Kerrie Wilson takes smart decisions to ANU

Twice a year the Fenner School of Environment and Society (FSES) invites outstanding mid-career scholars working in the environment space to deliver a guest lecture and participate in a panel discussion.

In August, that invited scholar was CEED’s Director, Professor Kerrie Wilson, who used the occasion to discuss her lab’s work on structured decision making and how to develop smart decisions for the environment.

In her talk, Kerrie described examples of best practice restoration planning and prioritization approaches involving formal processes of objective setting involving stakeholder groups with varying values and priorities.

Following the presentation, Kerrie fielded questions from an expert panel consisting of Dr Rosie Cooney (IUCN, specialises in illegal trade of wildlife), Associate Professor Phil Gibbons (FSES, working on native vegetation laws and biodiversity offsets policy), and Dr Virginia Marshall (FSES, Inaugural Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow working on cultural river flows and Indigenous law).

The panel answered a broad range of questions from the audience about how policy, management and research can move closer to incorporating structured decision making into standard practice.

Should you share location data of threatened species?

Scientists publishing locations of rare species have been blamed for helping poachers drive them to extinction, such as the local extinction of the Chinese cave gecko. 

But an international group of scientists lead by CEED researcher Dr Ayesha Tulloch believes that data publishing is important to help many species. 

Read more: Should you share location data of threatened species?

Offsetting impacts from palm oil a costly opportunity

Industrial oil-palm plantations now cover vast tracts of the tropics. The process of clearing forests to make way for these plantations has released huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and reduced the biological diversity in the areas that are now plantations. 

Could these impacts be reversed or somehow compensated for a reasonable price?

Read more: Offsetting impacts from palm oil a costly opportunity

A critique of ecosystem services as a communication strategy

Biodiversity is in crisis and there is an urgent need to raise public awareness of the issues, but is the way that nature is talked about by scientists and policymakers actually ‘disengaging’ the public? 

Read more: A critique of ecosystem services as a communication strategy