Our goal is to improve the lives of more than 20 million Australians living in coastal areas through better governance solutions.
Embracing vulnerability and change
The condition of the Australian coast is declining and facing intensifying threats from global environmental change and urbanisation. This is despite almost 50 years of integrated coastal management efforts.
We need to urgently change how we think about and manage our coastal environments, exploring new and better ways to protect Australia’s coastal values.
Research focus
Our research seeks to:
- Identify the types of social-ecological vulnerabilities in changing coastal contexts
- Critically analyse how vulnerability and change is managed through current coastal governance approaches
- Assess the implications for coastal governance innovations that embrace vulnerability and change
Learn more about the project aims and our holistic approach using case-study research in Australia’s seven most rapidly growing coastal communities.
Explore publications and access a series of research insight resources promoting key findings from our research. Each insight explores a major theme and has a downloadable resource.
Meet the cross-disciplinary researchers that form the coastal governance project team.
Contact
Dr Carmen Elrick-Barr
Senior Research Fellow, School of Law and Society
Email: celrick@usc.edu.au
Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (project FT180100652: Coastal Governance: Embracing vulnerability and change). This project contributes to Future Earth Coasts, a Global Research Project of Future Earth. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council or Future Earth Coasts.