Australian policies on water management and climate change: are they supporting the sustainable development goals and improved health and well-being?

BACKGROUND: Sustainable management of the natural environment is essential. Continued environmental degradation will lead to worsened health outcomes in countries and across generations. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework for viewing the preservation of natural environments and the promotion of health, well-being and health equity as interconnected pursuits. Within the SDG framework the goals of promoting environmental sustainability and human health are unified through attention to the social determinants of health and health equity (SDH/HE). This paper presents findings from a document analysis of all Australian environment sector policies and selected legislation to examine whether and how current approaches support progress toward achieving SDG goals on water, climate change, and marine ecosystems (Goals 6, 13 and 14), and to consider implications for health and health equity. RESULTS: Consideration of a broad range of SDH/HE was evident in the analysed documents. Related collaborations between environment and health sectors were identified, but the bulk of proposed actions on SDH/HE were initiated by the environment sector as part of its core business. Strengths of Australian policy in regard to SDGs 6, 13 and 14 are reflected in recognition of the effects of climate change, a strong cohesive approach to marine park protection, and recognition of the need to protect existing water and sanitation systems from future threats. However, climate change strategies focus predominately on resilience, adaptation and heat related health effects, rather than on more comprehensive mitigation policies. The findings emphasise the importance of strengthened cross-sectoral action to address both the drivers and effects of environmental degradation. A lack of policy coherence between jurisdictions was also evident in several areas, compounded by inadequate national guidance, where vague strategies and non-specific devolution of responsibilities are likely to compromise coordination and accountability. CONCLUSIONS: Evidence on planetary health recognises the interconnectedness of environmental and human health and, as such, suggests that ineffective management of climate change and water pose serious risks to both the natural environment and human well-being. To address these risks more effectively, and to achieve the SDGs, our findings indicate that cross-jurisdiction policy coherence and national coordination must be improved. In addition, more action to address global inequities is required, along with more comprehensive approaches to climate change mitigation

Learnings from Local Collaborative Transformations: Setting a Basis for a Sustainability Framework

The complexity of the sustainability challenge demands for collaboration between different actors, be they governments, businesses, or grassroots movements, at all levels. Nevertheless, and according to previous research, many tensions and obstacles to partnership still exist and results are far from meaningful. By investigating potential synergies, our purpose is to define a sustainability framework to promote better collaboration between community-based initiatives and local governments, in the context of transformation. Specifically, the research aim presented in this paper is to harvest learnings from existing collaborative experiments at the municipal level. As a starting point and using exploratory literature review concerning areas like policy (e.g., public administration) or business and management research, we propose a ‘Compass for Collaborative Transformation’. This heuristic device can support the study of these sustainability experiments. We also introduce a method to map the governance imprint of these collaborations and to provide a ‘proxy’ of transformative efforts. We then present and discuss results from 71 surveyed cases happening in 16 countries in America and Europe, comparing distinctive frameworks involved. Finally, we consider the preconditions of a framework to improve these local collaborations—namely the capacity to support joint navigation through transformative efforts, facing high levels of uncertainty and complexity—and present ongoing efforts to codesign a new sustainability framework.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Classification of the approaches to learning adopted by students of architecture in their design coursework

Students’ approaches to learning has been classified through their experiences in the design coursework within the larger context of architectural education. What are the learning approaches being adopted by students in architectural design and how does the introduction of the first year design coursework impact on their approaches to learning in the subsequent years are key to this classification. This research reflects on why learning approaches evolve from the first to the final year of the architecture program. Approaches to learning is well-understood in other disciplines including engineering, information technology, mathematics and sciences to name a few, but less-researched in architectural education. This research endeavours to fill this gap. The students are introduced to design theory as a part of their architectural design coursework. This research vehicle of the architectural design is identified as a more appropriate way of classifying learning approaches instead of history, critical theory and technology as design coursework plays a central role in the studio-based program. The academic context has been reviewed through existing literature with a focus on learning approaches within pedagogical research in architectural education, in addition to other fields and disciplines including established research on ‘surface and deep’ approaches in text-based fields through the qualitative research method of phenomenography. This classification is the further consolidation of the pilot study on students’ learning comparing the first and fourth year of the architecture program through phenomenography. The learning context for this classification includes four architectural institutions from the United States of America, United Kingdom and India. The intention of this research is to present the phenomenographic results as meta-categories by depicting the evolution of the learning approaches in architectural design. This research currently intends to further represent these findings and interpret these meta-categories within real world examples of architectural pedagogy and education through an illustrative account of nine students of architecture and their learning approaches in evolution