Sustainable Sydney
Australia's focus on environmental issues has intensified in recent years, spurred by warnings from officials and scientists that the world faces accelerated climate change.
The University of Sydney is at the forefront of those developing
solutions for this pressing challenge.
Sustainable solutions
Although environmental issues often capture most attention, the future sustainability of our way of life faces many challenges: for example, the availability and price of food, or the health and economic consequences of overpopulation. The University of Sydney is at the forefront of those developing solutions for these challenges.
In the middle of 2008, the University created the Institute for Sustainable Solutions which groups researchers around four thematic areas – energy, environment, development (including security, law and economics) and health.
To list just a few of the researchers linked to the institute underlines the breadth of issues being examined – and the widespread potential for cross-disciplinary solutions.
One of the institute’s two interim directors is ARC Federation Fellow Professor Thomas Maschmeyer, a technical chemist who specialises in catalysis – accelerating chemical reactions. Maschmeyer hopes to help tackle the world energy crisis with third generation biofuels and solar-powered processes. For example, he can harness sunlight to generate hydrogen gas from waste water by using a non-carbon emitting process which addresses concerns about climate change and can also be an integral step in recycling degraded water supplies.
Demonstrating how the institute brings together research on similar themes from different disciplines, Maschmeyer’s fellow interim co-director, Associate Professor Rosemary Lyster, is looking at how to reduce greenhouse gases from a legal perspective.
An associate professor in the Law School and director of the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law, Lyster's research focuses on how the law can be used to regulate escalating energy sector emissions, for example through energy and carbon taxes, tax incentives, or participation in international or national emissions-trading schemes.
But Sydney researchers cover a much broader range of sustainability issues than just emissions. For example, the institute houses research on breeding plants that can deal with climate change, examining the security implications of climate change, and studying how we can learn from history when tackling overpopulation.
Other researchers have already changed how the University itself operates. In August 2008, the University published its first 'triple bottom line' report, based on work developed by the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) in the School of Physics.
Sustainable agriculture
The environment, energy, food and water resources are fundamental to our future, so it’s no surprise that the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources is at the forefront of studying sustainable management of natural resources.
The faculty's activities attract national and international attention, as seen in October when Professor Ivan Kennedy and Dr Michael Rose received a major innovation award from the World Bank. Kennedy and Rose are working with the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Ho Chi Minh City to lower rice farmers’ costs by allowing crops to be grown with much less nitrogen fertiliser, potentially reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.
The University's work on sustainability received a major boost during the year, when alumnus David Coffey with his wife Judith donated $4 million to establish a professorial chair in sustainable agriculture.
Mark Adams, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, says the Coffey donation is already having a major impact on sustainability studies and research at Sydney.
"The first holder of the Coffey professorship, John Crawford, is developing some tremendous concepts for graduate centres focused on interdisciplinary studies in sustainability that are getting buy-in right across the board, for example from physics, mathematics, biological sciences, social sciences, and economics."
Triple bottom line
Benchmarking is core to analysing the University’s Triple Bottom Line performance. The Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA)'s 2008 report benchmarked the relative performance of the University in 2006 against the entire Australian education sector average. The groundbreaking nature of the report means that it is not yet possible to benchmark in the same way against other universities.
"Our emissions are high compared to the whole education sector,
in part due to the electricity use required to support the volume of
research activity here. This doesn't occur to the same degree across the whole sector," explains ISA's Chris Dey (pictured with his ISA colleagues Dr Joy Murray and Professor Manfred Lenzen). "However, we know that compared to other leading universities we are one of the lowest users of electricity, gas and water per student."
"In terms of salaries, again we're below the sector average but that’s because we’re comparing ourselves against the whole education sector and we have a greater proportion of expenditure on upstream suppliers and equipment than schools do, for example. That in turn has a positive impact on the University's economic stimulus, and our export performance – that is the revenue we derive from outside Australia – is also strong thanks to our popularity with international students."