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Professor Tiffany Morrison: ‘We want to transform governance of climate impacted systems’
Tiffany Morrison has been appointed as a fractional personal professor in the Environmental Policy group by the Wageningen University and Research Executive Board as of 1 September 2023. Her expertise is in the governance of environmental change, policy responses to warming ecosystems, and governance of new interventions in warming ecosystems.
Morrison grew up in Queensland, Australia, where she majored in environmental policy at the University of Queensland and Griffith University. “My interest in governing complex environmental change began in 1996 while working on the first CSIRO experiment in regional environmental governance”, Morrison says. “This was an experiment fundamentally challenged by rapidly changing social-ecological systems and hidden political-economic dynamics.”
Novel climate interventions
Climate impacts are creating novel ecosystems, stimulating new interventions to conserve ecologies and communities. Novel interventions are those that mitigate climate change (like offshore renewable energy development, seaweed restoration, carbon trading) and promote conservation and adaptation (like assisted animal and plant migration, climate refuge protection, solar-radiation control). Morrison: “Changing ecosystems and novel interventions require transitions in governance, to realise new opportunities, meet escalating demand for resources, and manage risks and unintended consequences.”
Transformative governance
Through working directly with governments, NGOs, and donors, Morrison and her team’s overriding agenda is to transform governance of climate impacted systems. In the coming years, Morrison will focus on this mission with researchers in the Environmental Policy group. “WUR and the Environmental Policy group are at the cutting edge of governing food, energy and climate and I look forward to collaborating as the world tests, upscales and standardises more transformative governance solutions.”
New international team
Morrison holds concurrent professorial appointments in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University & Research, the School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at Melbourne University, and the College of Science & Engineering at James Cook University. She also continues to lead a new international team on Governing Changing Oceans funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Program (2022-2025) and the US Science for Nature and People Partnership (2023-2025).
About Tiffany Morrison
The research of Tiffany Morrison combines political science, public administration, geography and ecology to improve the governance of complex environmental problems.
Morrison is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (elected 2022) and the Regional Studies Association (2020) and has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, University of Oregon, University of Kyoto, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her PhD in 2004 at the University of Queensland, supported by a Land and Water Australia scholarship and a visiting fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
Between 2004-2008 she taught in the Master of Public Administration program in the School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University. During that time, she was awarded a visiting Fellowship at the University of Kyoto Disaster Prevention Institute in Japan. In 2008 Morrison joined the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland where she co-led an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, geographers, planners, economists and lawyers on an ARC Super Science funded program on sea level rise.
She co-led the People and Ecosystems Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University between 2015-2022 and joined the newly formed School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne in 2023.