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100 Speakers at Joint Sustainability and Liveable Cities Conference Melbourne, June 2013

Over 100 Presenters over the 3 days – 17th to the  19th  of June 2013 at the Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Confirmed keynotes presenters include;

  • Dr Nick Fleming, Chief Sustainability Officer, Sinclair Knight Merz and Chairman of the Sustainability Taskforce of Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, and a Director of the Board of the Australian Green Infrastructure Council. NSW
  • Jason Roberts, Co-Founder, Better Block,  USA
  • Melissa Houghton, Director, Sustainability at Work, VIC
  • Professor Anthony Capon, Head, Discipline of Public Health, Faculty of Health University of Canberra ACT
  • Tony Wood, Energy Program Director, Grattan Institute, VIC
  • Simon Lockrey, Research Fellow, Sustainable Products and Packaging, Centre for Design, RMIT University, VIC
  • Professor Billie Giles-Corti, Director,   School of Population and Global Health,  Melbourne University, VIC
  • Angela Hazebroek , Director Urban and Regional Planning Solutions (URPS),  SA
  • John Thwaites, Professorial Fellow, Monash University, and Chair of ClimateWorks Australia and the Monash Sustainability Institute.

Message from the Mayor Amanda Stevens
The City of Port Phillip remains committed to maintaining a sense of place, reinforced by a network of public spaces, local character and built heritage as well as well designed community infrastructure to support our diverse community. This conference will be an excellent opportunity to explore innovation, exchange ideas and be creative… more

Welcome from Conference Chair, Paula Drayton
“This is a fantastic opportunity for professionals in the public and private sector to examine the challenges and solutions needed to develop the Liveable Cities of tomorrow.  The Conference will also examine public policy and social/community outcomes and consider what actions we can take to positively influence the ongoing debate… more

The full program is available on the conference website

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!
Delegates will have access to an extensive range of topics with over 100 presentations across three days including Keynotes, Concurrent Sessions, Case Studies and Posters.

Sustainable Outcomes Through Work Transformation

Organisations are at the brim of a major transformation. One fundamental element of this change is rapidly re-shaping itself to the beat of the sustainability drum, with innovative changes to how organisations interface with colleagues, the community and the environment.

At the heart of this transformation lies one single, yet complex phenomenon. Work. Fuelled by a multitude of drivers, including globalisation, technology and management innovations, the how, when and where we work is revolutionising at full speed. Shifting economies, priorities and social structures means variations to the ways in which we do business and also in the ways in which we engage and sustain our workforce.

In a bid to reconcile the hyper pace of work and life, the overarching notion of workplace flexibility has become an integral and highly prized proposition, almost a commodity in itself. Considerations for features such as work/life balance and telework are being increasingly hardwired into our work routines and employment contracts.

Government initiatives such as the National Broadband Network (NBN) and Fair Work legislation have been amongst a growing number of catalysts spurring this burgeoning trend. Consequently, flexibility is permeating through our organisations, forging long-term effects on our economy, our social constitutions and our environment. Sustainability scholarship has traditionally focused on environmental issues. Yet, the social and economic elements have often been extrinsic or peripheral to the core discourse.

Maria aims to present an under-examined, yet significant contribution to the study of sustainability. It will highlight some of the emerging transformations in organisational change and new work models, employee engagement and spatial re-design of work spaces. The paper will discuss how these innovations forge their unique contribution towards the nexus of business and sustainability.

Mrs Maria Montesano, La Trobe University will present at:

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking.  The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Local Councils responding to Climate Change – just don’t call it adaptation or mitigation!

As with many local Councils around Australia, Randwick Council in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs has been developing and delivering comprehensive environmental programs via an innovative environmental levy program for 8 years. Many of these programs involve close collaborations with neighbouring Councils and are targeting community and operational initiatives aimed at responding directly or indirectly to the impacts of human-induced Climate Change.

Over the years these initiatives include: providing financial incentives for energy changes in local homes; the first attempts to establish carbon trading between 12 NSW Councils; installation of 1330kilowatts of renewable energy including small scale wind; recycled and waste water re-use projects saving around 450 million litres of potable water a year; and major programs aimed at achieving measurable behavioural change in community sectors coving households, businesses and schools.

Working on the practical responses that respond to Climate Change issues is not always premised or articulated around Climate Change. The measures underway and their results however are often those identified by researchers and policy-makers as fundamentally important or necessarily creative as a means of responding to changes underway from increased greenhouse gases altering our climate over coming decades.

Peter’s presentation brings forward the practical responses underway and some of the results of projects and measures implemented ‘on-the-ground’ by Randwick City Council, more often than not in the face of uncertainty surrounding Climate Change scenarios, scepticism by decision-makers at different levels, and strong expectations by the community and other tiers of government that the changes that need to be made to adapt and respond to Climate Change will be implemented primarily at the Local Government level around Australia.

Mr Peter Maganov, Manager, Sustainability and Strategic Waste, Randwick City Council, will present at:

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Climate impacts– analysing infrastructure interconnectivity and flow-on effects for Australian cities

Manidis Roberts, KPMG and The Climate Institute (TCI) collaborated to undertake an exercise to credibly identify, quantify and cost, climate impacts on city infrastructure (Melbourne) as a result of extreme heat event. We modelled the impacts on infrastructure and their interdependencies under a specified climate event.

This provided a case study of the flow-on impacts of the damage to infrastructure from future climate events. We explored the interdependencies that play out between businesses and infrastructure owners and operators under future climatic conditions, such as an extreme heat, sea level rise or extreme rainfall events. The exercise identified nodes of interconnectivity and interdependency and where there are critical infrastructure vulnerabilities to future climatic events. It also analysed flow-on effects throughout the economy of any resulting disruption to services and performance of assets as a consequence of these events. There have been very few exercises of this nature carried out to date, and this now forms an important body of research for the TCI Resilience Flagship Project and more widely.

An analysis found businesses and organisations are largely unprepared for a heatwave event of magnitude. 2030 predictions doubling both frequency and severity of impacts would severely overstretch budgets, infrastructure capacity, coping ranges and system interactions and would be unmanageable. The potential impact on individual businesses in terms of effect on total revenue was calculated. The exercise also shows that the responsibility for planning and actions to reduce vulnerabilities lies with multiple parties and not just those initially impacted. Systems resilience rather than sector resilience is required.

Ms Nicki Hutlley, Chief Economist, KPMG, will present at the combined Liveable Cities and Sustainability Conferences in Melbourne in June 2013

Two Conferences! Three Days! One Location!

The Sustainability Conference: “Taking Care of Business: Sustainable Transformation 2” will be held in conjunction with the 6th Making Cities Liveable Conference, in a new era of collaboration, information sharing and professional networking. The conference is being held from the 17th – 19th June 2013 at Novotel Melbourne St Kilda.

Carbon price to cost trucking industry $500m

The trucking industry wants to stay protected from Australia’s carbon price legislation beyond 2014. Under current plans, fuel used by trucks on Australia’s roads is not subject to the carbon price until middle of next year.

That is when the Labor government’s legislation will reduce the fuel tax credits trucking operators can claim. Australian Trucking Association chairman David Simon has said the planned reduction of about seven cents a litre amounts to a 27 per cent increase in the fuel impost.

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