Overview

Current activities

Dr Russell Wise is a Senior Research Scientist with CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.

His current projects are:

• Enabling adaptation pathways – an integrated decision-focused approach to enabling climate adaptation
• Striking the balance: Coastal development and ecosystem values – an institutional, decision and values analysis of how human beliefs and values for coastal ecosystems may be affected by climate change and how decision-making processes will need to adapt to account for these changing values
• Climate Futures and Rural Livelihood Adaptation Strategies in Eastern Indonesia – An integrated, participatory approach to projecting potential climate, social and economic impacts on rural livelihoods to identify and test appropriate gender-sensitive climate adaptation strategies at the provincial and community levels
• Climate futures, ecosystem services and livelihood adaptation strategies in West New Britain Province, PNG – An integrated, participatory approach to projecting potential impacts of climate, economic and population changes on rural livelihoods to identify and explore multi-scale climate adaptation strategies.

Background

Dr Wise has specialist skills in the development and application of economic analytical and modelling techniques within trans-disciplinary frameworks. 

Dr Wise's recent experiences have focused on institutional, decision and values analyses in the context of problems that result from climate change in complex coastal social-ecological systems to improve understanding and inform policy and decision-making.

Before joining CSIRO in 2010, Dr Wise spent six months in the Economics and Policy Research Branch at the Victorian Department of Primary Industries where he assisted in the development of a random Linear Programming model to investigate the possible economic implications of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan on the northern Victorian Irrigation region.

Prior to this, between 2006 and 2010, Dr Wise led a team of environmental economists at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. 

During that time Dr Wise gained experience in the development and application of ecological-economic models in areas as diverse as:

• invasive species control
• climate-change adaptation
• payments for watershed-protection services
• natural capital restoration projects, and
• carbon-sequestration in land-use systems.

Dr Wise has spent the last two years working within a multi-disciplinary team on a federal government funded project to improve understanding of how the monetary and non-monetary values of coastal ecosystems may be affected by climate change and how the decision-making processes which affect Australia’s coasts will need to adapt to account for these changing values.

Academic qualifications

Dr Russell Wise has been awarded a:

• Bachelor of Science (Environmental and Geographical Science) from the University of Cape Town
• Graduate Diploma in Environmental Economics
• Doctor of Philosophy in Agricultural and Resource Economics focused on the economics of carbon sequestration in land-use systems, both from the University of New England.

Read more about CSIRO's Climate Adaptation National Research Flagship.