Krebs Lecture 2014 - Tim Flannery at Uni of Canberra

The IAE social media team had seats with a view at the back of the Boiler House lecture theatre

Last Monday I attended - and live-tweeted from - the 2014 Krebs Lecture at the University of Canberra. The Krebs Lecture is an annual event staged by the Institute for Applied Ecology and named in honour of the ecologist Professor Charles Krebs. Charley is a "Thinker in Residence" at the IAE and spends the Australian summer with us.

This year's lecture was delivered by Professor Tim Flannery. He spoke on "A new approach to biological conservation in an era of climate change".  About 500 people attended in person, more watched a live feed and there was enthusiastic participation on Twitter as well. If you want to see it for yourself, the live feed has been archived and I'm told a better quality recording will be made available shortly. I also made a storify of the twitter discussion of the talk (#Krebs2014).

Professor Flannery began by discussing the climate change, especially in Australia. He covered warming oceans, sea level rise, floods, bushfires and extreme weather events. The talk then moved on to discuss biodiversity, endangered species and how changing climates will affect wildlife and habitats. The conclusion was a series of suggestions that the world / Australia / politicians / the general public need to embrace if we are to conserve biodiversity as the climate changes. I particularly liked the point that we should hold ourselves accountable for the environment as we are for the economy. Many of the audience questions were centred around the final point: Flannery's assertion that we need to leave 80% of our fossil fuels in the ground as we cannot afford to deal with the carbon pollution associated with using those resources.