Environmental Futures Seminar - Professor Sharon Robinson

Sharon Robinson is a Climate Change Biologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She first visited East Antarctica in 1996 and has been on 13 expeditions to Antarctica with the Australian and Chilean National Antarctic Programs. Her research characterizes the impact of anthropogenic change including ozone depletion and climate change on Antarctica tundra ecosystems. She is a member and lead author of the UN Environment Programme, Environmental Effects Assessment Panel. As Deputy Director (Science Implementation) for the ARC Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future and as a 2024 Australian Laureate Fellow, she leads research which informs stronger protection for Antarctic environments.

Antarctica is experiencing rapid climatic shifts from ozone depletion and climate heating, but the impact on biodiversity in its ice-free areas is still poorly understood. Utilising a range of biological, chemical and environmental data from key locations around the Antarctic continent my team seeks to understand how vegetation in ice-free, coastal areas has responded to recent climate change. Improved spatial and temporal climate data for Antarctica’s coastline, will enable more accurate modelling of the rates of environmental change and how this is affecting Antarctica's unique biodiversity. We aim to provide a toolkit for a proposed Antarctic terrestrial observing system, which could become the foundation for a whole-of continent observing system. By linking past changes in climate to current ecosystem health we can start to model future risks for Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems and better plan for their protection.