lawrie Zion. As well as exploring the themes in Ross Garnaut’s new book, ‘Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity’, which is published by La Trobe University Press, the discussion examined the potential impact of Australia’s recent savage summer and the COVID-19 virus on climate policy.
There is no question of greater significance for the future of humankind than global warming. There is no task more pressing and difficult than the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
Australia's former Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, begins his inspiring, cautiously optimistic, and sometimes controversial new Quarterly Essay with these words:
"Like others, I dream that my great-grandchildren, whom I might never meet, will grow up living on a planet just as magnificent as it was when I was young.
"Fulfilment of this dream will require that we preserve our planet’s unique beauty in the face of global warming, armed with ambition and realism. We do not have time for fatalism or despair...
"Change is in the air. The global momentum and enthusiasm for solar and wind as our future primary energy sources...is growing every day."
Hear Alan Finkel and La Trobe alumnus Tim Flannery discuss Australia's road to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Hosted by Professor Katie Holmes, co-leader of La Trobe’s Climate Network.
La Trobe University has made impressive strides in its commitment to be carbon neutral by 2029 and is ranked No. 4 in the world for work towards realising the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The Climate Network’s new series ‘The Way We Work’ explores what else we can do to further reduce our carbon footprint.
In the second of our webinars we explore the vexed but increasingly critical issue of academic travel in a carbon constrained world. Although travel is important for many types of research, networking and career advancement, it carries a significant ecological and carbon footprint. How can we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from travel while still doing the important work required of us as academics? These are complex, contextual and ethically laden questions that we need to grapple with urgently as the heat from the climate crisis intensifies.
To help us frame these challenges, two of the authors of a recent working paper out of history outline some of the key issues they have identified as relevant for all disciplines. We then invite a brief response from Prof Ash Franks, Pro Pro Vice Chancellor for Research Capability to discuss the institutional implications of seeking to lower our travel footprint. Finally, we invite responses and discussion from the webinar participants following this presentations.
Speakers
- A/Prof Andrea Gaynor (Environmental Historian, University of Western Australia)
- Dr Yves Rees (Lecturer in History, La Trobe University)
Respondent
- Prof Ash Franks (Pro Vice Chancellor for Research Capability, La Trobe University)
Moderator
- Prof Katie Holmes (Co-Convenor, La Trobe University Climate Network )
Join us for a discussion with Dr Kathleen Birrell (University of Melbourne) and Dr Julia Dehm (La Trobe University) about the ways legal narratives shape our responses to a changing climate and how the relationship between law and ecology in the Western legal tradition might be ‘re-storied’ for the Anthropocene.
About the speakers:
Kathleen Birrell is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her postdoctoral project is focused on encounters between juridical, political and cultural narratives in the context of climate change. Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to consider the limits and possibilities of rights and obligations and encounters between laws in the context of the Anthropocene. Her research is strongly interdisciplinary, encompassing environmental and climate change law, rights law, property law and native title, and intersects with Indigenous jurisprudences, literature and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (2016), is co-editor of a recent special issue of the legal journal Law & Critique, entitled Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries (2020), and teaches a new legal research subject at Melbourne Law School entitled Laws, Rights and the Anthropocene.
Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, La Trobe University, Victoria. Her research addresses international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. She is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. Previously she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin and a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. Her work has been widely published in journals such as the Leiden Journal of International Law, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, and the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.
Danielle Celermajer is the author of the recently published and highly acclaimed Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future. Summertime is ‘written in the shadow of the 2020 bushfires that ravaged Australia. In the midst of the death and grief of animals, humans, trees and ecologies Celermajer asks us to look around – really look around – to become present to all beings who are living and dying through the loss of our shared home.’ It is a powerful contribution to reassessing and reimagining our collective future.
Dany is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, and Deputy Director – Academic of the Sydney Environment Institute and Director of the Multispecies Justice Project. Her other books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge University Press 2009), A Cultural Theory of Law in the Modern Age(Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Dany is in conversation with Dr Simon Kerr from the Climate Network.
Dennis Fila (University of Freiburg) - Local Competence Development for Climate Change Adaptation in Small and Medium-Sized Municipalities and Districts and Alexandra Speidel (University of Freiburg) - Intelligence for Cities
Dennis Fila is a scholar in the field of political and urban geography, currently engaged as a PhD student and research fellow at the chair of Geography of Global Change at the University of Freiburg.
At present, Dennis is involved in the research project “Local Competence Development for Climate Change Adaptation in Small and Medium-Sized Municipalities and Districts” (LoKlim), working with three districts and municipalities each in the Southwest of Germany. His work within the LoKlim project is centered on developing practical, community-focused strategies for adapting to the evolving challenges posed by climate change.
Alexandra Speidel is a Social Anthropologist and Geographer, currently engaged as a PhD student and research fellow at the chair of Geography of Global Change at the University of Freiburg.
Alexandra is involved in the interdisciplinary research project I4C – “Intelligence for Cities”, which aims to develop AI-supported fine-scale weather and climate predictions for cities.
Alexandra’s main research interest lies on AI-supported decision support tools in urban climate change adaptation planning. By using qualitative research methods, she researches how and in what way actor-specific dynamics affect the development and implementation process of such tools. Additionally, she is committed to explore the role of agency – what kind of agency do AI-supported decision support tools unfold and what kind of spatial interactions does the use have on the practices of urban climate change adaptation planning.
Steph Houghton (La Trobe University) and Julia Dehm (La Trobe University) - Towards an interdisciplinary agenda for teaching in the climate crisis: reflections from the humanities and social sciences
In 2022, a group of researchers and educators from School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University came together to explore our pedagogical approaches and highlight possibilities for climate action in higher education classrooms. Our discussions looked at the unique challenges posed by the climate crisis and how we might further define our pedagogical approaches and tools. We produced an article to offer more concrete examples of practice for teaching in the climate crisis, attuned to framing, positionality and reflexivity; multiple temporal and spatial scales; other ways of living and knowing; creative action and activism for an affective classroom. Today, Steph Houghton will present on the methodology and process behind producing this article and the importance of including climate change education across disciplines. Julia Dehm will present on current work to mainstream climate change in legal education, including by creating pedagogical resources such as an open access textbook. Read the paper: https://bit.ly/3HanQEb
Dr Steph Houghton teaches across Development Studies, Planning and Environmental Humanities and works with the Climate Change Adaptation Lab at La Trobe, and as a researcher on the ACIAR project Strengthening Agricultural Resilience in Western Province, PNG (University of Canberra/Western Sydney University).
Dr Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, La Trobe University. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan) and Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor). She was previously a consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing assistance and a Member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
Liz Conor (La Trobe University) - Homeloss on Homelands
Truth-telling could take in all the layers of loss beneath settler homeloss due to climate calamities to dismantle the substrata of effacement and overbuild. As Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara scholar Paola Balla reminds us, millennia of Aboriginal heritage and country was lost in the Black Summer fires of 2020. But when settler homes are lost a potential reckoning with what was already lost does not take place, re-enacting another erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty. Homes are razed and with them any knowledge of what was lost there before. In the insurance claims and government inquiries, the ‘tight-knit’ community memorialising, the grief, rebuilding and Prime Ministerial handshakes, we see protections afforded to settler property while none are extended to Aboriginal cultural heritage and sovereignty. What if the process of rebuilding actively uncovered ancestral ties to these traumascapes, could this decentre Eurocentric modes of relating to property, home and emplacement, and recalibratere settler relations to land while reconnecting with the other species that call these ravaged places home. This paper attempts to reinscribe settler homeloss within a spatial rubric not of common ground but trespassed and repatriatable Country.
Dr Liz Conor is an ARC Future Fellow at La Trobe University where she is an Associate Professor in History. She is the author of Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women, (UWAP, 2016) and The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Indiana University Press, 2004). She is former editor of Aboriginal History and columnist at New Matilda, and has published widely in academic and mainstream press on gender, race and representation.
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