Home » Climate change

May 8, 2012

Connect the Dots climate action day at Blackwater

Organized by 350.org, the global climate action day Connect the Dots event at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Sat May 5 was a great success. In advance of the event on May 4, we had a little local press coverage – Maryland Daily Record and Baltimore Sun – via a telephone conference call arranged by [...]

Continue Reading »


April 30, 2012

Global Day of Climate Change – Blackwater event on May 5

350.org, as part of their movement to solve the climate crisis, has declared May 5 to be Climate Impacts Day. They have a network of people in 188 countries who are concerned about the effects of climate change and the lack of action, globally and locally. May 5 is the day they are rallying this [...]

Continue Reading »


April 5, 2012

Assessing the vulnerability of the Great Barrier Reef to climate change

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation is an organization which funds research that protects and preserves the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in the face of climate change. The Foundation convened a workshop to develop a synthetic publication that charts the vision for assessing the vulnerability to climate change. The Great Barrier Reef components used in this [...]

Continue Reading »


February 13, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 8- Examples of Flooding in Europe

I will use three examples of flooding from Europe. The first two are up in the North Sea: London and Holland, and finally the famous case of Venice, which is sinking fast. In 1953 there was a devastating storm surge in the North Sea. The storm surge was two and a half meters on the [...]

Continue Reading »


February 10, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 7- Examples of Flooding in the United States

Let me talk about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in southern Louisiana. It was scheduled that some Louisiana people were going to come up to work with us the day that Katrina hit, then we re-scheduled for us to go down to Louisiana the day Rita hit. So we decided that we’d wait until hurricane season [...]

Continue Reading »


February 8, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 6- Global Initiatives in Response to Flooding

Let’s take a trip around the world and look at five examples. I’m going to do two examples from North America that I have been working with; the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast, and coastal Louisiana–the mouth of the Mississippi River with marshes and the city of New Orleans. Let’s look at the two [...]

Continue Reading »


February 6, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 5- Preparing for Floods

Another legacy of what happened here was the whole idea of healthy waterways, and how that relates to healthy catchments, and healthy parks. In Victoria, their whole catchphrase is healthy parks, healthy people. So they are making the connection between the health of the ecosystem, and human health. One of CSIRO‘s flagships is water for [...]

Continue Reading »


February 1, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 3- History of Flooding in Brisbane

You can take a walk down the street to the Botanic Gardens; you can find a little park there; the Paluma Park. And that’s to commemorate the location where a large gunship washed up into the Botanic Gardens in February, 1893. Interesting story, the Paluma was a gunship that was commissioned by the Queensland government. [...]

Continue Reading »


January 30, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 2- A Learning Moment

We really did have a learning moment. This is needed regarding the flooding and the impact of the flooding. We had two kinds of floods. We had the flash flooding that occurred up the Lockyer, and we had the riverine flooding that occurred in Ipswich and in Brisbane. The flash flooding, which is water coming [...]

Continue Reading »


January 27, 2012

Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs: Part 1- Introduction

A seminar entitled ‘Brisbane 2011: Living with Floods and Dancing with Dugongs’ was presented on 8 July 2011. The seminar was sponsored by the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, and delivered at the historic Customs House in downtown Brisbane, situated along the shore of the Brisbane River. The following fifteen part blog series captures [...]

Continue Reading »


Older Posts »