Lauren Rickards

• BSc (Hons), MSc, DPhil.
• Professor (Associate) at RMIT University

Cities and urban regions face critical questions as to how they will engage with the growing momentum around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda. This is the transformational vision of environmental sustainability, social justice, and prosperity for the world laid out by the United Nations as a road map for 2015–2030. There is a substant...

It is already well understood that unbinding materials and energy from their lithic reservoirs impacts upon Earth systems. But that is just the first stage of a cycle of ‘Anthropocene trouble’. This paper tracks the multiple ways in which subsequent Earth system change reacts back upon the social infrastructures of subsurface exploitation and the l...

In this article, we seek to open up for critical debate disciplinary narratives that center the “synthesis” qualities of geographic thought. Proponents of Geography often emphasize its integrative, synthesis approach to human–environment relations to underline its value to interdisciplinary research initiatives addressing critical real-world issues...

Human consumption of livestock remains a marginal issue in climate change debates, partly due to the IPCC's arbitrary adoption of 100-year global warming potential framework to compare different emissions, blinding us to the significance of shorter-term emissions, namely methane. Together with the gas it reacts to form - tropospheric ozone - methan...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post-event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore emerging synergies and tensions between the twin moves to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and online learning and teaching (L&T) in higher education institutions (HEIs). Design/methodology/approach A preliminary global exploration of universities’ SDG-based L&T initiatives...

In this introduction, we outline our critical reading of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a witness statement to the tragedies and injustices of unsustainable modern development (including in higher education). Our starting point is feminist and critical social science scholarship that understands that all of us, especially within univer...

The significance and importance of learning and teaching (L&T) as critical pedagogy about, for and through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is explored. Understandings and practices around L&T are evolving to better address the need for meaningful real-world change. As educators this is an opportunity to attune to what is most important and...

This chapter develops the focus on the reciprocal role of the universities and the SDGs as both process and outcome (i.e. means AND ends) in the age of disruption, crisis and change. Moving beyond the nationalistic and individualistic competitor mindset, the SDGs encourage universities to acknowledge their ongoing contribution to unsustainability a...

The knotty challenge of what success around sustainable development means and how it might be re-defined as part of the transformational approach needed for systemic global change is the focus of this penultimate chapter. What constitutes success and impact is constantly evolving—and will continue to do so—as a result of the shifting relationships...

Building capacity and momentum around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across the higher education sector—intellectually, practically and culturally—requires a commitment to achieving a more sustainable future. There is a substantial gap between business-as-usual and academic-based, real-world-engaged approaches that catalyse positive actio...

This chapter emphasises the role of research as an evolving development ethos. Research is development-like, but—by positioning itself as a purported distant observer or disguising itself as a mere processor of others’ values and wishes—it has often not been subject to the sort of fierce reflexivity and renovations that social and economic developm...

The urgency and complexity of sustainable development means universities need to be more energetic, effective and careful in generating change. Based on an assessment of common misunderstandings of innovation and related ideas like technology, in this chapter we offer Ethical Innovation as a normative frame to help in this endeavour, outlining the...

This chapter focuses on the evolving role of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the context of the Anthropocene and its historical roots. The story of the SDGs agenda is a story about development. At the heart of ‘sustainable development’ is the legacy of unsustainable development with its roots in modernity and colonialism. Critical e...

University-based research is an inherently future-oriented activity and plays a unique role in shaping futures in diverse domains. Despite the push for academic research to demonstrate ‘societal impact’, there is surprisingly little thought to the need for, or development of, futures literacy as a core capability within research impact in higher ed...

In 2019, the climate emergency entered mainstream debates. The normative frame of climate justice as conceived in academia, policy arenas, and grassroots action, although imperative and growing in popularity across climate movements, is no longer adequate to address this emergency. This is for two reasons: first, as a framing for the problem, curre...

This essay seeks to open a conversation about multispecies justice in environmental politics. It sets out some of the theoretical approaches, key areas of exploration, and obvious challenges that come with rethinking a core plank of liberal theory and politics. First, we discuss some of the diverse scholarly fields that have influenced the emergenc...

The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in the most devastating global public health crisis in over a century. At present, over 7 million people from around the world have contracted the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to more than 400,000 deaths globally. The global health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemi...

Researchers are more accustomed to writing about climate change than adapting their work to it. But as climate change impacts on the research sector become more evident, rapid adaptation is needed.

This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...

The Adani mine controversy is a significant new space of contestation in conflicts over coal mining and climate change in Australia. Proposed as one of the largest new coal mines in the world, the Adani (or “Carmichael”) mine has become a flashpoint between two broad coalitions—the pro‐mine coalition, consisting of governments, elements of the medi...

Urban greening is about bringing vegetation into cities in ways that produce flourishing urban ecologies whilst also making cities more liveable for human inhabitants. We focus here on greening that is done through the maintenance or establishment of gardens, parks, urban forests and informal spaces. We argue that in contexts with established prope...

How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing togethe...

This intervention seeks to focus political geographic attention on design as a form of governing emergent futures in the urbanized world of the Anthropocene. Recent decades have seen design shifting its concern from objects to processes, systems and futures. Design orients thought and action not towards questions of how something came to be, but ra...

Biosolids, the treated and stabilised sewage sludge, was pyrolysed in the presence of naturally occurring minerals in a Thermogravimetric Analyser (TGA). The results were then compared with a synthetic catalyst (i.e., 5% Co/Al 2 O 3 ). Higher mass loss was observed in TGA in the presence of both minerals and the metal oxide based catalyst when comp...

Cambridge Core - Environmental Policy, Economics and Law - Urban Climate Politics - edited by Jeroen van der Heijden

One of climate change’s most certain impacts is increasingly frequent and extreme heat. Heat management and climate adaptation policies generally utilize temperature and humidity thresholds to identify what constitute ‘‘extreme’’ conditions. In the workplace, such thresholds can be used to trigger reductions in work intensity and/or duration. In re...

The challenges of climate change adaptation in agriculture are examined through the lens of priorities for research, and the use of best management practices (BMPs) to better manage climate risks. The methods and results have two parts. Firstly, a case study from the northern grains region examines the use of BMPs for managing climate risks associa...

In this article, we explore the nature, value, and challenges of dialogue both within and outside the academy. After considering the possibilities and limits to dialogue, we divide our analysis into three sections, first discussing dialogue as a form of embodied action, next examining dialogue as a means of enacting a critically affirmative politic...

The contributions to this forum have highlighted how the limits to scholarly dialogue are multiple and have had serious consequences for the ways in which knowledges are produced and debated in the academy, the media, and wider society. In this rejoinder to the commentaries on our article, ‘The Possibilities and Limits to Dialogue’, we embrace the...

The functioning of the biosphere and the Earth as a whole is being radically disrupted due to human activities, evident in climate change, toxic pollution and mass species extinction. Financialization and exponential growth in production, consumption and population now threaten our planet’s life-support systems. These profound changes have led Eart...

Multiple forms and spaces of energy are enrolled in nation-building projects. In this cross-disciplinary paper, we outline how struggles to govern the relations between climate and the human body have shaped nation-building efforts and electricity infrastructure in the settler-colonial society of Australia. Focused on Australia's tropical zone, not...

Human consumption of livestock remains a marginal issue in climate change debates, partly due to the IPCC's arbitrary adoption of 100-year global warming potential framework to compare different emissions, blinding us to the significance of shorter-term emissions, namely methane. Together with the gas it reacts to form - tropospheric ozone - methan...

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the 'Australian national climate', claims...

Kareiva and Fuller (2016) consider the future prospects for biodiversity conservation in the face of the profound disruptions of the Anthropocene. They argue that more flexible and entrepreneurial approaches to conservation are needed. While some of the approaches they promote may work in particular situations, we believe their proposal risks unint...

In this paper explore contemporary investments in the underground. We argue that alongside excavation processes the subsurface the underground is increasingly being presented as site for the burial of toxic and radioactive waste and carbon dioxide. We explore two particular burial practices; the long-term disposal of industrial and toxic waste in d...

In recent years the diverse primary food production activities in cities known as ‘urban agriculture’ have proliferated on the ground, in policy and in academic discourse. Most explicit representations of urban agriculture (UA) are positive, advocating its many related benefits and success stories, or critiquing barriers that restrict it. Despite w...

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capa...

A global tragedy is unfolding in Tasmania. World heritage forests are burning; 1000-year-old trees and the hoary peat beneath are reduced to char. Fires have already taken stands of King Billy and Pencil Pine—the last remaining fragments of an ecosystem that once spread across the supercontinent of Gondwana. Pockets of Australia's only winter decid...

In this paper, we critically explore the combination of a dynamic, multilayered understanding of community with an open-ended, ‘emergent’ understanding of resilience, and highlight the relevance for planners. We argue prevailing planning policies and practices on community resilience tend to work with rather simplistic, one-dimensional understandin...

Among the many demands that the Anthropocene places on us is a demand to engage seriously with science. Noel Castree’s bold call to human geographers to engage with the scientific ‘Anthroposcene’ implicitly requires that we revisit and refine our intellectual stance towards science in the contemporary era. In its various guises, Anthropocene scienc...

Greenhouse gas conventions and metrics have powerful framing effects, significantly under-reporting emissions and obscuring the impact of shorter-lived emissions. This interdisciplinary Australian case study re-calculates emissions to include short lived gases and use 20 year Global Warming Potentials (GWPs), a timeframe relevant to averting catast...

Climate adaptation research is expanding rapidly within an increasingly reflexive society where the relationship between academia and other social institutions is in a state of flux. Tensions exist between the two dominant research orientations of research about and research for adaptation. In particular, the research community is challenged to dev...

Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature' (Steffen et al., 2007, 614). Introduction If humans have become a rival to Nature, then the epic nomenclature of the great forces – the eras, periods, and epochs of geological time – have finally been reconciled with the social, something geographers...

Intellectually as well as materially, the Anthropocene is a deeply cultural phenomenon. This includes its communicative form, which is a contested trope-rich narrative, even within the sciences. In this essay I focus on the role of metaphor in Anthropocene thought and in particular, on the provocative, ambiguous, and potentially far-reaching idea o...

2: (based on the stress paper and targeting 'The role of change agents in sustainability transformations' theme) Major societal transformation is important yet it can be particularly demanding. Appreciating the additional strains that transformational changes create and recognising that people have many roles and social realities is critical if tra...

While the case for rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is compelling, actions being taken by most senior decision makers (SDMs) in government and business compound the problem. Given the systemic reach of much senior decision making, including decisions that constrain their own actions, there is an urgent need to open up the SDM black box....

Adapting to climate change is a new responsibility for state and local government. Yet there is little clarity about what is involved, beyond an expectation of acting in a rational, informed manner. This paper presents a study from Victoria, Australia into public servants' perceptions and experiences of using scenario techniques for adaptation. It...

The gales of climate change blow the future open and closed. In response, we are having to learn to live with a renewed notion of limits and a novel level of uncertainty. One emerging governance response is a turn to scenario planning, which generates narratives about multiple futures refracted out from the present. Like climate change itself, scen...

Climate change adaptation means that not only do we have difficult decisions to make, but we also need improved ways of making them. Although not new, scenario planning is one tool increasingly being used to improve thinking about climate change and adaptation, reflecting the way it usefully accommodates the mix of certainty and uncertainty, as wel...

Adaptation to and mitigation of climate change in Australian agriculture has included research at the plant, animal, and soil level; the farming system level; and the community and landscape level. This paper focuses on the farming systems level at which many of the impacts of a changing climate will be felt. This is also the level where much of th...

Climate change presents the need and opportunity for what the Stern report called ‘major, non-marginal change’. Such transformational adaptation is rapidly emerging as a serious topic in agriculture. This paper provides an overview of the topic as it applies to agriculture, focusing on the Australian situation. It does so by first defining transfor...

Most mixed farms in Australia are family run, and so the goals of the family and of the farm are closely inter-related. This chapter describes and discusses social factors which influence decisions made on mixed farms with particular reference to the influence of drought. Decision making on mixed farms is an extremely complex process as many factor...

Grain & Graze was an innovative, multi-scale, multi-organisational, inter-disciplinary and triple bottom line research, development and extension (RD&E) program conducted to investigate and improve mixed-farming systems in Australia from 2003 to 2008. This paper reports on a sociological evaluation of the program’s institutional arrangements that w...

Grain & Graze was an innovative, multi-scale, multi-organisational, inter-disciplinary and triple bottom line research, development and extension (RD&E) program conducted to investigate and improve mixed-farming systems in Australia from 2003 to 2008. This paper reports on a sociological evaluation of the program’s institutional arrangements that w...