Category: environmental policy
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Land clearing on the rise as legal ‘thinning’ proves far from clear-cut
April Reside, The University of Queensland; Anita J Cosgrove, The University of Queensland; Jennifer Lesley Silcock, The University of Queensland; Leonie Seabrook, The University of Queensland, and Megan C Evans, The University of Queensland Land clearing is accelerating across eastern Australia, despite our new research providing a clear warning of its impacts on the Great…
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Science for Saving Species: research of the Threatened Species Recovery Hub
I’ll be speaking at this event next Monday, 17th October at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. You can register your attendance here. Cutting-edge science that can help shape policy and management decisions and protect Australia’s threatened species will be on show in Canberra on Monday 17 October. Leading ecological experts from the NESP Threatened…
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Australia needs better policy to end the alarming increase in land clearing
Megan C Evans, The University of Queensland Land-clearing laws are being fiercely debated in both Queensland and New South Wales. These two states are responsible for the majority of cleared land in Australia’s recent history. The latest assessment from Queensland shows that 296,000 hectares of vegetation was cleared in 2014-15. More than a third of…
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Queensland farmers protest proposed changes to tree clearing laws
I was on Radio National this morning, talking about deforestation in Australia. You can listen here (mp3): The battle over land clearing in Queensland comes to Brisbane today, when hundreds of farmers will march through the state capital to Parliament House. They’re protesting against the Palaszczuk Government’s controversial move to tighten tree clearing laws, which…
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Queensland moves to control land clearing: other states need to follow
This article was originally published in The Conversation, and features my new paper published in Pacific Conservation Biology Queensland’s land clearing has yet again become a national issue. After laws were relaxed under the Liberal-National State government in 2013, land clearing rates tripled, undermining efforts to conserve wildlife and reduce carbon emissions. Now the current…
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The legal and institutional dimensions of biodiversity offsetting
This is Part 5 of a series of posts outlining the research journey of my PhD so far. Read the previous entries: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 Over two days in January 2015, fifteen academics and professionals from law, economics, business, ecology and policy came together to discuss biodiversity offsetting – but…
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Assisted regeneration could make farmers money
Here is the media release for my recent paper in Environmental Science & Policy: http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/assisted-regeneration-could-make-farmers-money Researchers have found that assisting vegetation to grow back naturally could be a far more profitable way for farmers to lock in carbon than the more commonly considered method of planting trees and shrubs. PhD researcher Megan Evans from The Australian…
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A framework to analyse the effectiveness of biodiversity offset policy
This is Part 4 of a series of posts outlining the research journey of my PhD so far. In this series of blog posts, I’ve introduced the motivation for my research topic, described the general range of approaches used to evaluate environmental policies, and have suggested some reasons as to why evaluation may not happen as…
Megan C. Evans 