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Some world national flags on poles on a wall.

Event Location: CCRC Seminar room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

Climate change and investment treaty arbitration: Barriers and opportunities to climate action

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

The seminar will be chaired by Associate Professor Jonathan Bonnitcha (UNSW Law & Justice) and feature a talk from Professor Lauge Poulsen (University College London), who chairs OECD's work-programme on climate policy and investment treaties.

ESG factors are essential for enhancing sustainability and corporate responsibility in businesses encompassing environmental impact social responsibility governance practices and sustainability re

Climate Risk and Response short course: UNSW Canberra

9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Recognising climate change as a fundamental financial risk, and with complex reporting requirements and regulatory pressures intensifying, the demand for climate-ready skills is soaring.

Past events

ICRR Seminar Series: Kristle Romero Cortes

Event Location Seminar room 2093, Level 2, Quadrangle Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Assoc. Prof. Kristle Romero Cortes

10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Title: Banking on Resilience: Integrating Climate Risk into Bank Stress Testing This project uses finance factor modelling to quantify banks' exposure to climate risk, offering insights into their resilience to climate change. By pinpointing areas of vulnerability, the project aims to support financial institutions in bolstering their adaptability to climate risks and to guide regulatory updates for a more resilient financial system. Additionally, these insights contribute to developing improved stress-testing frameworks.

ICRR Industry Day

The Calyx, Mrs Macquaries Road, Sydney NSW 2000

UNSW institute for Climate Risk & Response Industry Forum

8:45 AM - 6:00 PM

Join us for the ICRR 2024 Conference where a wide array of professionals from academia, industry and government will convene to discuss emerging key themes, challenges and opportunities in the fast-changing landscape of climate risk and response.

ICRR ECR Workshop

Colombo Theatre B, UNSW Sydney

UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response Early Career Researchers Workshop

9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

The UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response (ICRR) is excited to announce our Early Career Researchers Workshop on Wednesday, 16th October. This event offers PhD students and early career researchers a unique opportunity to share their climate-related research, collaborate with peers, and drive innovation in the field.

ICRR Seminar Series: Scientia Professor Shan Pan & Marian Cooray

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar Series: Scientia Professor Shan Pan & Marian Cooray

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Title: Leveraging Historical Data for Climate Prediction In Vietnam: An Imprinting Perspective Abstract: Although data science offers a promising avenue in climate prediction, the lack of adequately downscaled climate projections with diverse local contexts remains a significant challenge. Although history has left behind a wealth of data captured in human archives, there is a discernible gap in understanding how they can be used to develop climate projections. We present a case study of a project that used historical records to develop a long-term climate data series for Vietnam. Our preliminary insights highlight how historical imprints can be leveraged to navigate present uncertainties by synthesizing the past with the present.

ICRR Seminar Series: Eliza Northrop & Angelique Pouponneau

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar Series: Eliza Northrop & Angelique Pouponneau

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Title: Climate Change Diplomacy and Australia’s potential role in shaping the future of the UNFCCC Abstract: Australia is currently bidding to host the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC in 2026. If successful, Australia will host COP31 in partnership with the Pacific, creating the first regional COP Presidency. What will this mean for Australia and the region if we’re successful? What will it mean for global climate diplomacy and the future structure of the UNFCCC? Fundamentally, what is a COP and how are they used to shape domestic and international climate ambition? In this seminar, we will tackle these questions and aim to articulate a potential pathway for Australian leadership on key regional issues such as resilience, ocean-climate action and gender equality. We will also provide insights and lessons learned from climate change negotiations, focusing on various tactics used and strategies to overcome them. We will explore systemic and everyday issues arising in UNFCCC negotiations, illustrated through real-world examples. We will cover text interpretation, the structural challenges and equity considerations, navigating trust dynamics in negotiation groups and what the UNFCCC will need to tackle as impacts worsen and inequality continues to be exacerbated. The next few years will be critical in shaping the future of international and regional climate governance and Australia could play a defining role.

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Dr. Samantha Stanley

10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Using social psychology to understand public responses to climate change and climate migration. Academics and activists are increasingly recognising climate change as not only an environmental and health issue, but also as a justice issue. Those facing its worst consequences typically have not had access to high-emission lifestyles, or the means to adapt to the challenges climate change brings. In this seminar, I will talk about some of the ways that my collaborators and I use social psychology to try to understand how people respond to climate change. This will include some work on the ideological barriers to acceptance and action on climate change and the various emotional responses people have to environmental change. I argue that recognising that climate change already disproportionately affects vulnerable communities requires moving beyond a focus on the determinants of support for mitigation measures. The main part of the talk will give an overview of our emerging research on public attitudes towards funding adaptation measures in communities vulnerable to climate impacts and providing resettlement opportunities for those at risk of displacement who want and need to relocate.

Professor David Stern

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Prof. David Stern - The Macro-Economic Impacts of Weather-Related Disasters and Climate Change

Disasters, such as floods or droughts, and climate change are short-term and long-term meteorological phenomena that are expected to have important economic effects. The measured effects of weather-related disasters on economic activity could be negative or positive depending on how the economy recovers from the disaster. Working with Xueting Jiang, I find that floods have a positive long-term effect on GDP in a panel of 179 countries, particularly in developing countries, while other types of disasters do not have statistically significant effects. Increased government expenditure is the main channel through which the positive effect manifests. Existing research shows that the estimated impact of climate change on GDP is model dependent, with some approaches better equipped than others to capture long-term effects and adaptation. I will present preliminary results applying the long differences estimator to a global country panel data set. This method should be particularly good at capturing long-run effects while avoiding pitfalls inherent in other popular models.

Prof Christopher Wright portrait

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Prof. Christopher Wright - Confronting the fossil fuel hegemony in an era of climate crisis: The politics of mitigation, adaptation and suffering

Climate change is the most critical issue now facing humanity. As global temperatures rise, floods, fires and storms are becoming more intense and frequent. People are suffering. Yet, despite over 30 years of international climate negotiations, emissions continue to increase and as the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has bluntly stated, “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” This seminar presentation provides an overview of how corporations, governments, and civil society organisations have organised past and present climate responses in terms of mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. This has occurred within what we term a “fossil fuel hegemony” in which exponential growth of the capitalist system has been based upon a capital-state nexus which ensures the continued dominance of fossil energy. However, this hegemonic position is now coming under threat as new and innovative social movements have emerged, including the fossil fuel divestment movement, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and others. In exposing the inadequacies of current climate policies and pointing to the possibilities of new social and economic systems, we highlight how the worst impacts of climate change might be avoided.

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Tanya Fiedler - Exploring the climate-accounting divide

Organisations in Australia and abroad are increasingly required to report on their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related physical and transition risks and on the financial effects of these. The accounting standards underpinning such reporting were developed at break-neck speed, however, and are in large part based on the practices and assumptions of financial markets and accounting. This is to be expected – we are trying to solve an urgent problem by employing solutions we are familiar with, but that were never developed with that problem in mind. In this talk I examine some of the tensions that are emerging as practitioners attempt to straddle the boundaries between the climate and accounting. In doing so, I ask – who should the ultimate arbiter be, in determining the criteria, boundaries and definitions by which we account for the financial effects of the climate?

two people in landscape

Commonwealth Bank Place - South Building

CBA Behavioural Experimentation Hackathon on Climate Action

ICRR is partnering with CBA, UTS and the Harvard Star Lab to run a Climate Action Hackathon. The event kicks off at 9am on Thursday 14th March at Commonwealth Bank Place - South Building, 11 Harbour St, Sydney, NSW 2000. There will be talks from leading academics as well as CBA Executives, and a panel discussion, featuring ICRR Director Professor Ben Newell, on trends in science and business around climate action.

Dr John Cook

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Dr. John Cook - Best practices and case studies for debunking misinformation

Misinformation causes many negative impacts across a range of topics such as climate change and vaccination. Communicating facts – including fact-checking – is one important tool to reduce the damage. Another powerful tool that can neutralise misinformation across topics is critical thinking - explaining misleading rhetorical techniques helps people spot attempts to mislead them, and builds their “immunity” against being misinformed. In this presentation, Dr. John Cook will unpack the best practices on countering misinformation coming out of psychological research and present case studies that apply these principles using digital games and generative AI.

Professor Mathew Hornsey

CCRC Seminar Room, Level 4, Mathews Building, UNSW Sydney

ICRR Seminar: Professor Mathew Hornsey - Climate change inaction as an alliance between individual and collective interests

If every individual followed every recommendation from An Inconvenient Truth, global carbon emissions would still be too high to mitigate climate change. This has led some to argue that we should stop focusing on individuals to help solve climate change, and focus exclusively on collective, structural change. In this talk I nuance this argument, drawing on a series of multinational datasets to highlight how inaction on climate change represents an alliance between both individual-level and collective-level vested interests. On a more optimistic note, these insights provide clues about how to accelerate the process of rapid decarbonisation.