SPEAKER: Assoc Prof Dan Friess, Dean’s Chair, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

DATE: Friday, 6the December 2019

TIME: 1:30pm

LOCATION: Melbourne Campus at Burwood –Burwood Corporate Centre

Seminar will also be video linked to the following campuses: Geelong Campus at Waurn Ponds – room ka4.207 and Warrnambool Campus, Room J2.19 (Fishbowl)

ABSTRACT.

Mangroves are often found along coastlines that are experiencing rapid population growth, and thus can provide a range of benefits, or ecosystem services to increasing coastal populations. These range from fisheries to coastal protection to spiritual and heritage values, and their diversity means that their assessment requires an interdisciplinary approach.

This seminar will discuss our experiences of measuring and modelling mangrove ecosystem services, including the role of mangroves in storing ‘blue carbon’ for climate change mitigation. Importantly, different services can accrue at different scales, from the site scale to the global scale, providing challenges to their estimation.

We will also discuss how ecosystem services can potentially incentivize mangrove conservation, through novel Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes and international climate agreements, and the implementation challenges that these strategies face.

BIO.

Dan is an Associate Professor and Dean’s Chair in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on human-environment interactions in the tropical coastal zone, particularly mangrove forests.

Dan’s research group studies the assessment of ecosystem services and their use by local communities, changes to ecosystem services due to deforestation and sea-level rise, and policy mechanisms to conserve ecosystem services. This research is conducted throughout Southeast Asia, as well as Madagascar and New Caledonia.

Dan is also a Lead PI for the Natural Capital Singapore project, a large multi-stakeholder project conducting a national-scale ecosystem service assessment for Singapore.

Appointments with speaker may be made via awhitt@deakin.edu.au.

For more info visit https://www.themangrovelab.com/ and http://www.naturalcapital.sg/.

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