Dr Kim Alexander.

Dr Kim Alexander: researching social aspects of international agricultural change

Dr Kim Alexander is a social scientist working with the CSIRO AusAID Alliance. Her research includes understanding agricultural change and global water availablity and sanitation.

• 12 December 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

Overview

• Current activities
• Background
• Academic qualifications
• Achievements

Current activities

Dr Kim Alexander manages the social science component of the project Holistic solutions to management of on-site wastewater treatment systems over a karstic aquifer used for drinking water supplies, Mt Gambier, South Australia.

The project aims to provide natural resource management authorities with the necessary understanding of the impacts on groundwater quality from alternative on-site wastewater treatment systems. It also supports adoption of regulations and acceptable social and institutional measures to adequately protect groundwater quality.

Her work on the project Developing and Maintaining Community Partnerships for the Sustainable Use and Management of Water Resources for the The urban water security research alliance has her identifying any gaps in knowledge to ensure new water sources and management methods have the trust and confidence of the community.

She has contributed to research on the Partnerships and Understanding Towards Targeted Implementation (PUTTI) project with Catchment Management Authorities in New South Wales.

She is now working in the CSIRO AusAID Alliance with Director, Ms Melinda Spink, to facilitate the development of a sizeable portfolio of international projects to support investment decisions by AusAID.

Currently Dr Alexander is involved in the Greater Mekong Sub-region integrated project, with themes of climate change, water, urbanisation and food security.

Dr Alexander is actively involved in the following Alliance Horizon 1 projects:

• Regional and Country Scale Water Resource Assessment: Informing Investments in Future Water Supply in the Asia Pacific Region - a Decision Support Tool. The project used relevant data sets and future projections relating to water resources, population and climate from each of the 29 countries to develop a tool to assess the relative priority and scale of future water supply challenges in selected countries.

• Strategic Sustainability assessment for the Pacific - Phase 1. To provide a rapid strategic sustainability assessment (SSA) of the Pacific Islands region with a view to comprehensively accounting for their natural resource, social and economic circumstances (the triple-bottom line).

• Key conservation issues in Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.

Background

Dr Alexander has had extensive experience in laboratories as the manager of the Charles Sturt University Ecology Laboratory, 1992-2003.

She was employed as a Research Fellow at Melbourne University in conjunction with Dairy Australia, 2006-07.

She joined CSIRO Land and Water in July 2007 working on social aspects of water research with Australian Research Centre for Water in Society (ARCWIS), and moved to CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in September 2008.

She is now primarily involved in international water and sanitation projects, conservation and sustainability assessments and developing the CSIRO AusAID Alliance.

Academic qualifications

Dr Alexander had been awarded a:

• Bachelor of Science with Honours majoring in Nutrition and Biochemistry from the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, in 1978
• Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science from Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, in 2007. 

Her thesis is titled Agricultural change in Lao PDR: Pragmatism in the face of adversity [3.7MB PDF, 289 pages, external link].

Achievements

Dr Alexander is a member of the European Geosciences Union 2008.

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