The Great Australian Bight workshop

The vexing challenge confronting the Australian community is how to facilitate energy security, in an era lacking an energy policy for managing Australia’s liquid fuel reserves, while balancing the need for environmental protection of Australia’s fragile marine ecosystems. The pressing issue of whether to permit offshore petroleum drilling in the Great Australian Bight raises vital and often understudied questions about our future – ecological, economic and demographic – which can only be answered through multi-disciplinary perspectives.

This workshop brings together academics, researchers, stakeholders and educators from a range of disciplines and backgrounds for a novel examination of the question of drilling within the Great Australian Bight. The aim of the workshop is to explore the extent to which offshore drilling should be allowed, whether it can be undertaken without  significant and/or long lasting environmental impacts and socio-economic conflicts and what distribution of benefits and harms it might entail. The workshop will also examine the strengths and weaknesses of governance of offshore resources in light of comparative offshore drilling case studies, and will hopefully draw some lessons for the environmental protection of marine ecosystems and the role of mining in Australia’s future.

This event was a closed workshop presented at the University of Sydney on Tuesday, 23 April 2019.

Header Image: by A.v.Z via Flickr.