Australian Professor of ecology and mathematics Hugh Possingham will this week embark on a tour of Asia to share with international scientists and decision-makers some practical tools to solve global conservation conundrums.
Professor Possingham, whose University of Queensland laboratory invented the most widely-used reserve system design software in the world, is travelling to China, Japan, Indonesia and Singapore as part of the Australian Academy of Science’s international speaker series.
“The science of making conservation decisions is booming and as it matures many of its components are becoming more quantitative,” Professor Possingham says.
“This is just in time, as the rate at which species are becoming extinct is 100-1000 times ‘normal’.
“The region I am visiting includes several of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, but the conservation policy and management community in Australia and overseas is often poorly equipped and resistant to quantitative transparent approaches to environmental decision-making.”
In a series of eight presentations over nine days, Professor Possingham will show how decision theory tools taken from economics, applied mathematics and engineering can solve a variety of problems in conservation.
“The semantics and jargon surrounding the world of modelling and maths can make communication of decision science thinking a problem,” he says.
“But using these Australian-developed tools and ideas we can help effectively solve controversial problems such as how to allocate scarce funds between different global biodiversity hotspots, how much money should be spent on monitoring (if any), and how to build systems of marine protected areas.”
A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Possingham directs two research centres including the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, and sits on many committees and boards for non-government and government organisations.
The Australian Academy of Science international speaker series has been made possible by the Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR).
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