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Author Archives: turka15p

Radio New Zealand Voices from Antarctica – Sea ice

Greg Leonard from the National School of Surveying and Maren Richter, a PhD student in the Department of Physics, spent a few weeks down on the ice in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, last November, removing the Otago mass balance site, and making sea ice and oceanographic measurements. They talk to Alison Ballance as a part of the Voices from Antarctica series about the sea ice “life cycle”, some of the ways they measure sea ice thickness, and what makes McMurdo Sound a unique sea ice environment.

Listen, from about minute 13, here.

To find out more about the Otago mass balance site and what it measures, visit http://seaice.otago.ac.nz/ 

Student profile – Toản Nguyễn

Introducing Toản Nguyễn, a PhD student in Te Tumu, School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies.

Xin Chào Các Bạn / Hello friends,

My name is Toản. I am from Hanoi city, the capital of Vietnam. Hanoi is a beautiful and peaceful place. In 1999, it was granted the “City for Peace” title by UNESCO.

Last year (2019), I left my home country to come to Dunedin city to embark on a new journey and life: Doing my PhD research project at the University of Otago/Te Tumu School. Working in Vietnam over 15 years as a development practitioner, I have implemented several various projects that aim to support local communities, particularly vulnerable groups to well adapting to and timely coping with climate change and climatic associated disasters. From the work as well as interacting with local people, I understood that local people’s adaptation to climate change seems to be ineffective. There could be some causes resulting in those outcomes. My research is built on this rationale, and it primarily explores the key factors that have been adversely affecting to the adaptation work of local people across regions of Vietnam.

My research project is an empirical work, using the qualitative case-study approach. I have chosen four cases studies in the coastal regions of Vietnam to gather data. It is hoped that lessons learned from the case studies will be meaningful for local/national policy development processes in Vietnam.

And after one year doing my project, I see that PhD is a great chance to learn new things. I have gained new knowledge of climate change and academic research skills as well as having more friends. Also, I understand that completing the PhD is not an easy task! But I think if I maintain my faith, it will be fine 😊.

Chúc các bạn sức khỏe và hoàn thành xuất sắc PhD của mình / Wishing you good health, happiness and success in your PhD!

Internal seminar – Climate Change & Sustainability Education in NZ Schools

“Simple questions require complex, collaborative solutions”

Webinar and conversation with Davina Hunt on Climate Change & Sustainability Education in NZ Schools

 

On the 23rd of June we were privileged to have Davina Hunt, a teacher and science educator from Musselburgh School, share with us her work and reflections on climate change education in schools. He Kaupapa Hononga has hosted Davina as a participant teacher in the Royal Society Te Apārangi Science Teaching Leadership Program.

Davina started her talk by setting the scene with the timeline of how sustainability education has developed here in Aotearoa New Zealand, and then discussed her understanding, investigating, communicating, and participating and contributing to science and science conversations throughout her time with He Kaupapa Hononga.

Davina spent time in the Physics, Management and Surveying departments, bringing Energy Management students to conduct an energy audit at Musselburgh School, and observing Environmental Engineering student debates on sustainable transport, green infrastructure and South Dunedin’s rising water, providing content that has already fed into school students’ Ōtakou STEAM cluster “future focussed” projects (STEAM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). She also spent time in the Physics ice lab’s cold room, making thin sections of Antarctic sea ice cores. Studying sea ice cores in this way contributes to answering one of the fundamental questions in the sea ice physical science community – “how thick is the sea ice, and how is this changing?”.

In her talk, Davina spoke about how “thinking physics” means simplifying a problem down to the key question, and then adding the layers of complexity back on. She likened this to a strategy that can be used when talking to children about climate change; simplifying climate change down to what we know, and using that knowledge to empower change and adaptation. If the city of Christchurch knew that they were in for a large earthquake 50 years in advance, or even 5 years in advance, would they have chosen to do things differently? Probably, she posited. Knowledge is what gives us the power to act.

Davina also discussed what is currently occurring in schools in terms of sustainability and climate change education, and what principals and teachers are already doing and asking for more of. She highlighted how the discussion currently focuses more on mitigating impacts than adaptation, perhaps because climate change is still being seen as a future problem, rather than a problem of right now. In order move our thinking towards climate change as a “right now” issue, Davina said, we need to develop students’ emotional and social connections with the environment and climate change before they can move onto the necessary systems thinking.

One of Davina’s key reflections on the nature of science was that “simple questions require complex collaborative solutions”. This is certainly the case when it comes to climate change.

We thank Davina for her talk, as well as her wider contributions over her placement with He Kaupapa Hononga. For now, Davina is going back to the classroom. She will form a science development plan for her school and share her learnings with other teachers. We will welcome Davina back to He Kaupapa Hononga in 2021, for the remainder of her program.

 

Davina’s talk can be accessed on request by Otago researchers and students, by contacting hekaupapa.hononga@otago.ac.nz

 

The papers Davina worked alongside were:

EMAN405 – Energy Practice

MANT437 – Organisations & Sustainability

PHSI243 – Environmental Physics

SURV454 – Environmental Engineering

 

Recent research – Decarbonising the tourism sector

Sun, Y. Y., Lin, P. C., & Higham, J. (2020). Managing tourism emissions through optimizing the tourism demand mix: Concept and analysis. Tourism Management, 81(May), 104161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2020.104161

Currently, there are two avenues to feasibly mitigate carbon emissions from the tourism sector; improving the eco-efficiency of tourism business (e.g. increasing numbers of electric vehicles or developing more sustainable accommodation options) and fostering sustainable travel practices (e.g. encouraging travel closer to home, the use of non-motorised transport, or taking longer, less frequent trips, etc.). James Higham of the University of Otago’s Department of Tourism, along with Ya-Yen Sun and Pei-Chun Lin of the University of Queensland and National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, respectively, investigate an alternative solution.

Managing tourism emissions through optimizing the tourism demand mix: Concept and analysis advances the optimisation approach as a third way to reduce emissions from the tourism sector. This approach seeks to optimise the “demand mix” or the proportion of visitors who come from different generating markets, to reduce a destination’s overall anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from tourism, whilst at the same time, optimising the economic and social impacts of tourism.

Optimisation of the demand mix is grounded in the reality that visitors from different places generally consume in different ways; they may stay for a longer time in the country, visit in particular seasons, or buy products that are of particular benefit to the local economy. The figure below shows the profiles of different visitor markets, from the case study discussed in this paper. This figure shows the ranking of an average visitor from each of these different markets based on six different criteria; the higher the number, the better the ranking. A perfect visitor would show up as a hexagon along the outermost edge of their respective chart.


Reproduced from Sun et al. 2020 (Fig. 2). Radar charts on 6 indicators for four international visitors to Taiwan. LOS – Length of Stay

James and his team developed a mathematical model that can assess various scenarios against their social, economic, and GHG emissions mitigation outcomes, by varying the demand mix based on these profiles. As well as incorporating social and economic considerations, their model limits the allowed variation in visitor numbers from any one market; simply decommissioning high-emissions markets and encouraging the expansion of low-emissions markets, or removing an entire visitor market from a country’s tourism profile to achieve emissions reductions is neither realistic nor sustainable. For this reason, constraints are imposed in the model that reflect the societal capacity to deal with these changes. By applying constraints like these, and having societal impacts integrated into the model, any recommended result, James and his team argue, can be achievable and (more) sustainable.

The authors applied their model to a case study of Taiwan, a country where the tourism sector contributes a high proportion of national carbon emissions compared to its relative contribution to GDP.

This model is run using scenarios, or different sets of constraints and prioritised objectives, and the scenarios run for the Taiwanese case study vary from the very simple to the highly complex. The results of each scenario are then the demand mix (various increases or decreases in visitor numbers from different markets or origins) and the resultant changes in total visitor numbers, emissions, seasonality of visitors, and total spending, among other metrics.

For example, two scenarios were run that differed only in their primary objective; one prioritised emissions reductions, and the other, economic benefits, all other things being equal. Looking at the results, emissions reductions and total spending for each scenario behaved as expected, but in the scenario where the economic impact of tourism was given priority, visitor numbers became significantly more seasonal and the length of their average stay decreased, compared to when emissions reductions were prioritised. Results from contrasting scenarios like these can be used to help decision makers investigate the impact of differing objectives on their tourism portfolios.

In all, this framework offers a new tool for tourism market planning, being able to begin to direct incremental change in the visitor mix over time, to work towards a climate-safe tourism future. However, James and his team highlight that for the best result, overall tourism demand must also decrease, in this case by 5%. This tells us that optimising the visitor portfolio with tools like this must happen alongside efforts to reduce visitor volume, as well as encouraging increasing eco-efficiency and sustainable travel practices.

 

Authorship contribution statement:

Ya-Yen Sun: Conceptualization, Resources, Visualization, Writing – original draft.
Pei-Chun Lin: Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft.
James Higham: Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing.

 

Notes:

The authors plan to publish a follow up piece in the next few months, applying this analysis to the New Zealand tourism industry.

James has also given a seminar last year in our series Conversations on Climate Change, entitled Decarbonising Tourism. To watch the recording of this talk, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJxXIQw5KAk

 

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