Russell Wise

• PhD
• Principal Research Scientist at The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

What infrastructure do Australian cities need over the next century? Planning for, delivering, and maintaining infrastructure that is usually long-lived and expensive in a rapidly changing environment is difficult. Complexity and uncertainties are at play, with potentially serious consequences to be considered. Specifically, current infrastructure-...

Adaptation pathways are a decision-focused approach to account for future uncertainties and complexities in planning and implementation of adaptation actions. The pathways approach incorporates flexibility into decision making to accommodate for changing conditions over time, and to reduce undesirable path dependencies and maladaptive consequences....

Purpose There are many pragmatic challenges and complex interactions in the reduction of systemic disaster risk. No single agency has the mandate, authority, legitimacy or resources to fully address the deeper socio-economic, cultural, regulatory or political forces that often drive the creation and transfer of risk. National leadership and co-ordi...

Infrastructure investment needs to account for climate change globally, yet most day-to-day projects are small and poorly served by economic assessment processes. Four simple adjustments to cost–benefit analysis practices would greatly improve decision making for future infrastructure resilience.

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

Adaptation pathways are decision-making processes which sequence actions over time to account for rapid change and future uncertainty. In developing economies pathways practice can guide climate-resilient development (CRD) but is hampered by complex political dynamics, intensified by ‘resource curses’ of abundant natural resources. We tested an ada...

As the world recognises the need to adapt to unavoidable climate change, diverse adaptation planning and risk assessment guides have emerged, with the legitimate intent of providing context- or sector-specific guidance. Despite this, adaptation seems challenged to move to action, and users of guides often report being overwhelmed or confused. New g...

Development processes and action on climate change are closely interlinked. This is recognised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth assessment report, which reports on climate-resilient pathways, understood as development trajectories towards sustainable development which include adaptation and mitigation. The upcomi...

This book is a comprehensive manual for decision-makers and policy leaders addressing the issues around human caused climate change, which threatens communities with increasing extreme weather events, sea level rise, and declining habitability of some regions due to desertification or inundation. The book looks at both mitigation of greenhouse gas...

Human actions have driven earth systems close to irreversible and profound change. The need to shift towards intentional transformative adaptation (ITA) is clear. Using case studies from the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA), we explore ITA as a way of thinking and acting that is transformative in concept and objectives, but achiev...

Adaptation pathways have experienced growing popularity as a decision-focussed approach in climate adaptation research and planning. Despite the increasing and broadening use of adaptation pathways reported in the literature, there has not yet been a systematic attempt to review, compare and contrast approaches to adaptation pathways design and the...

Co-production between scientific and Indigenous knowledge has been identified as useful to generating adaptation pathways with Indigenous peoples, who are attached to their traditional lands and thus highly exposed to the impacts of climate change. However, ignoring the complex and contested histories of nation-state coloni-sation can result in naï...

The sustainable development and food security of islands in the Asia-Pacific region is severely compromised by climate change, sea level rise and compounding socio-economic issues. To achieve a step-change in food production and climate adaptation, livelihoods must rapidly transform. Food security programs continue to apply the “pipeline” model of...

The sustainable development and food security of islands in the Asia-Pacific region is severely compromised by climate change, sea level rise and compounding socioeconomic issues. To achieve a step-change in food production and climate adaptation, livelihoods must rapidly transform. Food security programs continue to apply the "pipeline" model of s...

Transformation of social-ecological systems due to climate change requires, transformative adaptation responses. We propose the concept of nature’s contribution to adaptation (NCA; previously called adaptation services), to reveal properties of ecosystems that provide options for future livelihoods and adaptation to transformative change. Knowledge...

Main report https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP187363&dsid=DS16 appendix https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=csiro:EP187363&dsid=DS17 The Australian Vulnerability Profile is an initiative of Emergency Management Australia. This report documents the research conducted in the project ‘Supporting the Development of the...

The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guidi...

The Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs [44] are an ambitious step towards sustainable development, taking a much broader view of sustainability than ever achieved previously, yet practical challenges remain, including how to implement change. The aims of this research were to determine how an influential aquaculture company in Australia - Tassal...

Climate change adaptation presents a difficult challenge for coastal towns around the world, forcing local governments to plan for sea level rise in a contentious decision-making space. The concept of “adaptation pathways,” a diagnostic and analytical tool to assist in adaptive planning and decision-making, is gaining traction as a way of framing a...

This article advocates for a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of vulnerability to climate‐related environmental changes in order to feed the design of adaptation future pathways. It uses the trajectory of exposure and vulnerability ( TEV ) approach that it defines as ‘storylines of driving factors and processes that have influenced past and...

The global changes that we face are rapid, novel, interacting and cumulative – we are operating in uncharted territory and that means that there are no ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions. There is an urgent need to understand, design and effectively implement interventions to guide social-ecological systems along sustainable paths into the future. The magni...

Transformative adaptation will be increasingly important to effectively address the impacts of climate change and other global drivers on social-ecological systems. Enabling transformative adaptation requires new ways to evaluate and adaptively manage trade-offs between maintaining desirable aspects of current social-ecological systems and adapting...

In regions prone to wildfire, a major driver of ecosystem change is increased frequency and intensity of fire events caused by a warming, drying climate. Uncertainty over the nature and extent of change creates challenges for how to manage ecosystems subject to altered structure and function under climate change. Using montane forests in south-east...

Supporting Information for 'Adaptation services and pathways for the management of temperate montane forests under transformational climate change'. Climatic Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1724-z. Table S1. Ecosystem services associated with each ecosystem state. Note that tall mixed eucalypt forest and mixed eucalypt coppice woodlan...

Adaptation services are the ecosystem processes and services that benefit people by increasing their ability to adapt to change. Benefits may accrue from existing but newly used services where ecosystems persist or from novel services supplied following ecosystem transformation. Ecosystem properties that enable persistence or transformation are imp...

Co-production of new knowledge can enhance open and integrative research processes across the social and natural sciences and across research/science, practice and policy interrelationships. Thus, co-production is important in the conduct of research about and for transformations to sustainability. While co-design is an integral part of co-producti...

Climate change and its interactions with complex socioeconomic dynamics dictate the need for decision makers to move from incremental adaptation toward transformation as societies try to cope with unprecedented and uncertain change. Developing pathways toward transformation is especially difficult in regions with multiple contested resource uses an...

Responding to global change represents an unprecedented challenge for society. Decision makers tend to address this challenge by framing adaptation as a decision problem, whereby the responses to impacts of change are addressed within existing decision processes centred on defining the decision problem and selecting options. However, this ‘decision...

Mainstreaming climate change and future uncertainty into rural development planning in developing countries is a pressing challenge. By taking a complex systems approach to decision-making, the adaptation pathways construct provides useful principles. However, there are no examples of how to operationalise adaptation pathways in developing countrie...

RAPTA is a unique tool to help project designers and planners build the ideas of resilience, adaptation and transformation into their projects from the start, to ensure outcomes that are practicable, valuable and sustainable through time and change. This report offers practical advice to planners, project managers, policy makers, donors, farmers, r...

Few studies have examined how to mainstream future climate change uncertainty into decision-making for poverty alleviation in developing countries. With potentially drastic climate change emerging later this century, there is an imperative to develop planning tools which can enable vulnerable rural communities to proactively build adaptive capacity...

Achieving climate compatible development (CCD) is a necessity in developing countries, but there are few examples of requisite Planning processes, or manifestations of CCD. This paper presents a multi-stakeholder, participatory planning process designed to screen and prioritise rural livelihood adaptation strategies against nine CCD criteria. The p...

Building an effective response for communities to climate change requires decision-support tools that deliver information which stakeholders find relevant for exploring potential short and long-term impacts on livelihoods. Established principles suggest that to successfully communicate scientific information, such tools must be transparent, replica...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Climate adaptation planning provides an opportunity to enhance the adaptive capacity of stakeholders across multiple levels. However, reviews of standard top-down and bottom-up approaches indicate that the value of multistakeholder involvement is not fully recognized or incorporated into guidelines. Focusing on provinces in Indonesia and Papua New...

Full paper: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/ZjtQIbuTMasfJJXPqKrm/full Adaptation pathways are increasingly being used as a foresight tool to help guide the implementation of climate change adaptation and deliberate transformation. This paper applies a pathways lens as a hindsight tool to provide new understanding about past change and adaptation...

Ecosystem services are typically valued for their immediate material or cultural benefits to human wellbeing, supported by regulating and supporting services. Under climate change, with more frequent stresses and novel shocks, 'climate adaptation services', are defined as the benefits to people from increased social ability to respond to change, pr...

A position paper on the importance of EbA for achieveing Sustainable Development Goals

The need to adapt to climate change is now widely recognised as evidence of its impacts on social and natural systems grows and greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. Yet efforts to adapt to climate change, as reported in the literature over the last decade and in selected case studies, have not led to substantial rates of implementation of ad...

In developing countries adaptation responses to climate and global change should be integrated with human development to generate no regrets, co-benefit strategies for the rural poor, but there are few examples of how to achieve this. The adaptation pathways approach provides a potentially useful decision-making framework because it aims to steer s...

Mesquite (Prosopis species) were introduced to South Africa to provide fodder and shade for livestock, but some have become invasive, impacting on water and grazing resources. Mesquite’s net economic effects are unclear and their unequal distribution leads to conflict. We estimated the value of mesquite invasions in the Northern Cape Province for d...

The goal of this project was to improve understanding of how the monetary and non-monetary values of coastal ecosystems may be affected by climate change and how the decision-making processes that affect Australia‘s coasts will need to adapt to account for these changing values. We show, based on analyses of four areas of decision making – problem...

The expansion of protected areas is a critical component of strategies to promote the continued existence of biodiversity (i.e., life at all levels of biological organization) as climate changes, but scientific, social, and economic uncertainties associated with climate change are some of the major obstacles preventing such expansion. New models of...

Water resources in many catchments in South Africa (SA) are over committed and water is projected to become scarcer. The impacts of plantation forestry on water resources in SA are well known and legislation limits further afforestation. Nevertheless demands for wood continue to grow. A challenge therefore is to increase the production of forest pr...

Agroforests managed by smallholders have been shown to provide biodiversity, carbon-storage and rural-livelihood services. Consequently, these systems are being promoted as an effective way of rehabilitating millions of hectares of degraded, formerly forested land in many tropical countries. Current conditions at the forest margins in these countri...

In this paper the impacts of biodiesel feedstock production in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa is assessed through the application of a Partial Equilibrium Model to the Eastern Cape Social Accounting Matrix, using canola production in the Province as an 'external shock'. Six economic indicators were estimated. The results show that invest...

Global sustainable development depends on the capacity of natural, social and economic systems to adapt to external stimuli. However, building this adaptive capacity in the developing world context of sub-Saharan Africa will require substantial investment in these systems, which most countries in this region simply cannot afford. Given that their s...

The impact of an expanding bio-fuels sector in South Africa is expected to be widespread and substantial and could affect the agricultural sector. For example, an expanded bio-fuels industry in the country is predicted to lead to marginal price increases of 7.5% for milk, 2% for chicken, 9.6% for beef and 2.5% for eggs per annum until 2015. Althoug...

Sustainable natural resource management requires inputs from both the natural and the social sciences. Since natural and social systems are inter-related and inter-dependent, it is essential that these data can be integrated within a given analysis, which requires that they are spatially compatible. However, existing environmental and socio-economi...

In this paper we consider the increasingly prominent expectations that business can and will significantly contribute to sustainable development. We use the framework of social-ecological systems, and the principles thereof, as a lens to evaluate the corporate approach to sustainability management through a review of the literature and a number of...

Minimising the cost of repeatedly estimating C (C) stocks is crucial to the financial viability of projects that seek to sell C credits. Depending on the price of C, this may imply less or more sampling effort than would be applied for science objectives. In systems with heterogeneous C pools, such as savannas, this translates into a variable-effor...

We review the potential contributions of environmental and resource economics (ERE) to the achievement of sustainable development in developing countries; and highlight the limitations associated with applying ERE within a deveioping-country context, using examples from South Africa. We flnd that ERE has much to offer in helping to overcome the cha...

The carbon footprint of materials and products is becoming an increasingly important factor in international trade. At present the carbon emissions balance of the South African economy is not well understood, especially the carbon emissions associated with imports and exports. An investigation was done of known economic input-output and life cycle...

South Africa aims to replace 2% of its total liquid transportation fuels in the short term through a newly introduced biofuels industrial strategy. It is envisaged that this target is achievable without excessive economic support by utilising surplus agricultural capacity. The target is based on local production, both agricultural and manufacturing...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

Science real and relevant: 2nd CSIR Biennial Conference, CSIR International Convention Centre Pretoria, 17 & 18 November 2008 The South African Government commissioned a detailed study entitled Long-Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS). This study defined and quantified the mitigation options and associated costs available under several energy and econ...

Sustainable development presents particular challenges for developing countries, where the need for rapid economic development to overcome poverty and inequality often makes environmental protection a low priority. Market-based instruments (MBIs), which make it possible for environmental considerations to be built into everyday economic decision-ma...

When a weed invasion is first discovered a decision has to be made on whether to attempt to eradicate it, contain it or do nothing. Ideally, these decisions should be based on a complete benefit-cost analysis, but this is often not possible. A partial analysis, combining knowledge of the rate of spread, seedbank longevity, costs of control and tech...

In many areas of developing countries, economic and institutional factors often combine to give farmers incentives to clear forests and repeatedly plant food crops without sufficiently replenishing the soils. These activities lead to large-scale land degradation and contribute to global warming through the release of greenhouse gases into the atmos...

South Africa's water resources are scarce, getting scarcer, and are often unpredictable. Long-term as well as seasonal water shortages are a reality in some areas and will become a binding constraint to economic development. However, an important shift in government attitudes and public awareness is leading to a multifaceted approach to water manag...

Agroforests, where trees are planted with crops, are promoted as an appropriate and sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture as they meet landholder demands for food, income and wood products. This is essential in countries such as Indonesia where much of the landmass is not suitable for intensive cropping (either too steep or the soils a...

The views represented in this document do not necessarily represent those of the institutions involved, nor do they necessarily represent official UK Government and/or DFID policies.

The Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol provides the opportunity for smallholders to receive financial rewards for adopting tree-based systems that are sustainable. In this paper a meta-model is developed to simulate interactions between trees, crops and soils under a range of management regimes for a smallholding in Sumatra. The mode...

The growing emphasis on market-based solutions to environmental problems, both under and outside of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, means that carbon sequestered in the biomass and soils of agroforestry systems is likely to acquire a direct market value. If the incentive provided by carbon markets is large enough, this ma...

Trees provide many environmental services including improved soil fertility and soil structure, which often leads to increased productivity and sustainability of the land. Trees also increase the average carbon stocks of land-use systems. Under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, landholders may receive payments for the carbon-se...

Agroforestry projects have the potential to help mitigate global warming by acting as sinks for greenhouse gasses, particularly CO 2. However, participation in carbon-sink projects may be constrained by high costs. This problem may be particularly severe for projects involving smallholders in developing countries. Of particular concern are the tran...

When a weed invasion is discovered a decision has to be made as to whether to attempt to eradicate it, contain it or do nothing. Ideally, these decisions should be based on a complete benefit-cost analysis, but this is often not possible. A partial analysis, combining knowledge of the rate of spread, seedbank longevity and economic-analysis techniq...

Technically, forestry projects have thepotential to contribute significantly tothe mitigation of global warming, but manysuch projects may not be economicallyattractive at current estimates of carbon(C) prices. Forest C is, in a sense, a newcommodity that must be measured toacceptable standards for the commodity toexist. This will require that cred...

The emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, and the consequent potential for climate change are the focus of increasing international concern. Temporary land-use change and forestry projects (LUCF) can be implemented to offset permanent emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy sector. Several approaches to accounting for carbo...

The emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, and the consequent potential for climate change are the focus of increasing international concern. Temporary land-use change and forestry projects (LUCF) can be implemented to offset permanent emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy sector. Several approaches to accounting for carbo...

Agroforestry can help in the battle to control global warming by sequestering atmospheric CO2. Most attention so far has been on the carbon sequestered in trees, but soils can also contain considerable amounts of carbon, some of which is released upon harvest. There has been little quantification of the impact of different land-uses on soil carbon...

Planting trees with crops is argued by many to be the most appropriate way for landholders to meet both their financial and basic-food requirements while ensuring that the productivity of their land is maintained or enhanced in the medium to long term. Interactions between crops and trees, however, are extremely complex and whether the net outcome...

Sustainable resource use requires that an inter-generational approach to management be adopted. Therefore the effects of current decisions on the future state of resource stocks must be considered. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol presents an interesting context in which this can be applied and dynamic-optimisation theory...

Science real and relevant: 2nd CSIR Biennial Conference, CSIR International Convention Centre Pretoria, 17&18 November 2008 Human actions have fundamentally changed the way the world’s ecosystems look and function. Our efforts to produce more food, fibre, and fuel, control our water supplies and protect ourselves from the elements (e.g. storms or p...