Dr Chloe Lucas representing the Curious Climate Schools team has been awarded the the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communication from the US National Academies for Science, Technology and Medicine in the category Science Communication by Early Career Research Scientist for the project Curious Climate Schools "Answering students' questions about climate change". Congratulations Chloe !!

Dr Chloe Lucas' award was highlighted in the article "Excellence in Science Communication" by UTAS Media. Read article here

We would like to congratulate all the CMS members who received CoSE Awards.

• College Leadership Award - Prof Gretta Pecl.
• College Engagement Award - The Curious Climate Schools Team (Chloe Lucas, Gabi Mocatta, Rachel Kelly, Kim Beasy and Gretta Pecl).
• Award for Progress in Inclusion, Diversity and Equity - Dr Maree Fudge and Dr Emily Ogier.
• College Student Focus Award - Dr Valeriya Komyakova.
• Teaching Merit Citation (Team) – AAI Sustainable Aquaculture course
  (Sarah Ugalde, Caleb Gardner, David Mossop, Mark Grassi, Norfaizny Hasweera)
• Teaching Merit Citation (Individual) – Hanne Neilsen, Jennifer Lavers

Read newsletter here

Prof Barbara Nowak presented a keynote plenary session at ICOPA2022 in Copenhagen, Denmark, during 21-26 August 2022. ICOPA is the official academic event of the World Federation of Parasitologists (WFP) and one of the biggest highlights in parasitology, run every four years.

CMS member Dean Greeno was interviewed in this article about how climate change is affecting the Maireener/rainbow shells and what it means for the Tasmanian aboriginal culture.

Read article here

Find out more about Redmap project and how Australia's fishers, divers and other ocean users' information submitted to Redmap has been instrumental in documenting species on the move around Australia's coasts over the past decade. This article, by CMS Director Gretta Pecl, Dr Barrett Wolfe and other collaborators, was published in The Conversation.

* Cover photo: a hairtail blenny submitted by Redmapper Jacob Bradbury. This species is one of the 77(!) moving south that we report on in the article.

Link to article

The SoE is an independent and evidence-based review, delivered every 5 years as a requirement of the EPBC Act, providing a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the state of Australia’s environment. It aims to help shape policy and action, influence behaviour and assists in assessing our interventions as stewards of the Australian environment.

The Marine chapter of the state of the environment (SoE) report provides an overarching synthesis of the state and trend of Australia’s marine environment, key pressures on the environment, and the management structures that are in place to support the sustainability of the marine environment and marine industries. For the first time, it also aims to integrate Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. It was led by CSIRO-based CMS researchers (acting as independent experts on behalf of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water) and written in collaboration with more than 200 marine experts from around Australia, including Traditional Owners.

Key findings from the chapter are that:

• Climate change continues to warm and acidify the ocean, and Australia’s oceans have experienced several major marine heatwaves during the past 5 years, resulting in an overall deteriorating trend for our marine environment.
• Despite this, Australia’s oceanic marine areas remain in generally good condition overall, but nearshore ecosystems (especially reefs) are in poor condition and deteriorating as a result of the effects of climate change and cumulative pressures.
• Indigenous experts generally assessed state to be poorer than ‘western science’ assessments.
• Management of Australia’s marine estate generally effective at the sectoral level but there is a need for widespread uptake of integrated and inclusive management approaches, supported by integrated monitoring datastreams. Even the best examples of integrated management do not currently adequately deal with climate change and cumulative impacts. If climate change and cumulative impacts aren’t adequately addressed, substantial continued and increasingly widespread degradation of Australia’s marine environment is expected.

Four of the lead authors for the chapter are CMS members (Rowan Trebilco, Mibu Fischer, Karen Evans and Alistair Hobday), and an additional 12 CMS members authored assessments and case studies (i.e. were “contributing authors”): Scott Condie, Anna Farmery, Beth Fulton, Denise Hardesty, Marcus Haward, Mark Hemer, Cayne Layton, Barb Nowak, Em Ogier, Gretta Pecl, David Smith and Chris Wilcox. Ingrid van Putten, Rich Little, Mark Hemer and Jo Vince also contributed as peer reviewers of assessments/case studies.

Find report here

PhD student Dimuthu Jayakody was the winner of the student award for the best speed talk presentation at the Hawaii Conservation Conference. Di presented the talk "An approach to assessing place attachment toward improving place-based biological conservation and environmental planning efforts". Congratulations Di!! 

Congratulation to Corrine who received the best poster award at the AMSA Conference 2022 for her poster "Social influence modelling - Reducing community conflict in aquaculture".

Congratulation to Graham Wood for being a finalist in the ACTS Champions awards for his work in "sustainability literacy"!