Our impact
Learn about how the Sydney Environment Institute has addressed key environmental challenges for the public good.
The Sydney Environment Institute leverages academic expertise and partners with community, industry and government to affect real world change. Our unique approach of bringing the social sciences into conversation with other disciplines to solve grand challenges has had significant impact towards a just and resilient future.
Read examples of our broad-ranging research impact from communities responding in climate disasters to our work tackling the biodiversity crisis.
In the face of escalating climate impacts and a shifting disaster governance landscape, local governments across NSW are now required to develop Disaster Adaptation Plans aligned with the NSW State Disaster Mitigation Plan.
Recognising that community resilience depends not only on physical infrastructure but also on social assets, this project focused on strengthening the social foundations of disaster preparedness. It developed an evidence-based tool to help local councils map, assess, and invest in social infrastructure. The tool provides councils with data-driven insights to inform efficient and effective decision-making and investment in community resilience initiatives.
Led by the NSW Reconstruction Authority (RA) in partnership with the engineering consultancy AECOM, and with research expertise from the Sydney Environment Institute, this research underscored the importance of both the physical and social dimensions of infrastructure, from libraries and community centres to volunteering, mutual aid, and place-based community groups, as the connective tissue that supports resilience and recovery.
The tool developed provides local councils with a practical framework and community engagement process to measure social infrastructure and identify where targeted investment can build social cohesion and preparedness. Social infrastructure is often associated with libraries, parks, community centres and places of worship. But as SEI’s research has shown, it also encompasses informal networks, local organisations, and social practices, from volunteer groups to school canteens, that build trust and cohesion over time. These assets are often invisible in disaster planning, yet they underpin a community’s capacity to act collectively when disaster strikes.
At a local scale, the tool will support councils to embed social preparedness into their DAPs, enabling more strategic investment in social infrastructure that builds long-term community resilience. By identifying where social infrastructure exists and how effective it is, the tool recommends investment opportunities that strengthen both places and practices of connection.
At a broader policy level, this project helps operationalise a key shift in disaster resilience thinking from a focus on physical assets to a more holistic view of infrastructure that includes the everyday relationships, services, and supports that enable communities to withstand crisis. The tool’s integration into state-led disaster planning frameworks signals growing institutional recognition of the importance of social infrastructure.
By collaborating with AECOM and the RA, SEI researchers applied their expertise in social cohesion and disaster resilience to a practical tool that aligns with government disaster planning frameworks. By bringing academia, consultancy, and government into active collaboration, this initiative demonstrates how evidence-based tools can support more just, connected, and climate-resilient communities, and how resilience is built not just through infrastructure, but through relationships.
Project Team: Associate Professor Michele Barnes, Associate Professor Petr Matous, Dr Nader Naderpajouh, Professor David Schlosberg.
SEI has led the advancement of environmental and climate justice, and the emerging field of multispecies justice. While mainstream western approaches to justice focuses on human individuals, the polycrises and turbulence of this era demand a broader perspective.
Bringing together researchers, practitioners, and community partners to reimagine how justice might work across species and systems, this research challenges the dominant, human-centred framework. Instead, researchers consider what justice would look like if it included other animals, members of the plant, mycelial and elemental worlds, ecosystems, and more-than-human communities.
SEI has reshaped how justice is understood and enacted across Australia and internationally. From bushfire response to global governance, its influence spans grassroots action and high-level policymaking. Together, these interventions are building a new public conversation about justice – one that reaches across species, sectors, and systems to imagine a more just and liveable future for all.
SEI has long worked with local partners on incorporating considerations of environmental justice in disaster, resilience, and adaptation policy and practice. We consulted on justice considerations in the development of the new Resilient Sydney strategy, on issues of equity and community in WSROC’s Heat Smart City Plan, and on the role of community knowledges in NSW disaster response.
Globally, SEI’s research on environmental, climate, and multispecies justice has informed the IPCC’s 2023 Sixth Assessment Report, the OECD’s 2024 report on environmental justice, and the 2024 UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Development’s report on climate justice on loss and damage. These examples of SEI's impact mark a shift in how justice frameworks account for the lives and interests of both human and more-than-human communities in the face of global environmental challenges.
Through creative research and deep collaboration with communities, SEI’s multispecies justice approach has helped reimagine disaster response in Australia. The ‘Animal Emergency Network’ app and the ‘Community Conversation Guide’ are practical tools designed by SEI which support collective preparedness and multispecies care as climate change intensifies. They are the result of research conducted in partnership with affected communities in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires. Our research also informed the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into the Health and Wellbeing of Kangaroos, helping to shape recommendations around native species care and the ethical treatment of wildlife in both emergency and everyday contexts.
Public storytelling has further amplified the impact of SEI’s multispecies justice research. During the Black Summer fires, Professor Danielle Celermajer was a prominent figure in media, shaping conversations using the term ‘omnicide’ to express the magnitude of species loss, which was subsequently picked up by national and international voices, including former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and authors Richard Flanagan and Amitav Ghosh. The fate of pigs Katy and Jimmy – who inspired Professor Celermajer’s Summertime – resonated with audiences through festivals, award shortlists, and literary events, exemplifying the emotional and ethical power of lived experience.
Key contributors: Professor Danielle Celermajer, Professor David Schlosberg, Dr Blanche Verlie, Professor Liza Lim, Dr Christine Winter, Dr Anna Sturman
At SEI, responding to the biodiversity crisis begins with a simple but profound belief: that our relationship with nature is as much cultural and emotional as it is ecological. SEI’s Biodiversity, Conservation, and Culture research theme brings this belief to life by bridging the disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) with the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS).
In an era of unprecedented environmental change, SEI is fostering new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting – where science meets storytelling, and where policy is shaped not only by data, but by ethics, history, law, and art.
The impact of SEI’s work lies in its ability to shift perspectives – showing that biodiversity is not only a scientific concern, but a cultural and emotional one too, bridging science, culture, and community to create more inclusive and effective conservation approaches. Projects like ‘Living on the Edge’, a partnership with the National Museum of Australia, have sparked national conversations, helping people to engage emotionally with threatened places and species, while ‘The Urban Field Naturalist Project’, helps people rediscover the wild lives woven through their everyday streets.
The ‘Biodiversity Challenge’ pilot demonstrated the power of emerging technologies – airborne eDNA, drones, and acoustic sensors – to rapidly and non-invasively detect hundreds of species across complex landscapes. With interactive tools now giving landholders access to local ecological data, the project lays the foundation for increasing the accuracy of biodiversity monitoring across Australia.
SEI’s work also drives ethical innovation. By exploring non-lethal conservation strategies in ‘The ethics of intervening in animal behaviour for conservation’, and rethinking human-wildlife relationships in ‘Human-Kangaroo Relations’, SEI challenges conventional approaches and broadens the public conversation.
Perhaps most powerfully, SEI’s work is helping people reconnect – with place, with species, and with each other. From storytelling workshops to citizen science, its projects empower communities to see themselves not as separate from nature, but as part of it. In doing so, SEI is building a foundation for responses to the biodiversity crisis that are not only innovative, but deeply human.
People
Professor Thom van Dooren, Professor Carolyn Hogg, Dr Catherine Price, Dr Sophie Chao
Healthcare is a major contributor to carbon emissions – responsible for 7% of Australia’s total footprint – yet challenges remain in effectively measuring the carbon emissions of different care pathways. Innovative research from the University of Sydney is developing effective measurement tools and technologies that can inform decision making at all levels of the healthcare system, from health economics to clinical decision making.
This work commenced with the first comprehensive comparison of the carbon footprints of two common cardiac treatments for the same condition, which from a clinical perspective, produced similar results.
The multidisciplinary team – comprising a cardiologist, sociologist, and sustainability analysts – initially estimated the full carbon footprint of two treatment pathways for patients undergoing treatment for blocked heart vessels, from admission to discharge.
Using environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) analysis and costing data collected by the Commonwealth, they found that elective open-heart surgery produced 4.9 times more emissions than a less invasive stent procedure. Emissions were traced through every stage of care, including diagnostics, equipment, supply chains, and waste disposal. This was an important discovery for supporting emissions reduction in healthcare, demonstrating that emissions can be reduced in patient care without compromising quality.
This research has also found that carbon analysis can be conducted and tailored in ways to inform treatment choices when medical outcomes are comparable. It provides data to assist different actors in the healthcare system to prioritise pathways, processes and procedures that lead to lower emissions without compromising patient health.
As healthcare continues to drive emissions growth, these findings offer a powerful tool to integrate sustainability into healthcare delivery. The team’s work provides a model for other clinical specialties, showing how EEIO analysis can be scaled to evaluate emissions across the healthcare system.
In 2024, the project secured a $1.56 million philanthropic grant to expand its scope. The team is now working closely with Sydney Local Health District, NSW Health Climate Risk & Net Zero Unit, and the Commonwealth’s National Health, Sustainability and Climate Unit. Their research has been published in Frontiers in Public Health and featured in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Project partners: Sydney Local Health District, NSW Health Climate Risk & Net Zero Unit, Commonwealth National Health, Sustainability and Climate Unit
Project team: Professor Danielle Celermajer, Professor David Celermajer, Dr Fabian Sack, Raymond Van Der Zalm, Associate Professor Arunima Malik, Dr Amanda Irwin, Lorraine Hoca, Dorna Goreshi
This project explored how communities in NSW responded to catastrophic bushfires and floods between 2019 and 2022, focusing on the Northern Rivers, Blue Mountains, and Hawkesbury regions.
The findings highlighted the crucial role of social infrastructure (the relationships, networks, and informal systems embedded in communities) in disaster response and recovery. It also explored the distinct forms of local knowledge that communities draw on during crises, and how these knowledges emerge from long-standing ties to place and people.
By elevating how communities self-organised in the face of government delays or failures, the project brought attention to two critical risks: the erosion of trust in formal institutions, and the loss or under-recognition of community knowledge essential for long-term resilience.
Nationally, the research influenced recommendations in the 2024 Senate Inquiry report Boots on the Ground: Raising Resilience, which assessed Australia’s preparedness for worsening climate disasters. Drawing directly from SEI’s joint submission that used insights from this project, it acknowledged the limitations of formal response systems during recent disasters and recommended greater integration of community knowledge, networks, and self-organised strategies into national disaster planning. These recommendations are also reflected in a broader push to reform Australia’s disaster resilience frameworks.
Locally, the research directly contributed to the formation of a new regional alliance in the Northern Rivers, the Northern Rivers Community Resilience Alliance, which is a network of ten community resilience groups, hosted by the University Centre for Rural Health. This alliance strengthens collaboration, facilitates peer learning, and builds a collective voice for advocacy and engagement with formal agencies.
The project also produced a podcast and magazine series, Stories are the Toolkit, which captures lived experiences and practical lessons from disaster-affected communities. These resources have become valuable tools for peer learning, used by local governments, emergency services, and community organisers to build capacity from the ground up.
This project has helped shift disaster resilience policy and practice in Australia towards community-led action; SEI continues to advocate for systemic change that reflect the project’s findings. The project showed that local knowledge, trust, and relationships are not just helpful, they are essential for effective disaster planning in a climate-changed future. Read more about this research in the ABC.
This project was funded under the joint Australian Government-NSW Government National Partnership on Disaster Risk Reduction and is part of SEI’s Climate Disaster and Adaptation Cluster.
Project Team: Professor David Schlosberg, Professor Danielle Celermajer, Dr Scott Webster, Dr Jodie Bailie, Maddy Braddon, Zachary Gillies-Palmer, Rachel Hall, Professor Amanda Howard, Associate Professor Kurt Iveson, Dr Pam Joseph, Dr Jo Longman, Mary Lyons, Associate Professor Petr Matous, Dr Nader Naderpajouh, Emma Pittaway, Associate Professor Margot Rawsthorne, Professor Jakelin Troy, Dr Blanche Verlie
FoodLab Sydney is a not-for-profit food business incubator that helps entrepreneurs with high barriers to entry formalise and grow food businesses. FoodLab’s programs equip participants with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to run a business.
The project is an innovative collaboration between local government, community organisations, and universities, and the first initiative of its kind in Sydney to address food insecurity and inclusion through entrepreneurship. In 2022, FoodLab spun out as an independent, not-for-profit entity.
Foodlab Sydney began in 2019 as a partnership program between SEI, the City of Sydney, and TAFE, supported by grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and City of Sydney. The initiative was inspired by a 2018 research study led by Professor Alana Mann and Professor David Schlosberg, which identified a lack of support for food entrepreneurs in Sydney and an abundance of informal food businesses.
Despite refugee, migrant, First Nations and low-income women having high entrepreneurial desires and skills, they experience:
FoodLab’s programs equip participants with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to run a business. Beyond the duration of business ownership, the impact of this training is enduring. Graduates gain transferable skills in financial management, marketing, and leadership, which enhance their career prospects, increase their earning potential, and empower them to contribute meaningfully to their communities for years to come.
Lifelong benefits such as ongoing ‘membership’ allow graduates to internalise a sense of collective identity and worth, which increases their psychological well-being, confidence, and enables them to become part of a broader social and professional network.
Since becoming a charity in 2022, FoodLab has supported two cohorts through the full six-month program and providd 4,480 hours of hospitality and business training (2022-2024). These two cohorts comprised a total of 20 participants, 90% women, and have gone on to employ 32 people. That is a total of 52 people who have found employment.
FoodLab has also launched a catering business, catering events for the University of Sydney, Canva, Paul Ramsay Foundation, Canterbury Bankstown Council, and many more. Their businesses have also been featured in Vivid Sydney.
Project partners: City of Sydney, TAFE NSW
Email: sei.info@sydney.edu.au
Donations: lauren.swift@sydney.edu.au
Events team: sei.events@sydney.edu.au
