AIBS National News

We're helping answer the sustainable resource and development questions critical to the future of society, industry and the environment.

Background

Current and future interaction between humans and natural systems will impact significantly on society and the environment.

This highlights the need to understand and measure the nature of sustainability and develop new approaches to:

• lifestyle
• land use
• development
• industry.

Understanding what makes a sustainable society and environment is a complex question that CSIRO is addressing across many sectors and disciplines.

We are working to develop technologies and behaviours that address sustainability issues into the future in many areas:

Understanding the true nature of a sustainable society and environment is a complex question that CSIRO is addressing across many sectors and disciplines.

• energy production
• materials
• transport
• agriculture
• tourism
• land management
• construction and built environments.

Understanding sustainability

New areas of science examining the behaviour of complex systems and the integration of social and economic systems are also being tackled.

This research seeks to understand how systems interact and feed back on each other causing unexpected shocks, changes and degradation within environments and ecosystems.

This work is critical in a world that relies on non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels, and puts increasing strain on ecosystems and natural resources, such as water and soil.

To plan for a sustainable future, we need to understand which ecosystems are resilient, which are fragile and why.

Informing policy and people

By creating models of the flow of materials and energy through our economy, CSIRO aims to understand the concepts and pathways to sustainable development.

Researchers develop scenarios that help determine the best practices to support sustainability in Australia, establish the true value of our environments and enable society to make well-informed choices about national resource policy, management and investment options.

The work considers land uses, climate change, urban development and community goals. Also, the impacts they have on biodiversity, water management, cropping lands, pastoral lands, as well as non-agricultural ecosystems and the broader environment.

Our aim is to inform policy makers, land managers, urban planners and communities on how to achieve a sustainable future on our farms, in our cities and in our industries.

Improving operational sustainability

CSIRO is working to improve the sustainability of its research and other operational activities. Efforts to achieve this are being developed by CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems (CSE), which has released:

• a Sustainability Charter that outlines what sustainability means by articulating our values and beliefs and how they translate into practice
• a Sustainability Report based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

The lessons being learnt from CSE's activities to monitor and reduce its environmental footprint are contributing to the broader development of an Environmental Sustainability Strategy for CSIRO as a whole.