Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Senior Professor Sharon Robinson is a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Environmental Effects Assessment Panel and has highlighted how ozone depletion is impacting ecosystems across the Southern Hemisphere, through its effects on climate. The United Nations Environment Programme is responsible for coordinating the UN’s environmental activities and assisting developing countries in implementing environmentally sound policies and practices.
While elevated temperatures and drying trends may elevate fire activity in our local ecosystems there are many challenges remaining to understand how fire will change in the future and how we may best deal with increased risk. The Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires (CERMB) was established as a joint venture between UOW and the NSW Government to conduct, transfer and apply research on bushfire risk into policy and operational management. The Centre facilitates research translation via educational, reporting and discussion activities along with formal involvement in policy development through various committees and fora. CERMB also leads the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub, bringing together researchers, fire agencies and public land managers in a collaborative research effort to develop new knowledge that will underpin cost-effective strategies to reduce the risk fire poses to people, property and the environment. This strategy will guide the effective communication and dissemination of that knowledge to the people who need it most: from the policy makers, operational planners, and on-the-ground fire services crews that work to mitigate fire risk, to the growing number of people living on the fringes of Australia’s cities.
UOW Law researchers Professor Trish Mundy and Professor Nan Seuffert have been engaged by the YWCA NSW to undertake an evaluation of the Domestic Violence Intervention Service (DVIS) based in Nowra. This report documents the first formal evaluation of the YWCA NSW DVIS, a specialist service established in 1992 offering a crisis response to victims of domestic and family violence through support, information, referral and case management services. The evaluation assesses and measures the effectiveness of DVIS in the context of its aims and objectives, with a particular focus on assessing the benefits, challenges and impact of their co-location as a community sector domestic violence service within a police station.
Dr Michelle Eady from the School of Education is leading Project ADVOCATE, inspired by research of team member Kelly Lewer about students who attend university after periods of domestic violence. The project is aiming to improve the quality of services and support provided to students who have experienced domestic violence by ensuring staff are better prepared to help such students. The project has received funding from the UOW Community Engagement Grants Scheme and will involve a multidisciplinary team of academics from UOW, the University of Newcastle, and the University of NSW, and partners such as Domestic Violence New South Wales and Women’s Health New South Wales.
UOW researchers are collaborating with the National Social Security Rights Network (NSSRN), which represents community legal centres across Australia, to assess the relationship between family violence and social security compliance and fraud. The project involves the analysis of case files from the Welfare Rights Centre in Sydney. The team is investigating Centrelink’s responses to victims of domestic violence and how the response may alleviate or exacerbate the impact of domestic violence. The research is informing strategies to improve how the government responds to extremely vulnerable welfare recipients.
The University’s Health and Wellbeing Strategy has led to the University partnering with local communities to tackle high youth suicide rates, expand nursing training for our ageing population, train GPs and specialists in regional and remote communities, and establish a preventative, and allied health and research facility. The strategy is equipping the University and its researchers to confront some of the world’s biggest health challenges with Molecular Horizons – UOW’s largest ever self-funded research infrastructure investment. Professor Alison Jones is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Health and Communities) and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health at the University of Wollongong. Beyond her work on the clinical frontline as a toxicologist and general physician, one of her key roles is to oversee the Health and Wellbeing Strategy, and she serves on a wide variety of expert advisory groups providing advice to State and Commonwealth government departments.
Dementia Friendly Communities research utilises a Community-based Participatory Action Research framework to inform the development, implementation and evaluation of a dementia-friendly community intervention. The research also guided the Action Plan of a local Dementia Alliance and Dementia Advisory Group.
in the media: building dementia friendly communitiesCurrently we have about 300,000 people living in Australia with dementia and because of the aging of our population by 2050 that'll be almost a million people.
Hi my name is Lynne Philipson I'm an NHMRC dementia fellow. If I going to make a community more dementia friendly it's not going to be something that happens because of a single person or because of a single discipline. A program like Global Challenges was really important to address a complex sticky problem like improving a community environment we need to be able to work with researchers and people with expertise about how we engage the community members how we work to improve knowledge and attitudes around dementia.
So the disciplines that we engaged to help us see if we could make came and dementia friendly were engineering psychologists and designers human geographers and public health researchers well as Richard Fleming.
I'm a professorial fellow here in the School of Nursing at the University of Hong Kong my speciality is Environmental Design for people with dementia so within the dementia friendly communities project I've been working on developing a way of evaluating public buildings. One of the real strengths of this project has been working with people with dementia and their carers. Without their help it wouldn't have been possible to develop the assessment tool that we've developed having them in the development team was an extremely important in fact a vital part of the project.
I'm Kris Burton Holly and I'm a human geographer. With this project I work with GIS. I'm helping bring together all the for this the maps have really been helpful in letting us know about the places and spaces that are important for people living with dementia and they've really helped the community understand.
The maps have helped us understand some of those aspects of the physical environment that have been challenging things like particular crosswalks and sidewalks signage on particular streets. Dementia is a global challenge and it's not one that we can fix just with medical solutions it's one that we have to fix it a community level and it takes all of us to make a change.
Professor Colin Woodroffe and his team’s research on coastal vulnerability has been instrumental in establishing a national sediment compartment approach, enabling better forecasts of Australian coastline response to sea-level rise. It has been adopted nationally by stakeholders using the CoastAdapt tool, incorporated in NSW state legislation and used to undertake probabilistic shoreline risk assessments at local government level. The sediment compartment approach provides a framework on which to base state-wide mapping, monitoring and modelling programs along the NSW coastline.
Researchers at UOW are examining the effect of deep-water anchors on the seabed of Australia’s east coast, bringing together industry, government, and environmental agencies. Deep-water vessels are essential to the nation’s trade links; more than 11,000 vessels visit Australian ports annually, supporting an industry worth $200 billion every year. This project aims to consider how these ships, which can have anchor chains up to a 100 metres in length, impact upon the ocean floor at popular ports. The project is mapping the sea floor along the strip where the deep-water ships anchor at Port Kembla, approximately three nautical miles off shore, to investigate the impact on the environment and marine life. Using swath mapping, underwater video and 3D imagery, the findings are then disseminated to coastal zone managers.
