Transforming sustainability education through transdisciplinary practice

Addressing urban sustainability challenges through transformative learning requires learners to be receptive to alternative viewpoints and to critically analyse their own assumptions and worldviews. Higher education institutions have an important role to play in addressing such challenges through their capacity to bring together diverse stakeholders and implement structured learning activities that can enable transformation on a personal and societal level. This article presents a case study of how urban sustainability has been incorporated into various courses run by the TD (transdisciplinary) School at the University of Technology Sydney. The findings illustrate that a transdisciplinary approach to higher education can facilitate transformative learning through a focus on real-world challenges, complex systems thinking, the integration of diverse knowledges and reflexivity. The lessons emerging from the case study demonstrate the importance of both enabling students to obtain a transdisciplinary skillset through their education and ensuring that educators adopt a transdisciplinary mindset to curriculum design

Energy cropping and social licence: What's trust got to do with it?

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Cellulosic energy crops have been promoted in various jurisdictions for their potential to mitigate climate change and enhance energy security while avoiding some of the negative impacts associated with first-generation biofuel crops. However, the successful expansion of cellulosic energy cropping depends on its acceptance by local communities. The social licence to operate (SLO) concept has been applied in mining and other sectors since the late 1990s and offers a framework for analysing the relationships between energy cropping proponents and local communities. This review analyses recent cellulosic energy cropping studies to determine the extent to which they consider the key SLO variables of distributional fairness, procedural fairness, trust and adaptability. The results indicate that, of these four variables, trust has received the least coverage in previous studies focusing on the social dimensions of cellulosic energy cropping. This review also highlights a contrast between energy cropping studies that applied the SLO concept, all of which explicitly considered trust, and those studies that did not apply the SLO concept. This result highlights the potential role that the SLO concept could play in ensuring that the importance of trust is not overlooked by researchers, bioenergy proponents or policy-makers

Enhancing ecosystem services through targeted bioenergy support policies

© 2017 While policy-makers in the bioenergy sector have paid considerable attention over the past decade to the risks that energy cropping can pose to forests, soils and food security, there has been less focus on how bioenergy policies can be designed to enhance ecosystem services. Some perennial energy crops have demonstrated the potential to provide habitat for biodiversity, improve soil health, enhance water quality, mitigate dryland salinity and sequester carbon. While much uncertainty exists around which forms of energy cropping might deliver these benefits, opportunities exist to preferentially support beneficial energy crops through the adaptation of existing bioenergy policies. This article provides a global review of bioenergy policy instruments that identifies existing and potential mechanisms for promoting the enhancement of ecosystem services. While many existing bioenergy support policies promote fuel supply (a provisioning service) and climate change mitigation (a regulating service), it is less common for bioenergy policies to actively enhance ecosystem services such as habitat provision, soil improvement and water regulation. Further opportunities to promote these ecosystem services exist through structured tax concessions, sub-mandates, banding and renewable energy auctions, but careful consideration needs to be given to trade-offs between services, risks of disservices and the need for complementary non-energy policies

A social licence for the sharing economy

© 2019 Elsevier Inc. The emergence of community concerns around a range of sharing economy platforms have led to calls for more research into the so-called “dark side” of the sharing economy, including the development and application of analytical frameworks. In this article, we present one such framework based around social licence to operate (SLO), a concept that has been applied most extensively in the mining, forestry and energy sectors. We argue that, despite requiring some adaptations and refinements for application to the sharing economy context, social licence is a relevant and suitable concept for analysing community acceptance of sharing economy platforms and provides an opportunity for mutual learning between different sectors. We present a Sharing Economy SLO Framework and outline a research agenda that includes defining communities of interest and place that are affected by sharing economy practices, analysing the complex relationships between social acceptance and regulatory requirements, identifying and measuring key variables that determine SLO, and developing strategies for building and maintaining SLO for sharing economy practices

'This country just hangs tight': Perspectives on managing land degradation and climate change in far west NSW

© 2019 Australian Rangeland Society. Discussions of land degradation often display a disconnect between global and local scales. Although global-scale discussions often focus on measuring and reversing land degradation through metrics and policy measures, local-scale discussions can highlight a diversity of viewpoints and the importance of local knowledge and context-specific strategies for sustainable land management. Similarly, although scientific studies clearly link anthropogenic climate change to land degradation as both cause and consequence, the connection may not be so clear for local rangelands communities due to the complex temporal and spatial scales of change and management in such environments. In research conducted in October 2015, we interviewed 18 stakeholders in the far west of New South Wales about their perspectives on sustainable land management. The results revealed highly variable views on what constitutes land degradation, its causes and appropriate responses. For the pastoral land managers, the most important sign of good land management was the maintenance of groundcover, through the management of total grazing pressure. Participants viewed overgrazing as a contributor to land degradation in some cases and they identified episodes of land degradation in the region. However, other more contentious factors were also highlighted, such as wind erosion, grazing by goats and kangaroos and the spread of undesired 'invasive native scrub' at the expense of more desirable pasture, and alternative views that these can offer productive benefits. Although few participants were concerned about anthropogenic climate change, many described their rangeland management styles as adaptive to the fluctuations of the climate, regardless of the reasons for these variations. Rather than focusing on whether landholders 'believe in' climate change or agree on common definitions or measurement approaches for land degradation, these results suggest that their culture of adaptation may provide a strong basis for coping with an uncertain future. The culture of adaption developed through managing land in a highly variable climate may help even if the specific conditions that landholders need to adapt to are unlike those experienced in living memory. Such an approach requires scientific and expert knowledge to be integrated alongside the context-specific knowledge, values and existing management strategies of local stakeholders

Synergies between Land Degradation Neutrality goals and existing market-based instruments

© 2019 Since the concept of the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) emerged in global policy discourse, a key point of contention has been the development of market-based instruments to promote the LDN agenda. Much of this discussion has focused on the use of LDN-specific offset mechanisms and private-public partnerships. However, there is also an opportunity to capitalise on the synergies that exist between LDN objectives and those of existing market-based instruments that have previously been developed for carbon, biodiversity, bioenergy and in other contexts. LDN objectives could be integrated into such schemes through targeted eligibility rules and certification schemes, supporting methodologies, adaptations to multifunctional indices used in auction-based approaches and the restructuring of mandates, tax breaks and feed-in tariffs for bioenergy and other products

Waste battery disposal and recycling behavior: a study on the Australian perspective.

Consumer behavior is a critical consideration for the development of sustainable waste management systems, including waste batteries, which pose a serious threat to human health and the environment if disposed of improperly. This study investigates the consumers' perspective on the waste battery collection and recycling behaviors in Australia, and analyses their implications for the development of recycling schemes. The results show that, although general awareness exists among consumers about the negative impacts of improper disposal, this awareness was not reflected during the disposal of waste batteries among the participants. Insufficient knowledge about the waste battery collection points and convenience were the most important factors affecting the inappropriate disposal behavior from most of the consumers. Over 50% of participants were unaware of the collection points for waste batteries. The most-preferred battery collection systems involved a deposit return system similar to that used for bottle recycling in the state of New South Wales (NSW) or collection at supermarkets/retailers. The most preferred methods for providing an incentive to recycle batteries were "old-for-new" battery swaps, "vouchers that could be used for other items in a store," and "cash payments." Several policy implications have been highlighted from this pioneering study that could shape the future development of sustainable waste battery management systems in Australia

Learning together: a transdisciplinary approach to student–staff partnerships in higher education

© 2019, © 2019 HERDSA. Partnership in higher education has gained prominence over recent decades, but recent studies have identified a lack of research exploring how partnership practices unfold in specific disciplinary contexts. This article explores how a transdisciplinary approach can be used to better understand and facilitate student–staff partnerships where staff and students have diverse disciplinary backgrounds and knowledge. We present a case study of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, focusing on the adaptation of our curriculum co-creation processes by drawing on multiple knowledge types through a reflexive process of mutual learning. We conclude that explicit consideration of these principles, which are common to both transdisciplinary and partnership frameworks, have the potential to enhance consideration of diverse perspectives and the roles played by worldviews, norms and values when building student–staff partnerships around curriculum co-creation