Free ticket for the NSW Environmental Education Conference - Email Jem your interest

Free ticket for the NSW Environmental Education Conference

AAEE NSW is offering our state chapter a free ticket to attend the biennial conference – any member interested please email Jem Hansen (project@aaeensw.org.au). The free ticket includes the Welcome Event (evening Wed 25/9) and 2-day conference (26/9-27/9). A conference bus tour from Sydney to Dubbo and back makes getting there easy!

The 31^st NSW Environmental Education Conference will be held in Dubbo, NSW on 25-27 September. This will be an amazing event, bringing environmental educators from all sectors together in the heart of NSW to explore the conference theme ‘Contributing to Global Hope: Interconnectedness between Rural and Urban Landscapes’. There are over 60 presentations across two days, plus field trips, workshops and social events.

There are opportunities to visit local and regional highlights as well:

·         The Flannery Centre in Bathurst and the Environmental Learning Facility in Orange on the Pre-conference Bus Tour (Sydney-Dubbo return trip for just $80)

·         Western Plains Cultural Centre in Dubbo for the Conference Welcome Reception with the touring exhibition: “unDisclosed” 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial

·         Dubbo Regional Botanic Gardens, the iconic Little River and Beni Conservation Area plus many more locations on the field trips

·         Western Plains Zoo or the Dubbo Sustainable City Expo on the Saturday morning before departure (Bus Tour return trip departs midday Saturday)

Keynote speakers include:

·         Professor Greg Smith, Lewis Clarke Graduate School, Portland Oregon: Grounding Learning in Place and Community

·         Margaret Somerville , University of Western Sydney: Connecting for planetary wellbeing: systems, people and country

·         Dr John Rafferty, Charles Sturt University: Teachers’ perceptions of the world (title TBC)

Please find attached the Full Conference Program. For more information about the conference visit the website www.nsweeconference.org.au, email conference@aaeensw.org.au or phone 02 6585 3601.

Online registration won’t work for free tickets, please email Jem Hansen (project@aaeensw.org.au).

NSW 31^st Environmental Education Conference

Contributing to Global Hope: Interconnectedness between Rural and Urban Landscapes

Conference Web address:  http://www.nsweeconference.org.au/ 

Note:

·         If several people from your state are interested it is quite possible that all could be provided with the free rego (depending on response from other areas)

·         Anyone already registered for the conference cannot swap to a free rego, sorry

Get on board for Marine teachers' Qld conference Gold Coast 22 - 25 Sept

The Marine Teachers’ Association of Queensland's (MTAQ) annual conference will be held at Griffith University on the Gold Coast from 22 to 25 September in collaboration with the university’s School of Environment, Engineering and Technology. To support the introduction of the new Marine Science syllabus from next year, Griffith University is assisting MTAQ in enabling teachers with Marine Science best practice.
Visit their website online:
http://www.marineteachers.org.au/

A tasty slice from this month’s “Decision Point” – for a full helping, get online...

Decision Point is the monthly magazine of the Environmental Decisions Group (EDG). Decision Point is available free from http://www.decision-point.com.au/

Strategies to bridge the divide - Mechanisms that help scientists and decision makers work together By Carly Cook (University of Melbourne), and Hugh Possingham and Richard Fuller (University of Queensland)

“There is a growing body of evidence to show that scientists often

don’t answer the questions most important to managers. It is

also increasingly clear that while decision makers value scientific

information (see Decision Point #70), they do not routinely use

science even when it’s available.

There are many reasons for this divide between the science and

practice of conservation (Cook et al 2013), a separation that is

often called the implementation gap”…read more on line.

Weighing up the costs of collaboration - Multiple actors working together in the landscape By Ascelin Gordon & Sarah Bekessy (RMIT University)

“Prioritising conservation actions is a challenging task even when it’s

a simple comparison between two options – for example, do you buy

land and put it in a reserve or restore degraded land if you want to

reduce the loss of habitat? However, the task of prioritisation becomes

considerably more complex when you try to factor in multiple parties

undertaking the actions.

In the real world many groups – individuals, NGOs, government

agencies and so forth – are all attempting to conserve biodiversity.

Often multiple groups will be working in the same landscape and the

objectives of the groups may range from significantly overlapping

to mostly diverging. If some of these groups were to collaborate in

their conservation actions (e.g. share the costs of buying land for a

reserve), there could be significant benefits. But such collaboration

has associated costs such as funds spent on travel and administration

for collaborative meetings. And it often causes delays in being able to

implement actions. Is collaboration worth the effort? We modeled a

few scenarios involving collaboration (Gordon et al. 2013) to explore

this question, and the short answer is: sometimes...read more online.

Decision Point is available free from http://www.decision-point.com.au/