The CASPR Blog

internship

CASPR Internship Success with Georgia, Bella & Cecilia

As part of their outreach program, CASPR hosts undergraduate and Honours student interns every year. In winter 2021, four enthusiastic students successfully completed research projects with CASPR’s lead academics. Georgia worked on a project with Associate Professor Cassandra Star: “As a research intern with CASPR during the winter break of 2021, I had the exciting opportunity to work with Associate Professor Cassandra Star on a research project regarding Prime Minister Scott Morrison and environmental protest/civil society organisations. Specifically, I was tasked with conducting a review …

bushfire

Extreme Event Attribution in Media Reporting of Wildfires in the US, Canada, and Australia: Anti-reflexibility and the Climate Countermovement

Associate Professor Cassandra Star and Dr. Josh Holloway have been awarded one of eleven prestigious Climate Obstruction Research grants from the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), headquartered at Brown University. The internationally-competitive grant will contribute toward research examining attribution of bushfires and wildfires to climate change in the media in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Intense bush and wildfires occur frequently in all three countries, command significant public attention and often prompt intense debate around cause, blame, and policy solutions. The research project, Extreme Event …

coastal

Coast to Coast National Conference

On 29 July 2021 Associate Professor Beverley Clarke delivered a keynote address ‘The changing prominence of coastal Natural Resource Management in Australia’ at the 15th Coast to Coast National Conference—Australia’s biennial national coastal management event. Sadly, the face-to-face delivery in Cairns was foregone due to the Covid lockdown, but the online program was highly effective and the presentation generated useful discussion and initiated opportunities for policy engagement. Natural resource management broadly refers to decision-making about the use …

conference

“Australia and the One Earth”: An interdisciplinary conference to mark fifty years of UN global environmental governance

In June 1972, 114 nations gathered in Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. A landmark event, it was the first major international conference dealing with the subject of ‘the environment’. In the fifty years since, the international architecture for dealing with environmental problems has expanded, with a range of intergovernmental organisations, a library of international environmental treaties, and regular international conferences trying to address problems. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of …

internship

Winter ’21 internships at CASPR

CASPR has welcomed four new undergraduate interns for the winter mid-year break. Based at Flinders University, they are each working on the first stages of new research projects with CASPR’s lead academics. Whilst with CASPR they are experiencing academic life and getting a taste of what post graduate study could be like! Bella is currently studying a Bachelor of International Relations/Bachelor of Arts. She identifies climate change policy as one of her key interests in the field of international relations and understands how it influences …

legal

Bushfire Legal Help Community Outreach

Law is probably not the first thing you think of to help to build resilience and capacity in communities impacted by catastrophic fire or other natural disasters. But information about the law, the legal rights of landowners and other community members and how to access legal services are critical – not only in responding once a fire has occurred, but also in prevention of future risks. Information about their legal rights and obligations can empower those in …

postgrads

Elizabeth’s PhD research with CASPR: Transforming Farmers Markets.

In 2016, I spent a year abroad in Leeds and a picked up a single class that changed my life. Land, Fuel and Agriculture introduced me to the world of international food networks, harmful agricultural systems and the alternatives that people around the world are using to reform their relationship to food and agriculture. Despite being completely different from everything else I had studied, I fell in love with the subject. Urban agriculture and farmers markets were of particular interest to me, as well …

newly published

Does ‘formal’ stakeholder consultation influence the outcome of Australian food regulatory policy?

An article recently published in the Health Promotion International journal reports on work conducted by Flinders and Deakin University researchers that examined the food regulatory decision-making process in Australia. The national policy on the voluntary fortification of foods and drinks with vitamins and minerals developed between 2002 and 2012, was used as a case study to understand the best means for public health professionals to effectively engage with, and have an influential role in, policy development. Written stakeholder submissions to the public consultation on voluntary food fortification policy were analysed to determine how the policy ‘problem’ was …

congratulations

Judi’s Path to a PhD with CASPR

My Honours dissertation proved that directors of five Australian fossil fuel corporations had contravened several criminal sections of the Corporations Act, by their conduct in relation to climate change, and that they could be sentenced to jail, receive hefty personal fines, and be disqualified from holding directorships of Australian companies for life. I am passionate about human rights, animal rights, and everything, and anything, environmental. Therefore, I sought a topic related to climate change, which …

newly published

EIA effectiveness in Vietnam: key stakeholder perceptions

A paper just released by Dr Beverley Clarke and Cong Chi Vu (Flinders University Master of Environmental Management graduate) presents a unique empirical study from Vietnam based on the perspectives of those engaged in the Environmental Impact Assessment system there. The paper evaluates the effectiveness of Vietnam’s EIA system from varied perspectives including government, NGOs, academia, and industry. Results suggest that, like other developing countries, Vietnam’s EIA performance, in practice, faces several significant challenges and …