Resource Management and Geography - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemA long-term historical perspective on environmental changes in the Wimmera of Western Victoria, Australia( 2016)Salt lakes form a conspicuous element of southern Australian arid and semi-arid regions. The origin and development of these salt lakes is closely tied to major climatic perturbations during the Pleistocene. Unlike most of North America, Europe and much of Asia, Pleistocene climate change in the arid and semi-arid of southern Australia is manifest as a series of aeolian deposits, erosional basins and unique, ancient soils. Sediments that are crucial for palynological studies are largely restricted to the temperate mountainous regions of east and southeast Australia, whereas much of the rest of the continent is remarkably flat and suffers from permanent water deficits or seasonal monsoonal influences. As a consequence, the Quaternary history of Australia has been derived from what are, on a continental scale, atypical climates and landforms. Despite their widespread occurrence, ecological importance and sensitivity to hydro-climatic change, only a handful of Australian palaeoecological studies have utilized the sediments contained within salt lakes. In a continent where any increase in mean annual temperatures will have profound implications for ecological processes and economic activities, it makes sense to try to understand the responses of semi-arid and arid landscapes to recent environmental changes. In addition, land degradation remains a critical and long lasting problem. Overgrazing, land clearance and the development of saline soils are clearly implicated as land degradation processes, especially in southern Australia. As many factors contribute to this pressing socio-ecological problem, it is not sensible to assess this phenomenon without considering its context in terms of long-term processes. In this context, I focus my palaeoecological analysis on a heavily altered landscape located within an area representative of Australian salt lake systems. I aim to disentangle the pre and post European environmental history of this important system and seek to identify, classify and understand land degradation processes, with a focus on plant community changes. This project proceeds by analyzing the history of land use and the ecology of plant communities concentrating on past human burning activities and palaeoenvironmental changes based on evidence from sediments, fossil pollen and microscopic charcoal dating from Aboriginal to European settlement times in the Wimmera of western Victoria, southern Australia. Using fossil pollen and charcoal from lake sediments illustrated that salinity rose substantially as forest diversity decreased since the start of European settlement.
-
ItemSustainable energy in Australia: an analysis of performance and drivers relative to other OECD countries( 2009)How sustainable is Australia’s pattern of energy supply and use? What are the major factors explaining Australia’s sustainable energy performance relative to other countries? This thesis explores energy supply and use in Australia during the 1990s and 2000s and examines major drivers such as policy decisions, economic structure and trade profile. Performance and drivers in Australia are compared with other OECD countries. To address the questions posed above, it is first necessary to explore the concepts of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainable energy’ and consider how best to measure sustainable energy performance. Alternative sustainability frameworks and models are examined, with the ‘strong sustainability’ model adopted for this thesis being distinguished from other models in three principal ways: i) it places biophysical constraints on economic activity; ii) it regards certain critical natural capital is being non-substitutable; and iii) it places roughly equal emphasis on intra- and intergenerational equity. The strong sustainability model is operationalised into a series of principles and objectives for energy sustainability, which in turn are used as a basis for systematically developing a suite of sustainable energy indicators. This approach is preferred over other approaches to assessing sustainable energy performance given the study’s focus on measurable objectives and outcomes. The second part of the thesis is devoted to measuring the sustainable energy performance of Australia and other OECD countries against twelve indicators. Some of the indicators selected are ‘standard’, being quite commonly used in other contexts. A number of the indicators though, are unique or have unique features that increase their validity as measures of strong sustainability. Initial results of the performance assessment suggest that Australia is amongst the weakest performing OECD countries, ranking last of all OECD countries against two of the twelve sustainable energy indicators and in the lower quartile of OECD countries against a further six indicators. Further analysis, combining and weighting indicator scores and country rankings across the 12 indicators confirms Australia’s poor performance. Australia ranks 28th of 30 OECD countries by two different ranking methods and 15th of 16 OECD countries by another two methods. Only the USA ranks consistently lower than Australia. Denmark consistently ranks highest of all countries by all methods. The third and final part of the thesis examines drivers of sustainable energy performance by Australia and a subset of four OECD countries: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden (OECD 4). The primary basis for OECD 4 selection was strong performance against the sustainable energy indicators, although other criteria including economic structure, trade and demography were also considered. A range of techniques, including factorisation, ‘what if’ analysis and linear regression are used to diagnose the underlying factors driving the performance of Australia and the OECD 4 against the sustainable energy indicators. The analysis is extended to include a qualitative assessment of policy drivers including strategic and institutional settings, energy pricing, electricity market policies, R & D and regulation. A major conclusion of the thesis based on the analysis is that Australia’s weak sustainable energy performance since 1990, relative to other OECD countries, has been substantially shaped by domestic policy decisions, decisions that were not inevitable given Australia’s economic structure, trade profile, demography, and geography.