Kerstin Zander

Natural hazards can turn into disasters when not managed well. An important part of disaster risk reduction is to understand how well communities are prepared for natural hazards and how well they can cope with and recover from shocks in the long term. This research assesses self‐reported community resilience and asks what makes a community resilient, using Australia as a case study. It reports on an Australian‐wide online survey which included questions related to the Conjoint Community Resiliency Assessment Measurement, a subjective indicator, as well as questions about risk perception, well‐being, and self‐efficacy. Community resilience was found to be moderately high but scores for community leadership and preparedness were low. Perceived community resilience was positively correlated with age and those with high scores for self‐efficacy and well‐being. There was, as expected, an inverse …

Agrobiodiversity is associated with a range of important but poorly quantified public good ecosystem services, the conservation of which requires public support. With a view to determining the general public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for such conservation, we organised interviews with 491 adult Peruvian residents in three regions a stated preference choice experiment (CE) to elicit the value they place on crop genetic resources conservation, using quinoa cultivation as a case study. Responses revealed strong support for the conservation of quinoa diversity particularly when conservation was framed in terms of conserving national cultural identity or food security. Respondents were willing to make a one-off donation of US$31.79 to an in situ on-farm quinoa crop diversity conservation programme, placing the highest values on programme attributes related to securing bequest/existence and option values, followed …

Most biodiversity monitoring globally tends to concentrate on trends in species’ populations and ranges rather than on threats and their management. Here we review the estimated impact of threats and the extent to which their management is understood and implemented for all threats to all Australian threatened bird taxa. The assessment reports the situation in 2020 and how this differs from 2010. The most marked finding was that the impact of climate change has increased greatly over the last decade, and now surpasses invasive species as the threat imposing the heaviest threat load. Climate change has driven recent massive population declines from increased temperatures in tropical montane rainforests and from fire. For both direct climate change impacts and fire management, progress in understanding how to relieve the threats has been slow and patchy. Consequently, little effective management has …

Reducing extinction risk is a common aim of threatened species management. However, over the period 1990 to 2020, extinction risk was recently assessed as having declined in only 25 out of the 199 Australian bird taxa eligible for assessment. Here we analyse patterns that emerge from these taxa. Some of these improvements may be only temporary; the extinction risk of three taxa increased after it had initially declined. Invasive predator control on islands was the conservation intervention with greatest impact, benefitting 13 taxa (with nine of these from Macquarie Island). For four taxa, intensive management was the primary driver of reduced risk. Another four benefited from habitat protection and one from law enforcement. For seven taxa, conservation actions had no discernible effect; for two albatrosses a shift in fishing patterns may have reduced bycatch, for one, losses on the mainland meant that most birds …

Large quantities of ‘negative emissions’ will be required to meet the 1.5°C temperature target under the Paris agreement. As nations consider more ambitious emissions reductions goals, policy makers, carbon market participants and environmental advocates need to estimate the potential scale of nature-based climate solutions (NCS), against the opportunity cost of current land use. In this study we construct a simple linear regression model of the relationship between carbon abatement potential and agricultural profitability, the latter a proxy for opportunity cost, to describe the total set of options for NCS on the Australian continent. Sampling these same two variables at the sites of over 800 land-based offset projects accredited since 2015 shows how the market selected from these abatement options. The model demonstrates that offset projects, under a range of crediting methodologies, were typically selected …

The uncertainty of climate change is a significant challenge prompting Australian farmers to create different thinking and different management systems that ensure sustained farm business viability and continuity, particularly in extreme environments. The purpose of this study was to explore the conditions and adaptive processes for managing farm resilience and cyclic adaptation pathways, in response to climate change. A positive deviance sample of farmers was interviewed, and data was collected from a cohort of twenty-two climate change innovators across Eastern Australia. Grounded theory analysis of data identified three processes and two transactional maps of climate change adaptation, in this under studied farmer cohort. The development of the transactional maps found the resilience and preparedness processes as adaptive learning responses to the stressors of climate change. The processes of …

Agroecological practices result in the generation of both private and public ecosystem services. Furthermore, both types of services have monetary and non-monetary values associated with them and there may be trade-offs to be considered in securing the different types of services and values. With a view to assessing both the monetary and non-monetary values of the services that agroecological practices generate, a choice experiment was applied to both farmers and the general public in W Kenya. This permits an exploration of the challenges, opportunities and incentives farmers face in adopting/using agroecological practices and the value the general public (who are the ultimate beneficiaries) places on the public good ecosystem services that are generated. Recommendations related to how agroecological practices use may be facilitated in order to enhance the value of the ecosystem services they generate are subsequently drawn from the results.

With increasing urbanisation and climate change, more people will be exposed to extreme heat. While health impacts of heat are well known, far less is known about how heat and responses to heat affect daily life. Such information is needed if appropriate advice is to be provided on heat adaptation. This study describes heat-related symptoms that can impact wellbeing but do not necessarily require medical treatment, and how heat changes people's behaviour, including their strategies for relieving heat and seeking heat health advice. Data were collected through an Australia-wide online survey with 1665 responses. We found that heat leads to maladaptive behaviours that could affect long-term health, such as reducing outside activities (67% of respondents) and increasing the consumption of soft drinks (27% of respondents) and alcohol (11% of respondents). Two-thirds of respondents used more air-conditioning …