Climate Research Accelerator (CRX) projects

In early 2021, the Birrarung Council – the voice of the Yarra River – invited postgraduate landscape architecture students from three universities to collaborate and develop a vision for the Great Birrarung Parkland. They asked for regeneration ideas from Naarm, the heart of Melbourne, to the upper catchments and tributaries, that build on the Wilip-gin Birrarung murron (Yarra River Protection Act of 2017) Legislation that defines the river as a living entity.

In response, the School of Design created the Design with Country: Resilience Studio, comprising urban designers and landscape and built-form architects, to explore the large, urbanised riverine system and develop and visualise design interventions for present to future scenarios. This multi-disciplinary studio brings together Aboriginal perspective, heritage and Country living systems with contemporary urbanisation and Birrarung catchment management.

We have established a co-educational course working with the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation (WWCHAC) on envisioning the Birrarung (Yarra River) as a living entity and shaping the future vision. Led by UoM staff including First Nations teachers and guests, students are immersed in local culture and science to navigate the concepts of connection to Country, building cultural awareness and engaging bi-culturally with Traditional Owners and knowledge holders, city managers, stakeholders and design professionals in order to understand the challenges and opportunities of the river precinct and surrounding areas from multiple perspectives and future scenarios.

This project will establish a science advisory group to work with landscape architecture, urban design and architecture students, alongside the WWCHAC and Indigenous designers, to incorporate the latest climate projections (such as drought, increased weather intensity, and more frequent and intense rainfall events) and apply a better climate understanding of these challenges. Through the Design with Country initiative (studio and consultancy), we will develop data and climate visualisation strategies to inform the designs and to feed into planning for the Great Birrarung Parkland. This will involve a focus on regional watersheds, sub-basins and neighbourhoods, drainage and infrastructure systems, and biology with the goal of developing multi-scale resilience strategies.

MCF’s CRX funding will support workshops and research support staff members to gather information on and support the development of hydrologic and climatic modeling for 2050s and 2100s scenarios along the Birrarung and its tributaries.

Concrete is the most used human-made material in the world and is the cornerstone of infrastructure development (roads, bridges, tunnels, etc.). Nonetheless, it is widely considered a carbon-intensive product, which requires urgent decarbonisation in the fight against climate change. Cement manufacturing is the root contributor (about 90%) to the CO2 emissions associated with the concrete industry, which in turn accounts for 8% of the global CO2 emissions.

With the increasing global population and the growing demand of infrastructure development, this will continue to have significant, negative impact on climate change if no mitigating actions are taken. In addition, excessive exploitation and further processing of natural resources used for concrete production (e.g., limestone for cement production and natural sand for fine aggregate) leads to deforestation, habitat destruction and degradation of natural systems. Therefore, as we strive for climate solutions, sustainable concrete-production technologies are needed.

Replacing cement and natural sand in concrete is the most cost-effective solution to this challenge and can be adopted immediately. Recycled glass (RG) is an attractive option as a cement-production alternative, due to its excellent pozzolanic reactivity in powder form and as an alternative for natural sand with which it has similar physical characteristics in particle form.

On average, each Australian produces about 70kg of waste glass annually, which results in 390,000 tonnes of waste glass in Victoria. Of that, around only 48% is recycled back into glass cullet for glass manufacturing. The remaining 52% (about 200,000 tonnes) becomes landfill, which leads to significant environmental problems. Therefore, using RG to replace cement and sand in concrete will have two-fold benefits to address the environmental impact associated with the concrete industry and increase the recycling rate of waste glass. This project aims to assess the potential of high-volume recycled glass in the production of sustainable concrete for the construction of greener infrastructure through structural and environmental investigation.

Directed by the Literary Education Lab and in collaboration with the Stella Prize, Reading Climate aims to build new understandings about the connections between sustainability and Indigenous knowledges in the context of secondary-school English literature. This timely project both responds to the pressing imperative for climate education in schools and activates English literary education as an important interdisciplinary site for reimagining social and environmental futures.

Using sociable and relational approaches to reading, the project will explore the interface between Indigenous literatures and climate justice by bringing into dialogue Indigenous authors, interdisciplinary scholars, English teachers, and students through book clubs and public events, and will generate an online toolkit of teaching and learning resources.

Reading Climate at the Literary Education Lab

An imperative of governments worldwide is to ensure that the infrastructure our society uses to live, work or commute, continues functioning within tolerable risks of interruption or failure. Flooding represents the most common hazard worldwide, with 18 million people impacted annually, a number that is expected to increase three-fold by the middle of this century.

Rising global temperatures are intensifying storm events leading to increased flood risk. Simultaneously, increasing evaporation leads to drier soils before the storm event that increases the amount of rainfall absorbed by the catchment, known as “rainfall losses”. Drier soils typically lead to increased rainfall losses and hence reduced flood volumes and water supply.

Australia’s flood guidance provides recommendations on how to address increased rainfall intensities under climate change, but there is no guidance provided on how to consider drier soil moisture states and the resulting increases in rainfall losses.

Despite global knowledge that changes in soil wetness need to be considered in assessments of flood risk, no jurisdiction in the world is assessing how these changes could be incorporated into flood risk assessments. Here, we aim to calculate the changes in rainfall losses due to climate change across Australia to directly inform practical engineering applications.

By contributing to 15% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and 29% of global energy demand, the transport sector must play a significant role in decarbonising the energy system. Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged as a promising technology that, through inter-disciplinary research, can lead this decarbonisation.

In particular, a significant opportunity lays in the Australian residential sector, which already has over 3.1 million rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems installed and millions of forecasted EV purchases over the next 20 years. Collectively, an increased use of rooftop solar PV generation to charge EVs can accelerate vehicle emission reductions and contribute directly to Australia’s net-zero emission targets, while individually, it enables consumers to increase the utilisation of their own solar PV generation while reducing electricity bills.

This project aims to develop an analytic framework and data visualisation dashboard that maps the potential for integrated use of rooftop PV systems and EVs. The project will involve a spatial analysis of the Greater Melbourne region that assesses how the driving and utilisation patterns of private passenger EVs intersect with residential rooftop solar PV generation and battery energy storage systems.

A holistic index will be created for administrative geographic units, such as Local Government Area (LGA) or State Electoral Division (SED). The index will include indicators that cover technological, economic, social, and transport demand dimensions that reflect both the current state of EV uptake and PV and battery installations, and the potential deployment scenarios that maximise economic and decarbonisation benefits. Results will be compiled to create a dashboard that will provide planners and policy makers with an evidence-based tool to guide transport decarbonisation roadmaps.

Regulation and current attempts to improve the environmental performance of the built environment have principally focused on operational energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which are associated with the ongoing uses of buildings such as lighting, heating, cooling and other operational demands. However, studies have revealed that embodied energy and GHG emissions, which are related to construction and material production activities, are often underestimated in the built environment and rarely considered. It is predicted that embodied GHG emissions will represent 50% of the entire GHG emissions footprint of new construction between 2020 and 2050. Thus, design approaches for the built environment must consider and minimise embodied environmental flows to meet short-term mitigation goals for climate change.

Developed by Dr. James Helal, Rephrame is a software tool that enables building designers to conduct an embodied carbon, energy and water assessment as a design-assisting tool, rather than as an appraisal method to evaluate, post-facto, a completed building. Through transdisciplinary collaboration across the University and with industry partners, this project seeks to enhance Rephrame to better identify cost-effective solutions that reduce the life cycle environmental effects associated with buildings. This includes integrating cost analysis and incorporating additional materials, geometries, building systems and life cycle stages.

Ultimately, determining optimal building designs requires a multi-disciplinary, multi-scale approach that holistically assesses the life cycle environmental flows across the built environment. This is due to the complex linkages between urban scales, from a building level to a city level. Thus, this project aspires to embed the capabilities of Rephrame into new methods and technologies in computational urban planning and design. This will help empower architects, engineers, urban planners, and construction managers to collectively implement the urgent and fundamental changes needed to mitigate the effects of climate change by reducing the environmental effects associated with buildings, neighbourhoods and cities.

Biodiversity continues to decline and the financing gap between what is currently being spent globally and what is needed over the next ten years is estimated to be more than $700B. However, no studies in top-tier finance journals have quantified and priced risks surrounding biodiversity loss or examined the potential role of private financing in addressing the financing gap. This is relevant because prior work in biodiversity finance has established the importance of this inquiry (Seidl and Nunes, 2019, 2021), but the absence of financial economists from this field poses a “science gap” problem that this work will address.

Financial economists can contribute important tools and methods of analysis that matter for decision makers at firms and investment managers. This project will address this challenge by developing the first objective and data-driven assessment of two of the world’s first biodiversity finance products: Belize’s $364M“Blue Bond” and South Africa’s $150M “Rhino Bond”. The Blue Bond is intended to finance marine conservation, aiding in the long-term planning and protection of Belize’s marine ecosystems. The Rhino Bond includes performance payments from investors through the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility toward contributing to protect and increase the black rhino populations in two protected areas in South Africa.

This project situates Indigenous creative practices as a process of caring for Country and climate action.   Together with Museums Victoria (MV), the Living Archive is developing a relational database with the capacity to link up information between people, places and things, alongside new and evolving stories of Country as they emerge through creative practices. From an Indigenous worldview, Country is kin, interconnected with and sustaining the wellbeing of humans, non-humans, land, water, sky, cosmologies and more (Moreton-Robinson 2015). As the recent State of Environment report notes, to keep Country healthy relies on keeping knowledge strong by continuing culture through creative practices, eg, artwork, photography, performance and storytelling (Janke et al 2021).

One example of artmaking as caring for Country (that also illustrates the concept of the Living Archive), is the southeast Aboriginal tradition of possum skin cloak-making. For instance, stories of waterways and knowledge of Country are frequently mapped on cloaks. These stories also intersect with other creative practices that support ecological knowledge, including, for example, the large-scale 10-metre river reed eel trap made by Mitch Mahoney and Maree Clarke in collaboration with a broad section of the public at Footscray Arts with Science Gallery at UoM. The project elaborated Indigenous ways of doing to support healthy and sustainable land and waterways, while exchanging knowledge through artmaking.

In 2022, the Living Archive has produced two possum-skin cloaks that connect stories of Country to people and places: one produced by Mahoney and Clarke with students at our partner university in the United States; and another (a work in progress) with Newcastle High School, NSW, students in collaboration with the Ngukurr community and southeast Aboriginal artists (Edmonds et al 2022).

Aligning with the CRX project, Mitch Mahoney aims to take the unfinished/unmarked cloak to Ngukurr, as a process of cultural exchange between north and south. Opportunities for understanding climate knowledge through artmaking between two Aboriginal communities, located in diverse ecosystems, offers new ways of engaging with Indigenous ecological knowledge. We will take the opportunity to explore how artmaking within and between these communities is intrinsically connected to caring for Country. In this CRX project, UoM researchers, alongside Aboriginal community-based co-researchers, will progress the Living Archive as a space where Indigenous ecological knowledge as creative practice is centered and contributes a model and resources for the development of an interdisciplinary masters subject across the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, School of Culture and Communication and the Wilin Centre/RUIC to progress intercultural knowledge exchange among students and the university’s broad networks.

This project centres Indigenous knowledge as critical for ecological wellbeing; it is led and guided by Indigenous knowledge holders and contends that everyone must engage with Indigenous knowledge to mitigate the climate crises. The project will expand on the work conducted through the ARC INDP Indigenous Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge, led by Wiradjuri scholar and creative writer Associate Professor Jeanine Leane, in collaboration with co-researchers, southeast Aboriginal artists, Mitch Mahoney (Boonwurrung/Barkindji) and Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wemba Wemba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung), alongside the Ngukurr community in Arnhem Land.