About
the
Centre

“Nature Positive is an aspirational term that is increasingly being used by businesses, governments and NGOs, but there is a danger that its meaning is being diluted away from measurable overall net gain in biodiversity towards merely any action that benefits nature.”

- E.J. Milner-Gulland (2022)

By 2032, Australia is on a pathway to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and nature loss has been halted.

Critical transitions in energy, urban and rural landscapes are enabling people and nature to thrive while driving the achievement of goals for limiting and adapting to global warming.

CENPCT Vision

To foster world leading transdisciplinary research that builds Australia's capability to tackle the climate transition in ways that enable people and nature to thrive. This research will achieve our vision by:

(i) Supporting a sustainable and just climate transition for Australia that increases natural and social resilience by minimising harm and maximising benefits for nature and people;

(ii) Developing and demonstrating nature-positive climate mitigation and adaptation approaches at scale through transdisciplinary action-research in collaboration with industry, community, Indigenous peoples and government leaders;

(iii) Delivering a road-tested nature-positive and socially-just climate transitions toolbox ready for use across multiple sectors; and

(iv) Creating a nature-positive, climate resilience community of practice with transdisciplinary expertise, including influential government, business, Indigenous and community champions to bring society-wide positive impact. 

CENPCT Mission

On Nature-Positive Climate Transitions

The urgent societal transition to mitigate climate change, minimise the impacts of climate disaster, adapt to existing and unavoidable ecological shifts and address the inextricable subsequent mass-biodiversity loss is already underway. Reactionary and poorly implemented climate transitions will damage nature, with detrimental effects on our communities and prosperity.

CENPCT is a Centre designed to engage this immediate need by finding, mapping, developing and promoting nature-positive climate transitions that are meaningful, sustainable, and long-lasting in relation to biodiversity.

Nature is the only effective large-scale carbon sink. Nature also provides myriad proven benefits; from supporting healthy agricultural and water supply systems, to moderating climatic extremes, to improving physical, mental, and community health. We seek approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation that protect and harness the benefits of nature rather than diminish it.

This means the term “nature-positive climate transitions” is used by CENPCT to refer to strategic, informed, and active ways that people, communities, businesses, governance and industries must respond to the dual and entwined threat of biodiversity loss and climate change by first considering biodiversity. Taking seriously the cultural and critical authority of those who understand biodiversity, therefore, is the lynchpin to a future with people in it.

As a community of researchers and partners, we understand that nature-positive transitions are imaginative, fruitful, and grounded in a deep sense of joy and respect towards the environments and ecosystems with which humans converse, and upon which people rely. As experts we know that bringing our specialised skill sets to worldly colleagues; communities, organic knowledge holders, Country, partners and businesses, all as respective experts - makes otherwise seemingly impossible problems, solvable. Humility as a research value is central to the possibility of active and proactive climate transitions that move economies and societies willingly towards net-zero.

Australia is in a unique position to make a decisive contribution to the global nature-positive agenda. We hold an immense natural legacy as one of the 17 megadiverse nations on earth, with most of our animals and plants unique to this continent. Yet, we have the highest rate of biodiversity loss of any developed nation, and strong downward trajectories in the abundance of native animals and plants. Without urgent action, we will witness many more extinctions in the coming decades.

CENPCT puts forward a genuinely holistic, transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and cross-cultural collaboration to navigate the social and technical complexities, competing demands and perceptions involved in addressing dual existential crises of biodiversity loss and climate change.

While technical solutions to climate and nature challenges are essential, many of the enablers and impediments to nature-positive climate transitions will be structural: social, political and economic. These challenges require ingenuity and foresight in policy and governance; information, partnerships and experts that know how to bring diverse actors together to negotiate trade-offs and mobilise transition pathways. CENPCT is a Centre activating research and projects that are strategically built to produce integrated, collaborative, and flexible approaches to adaptation, and bring enormous and lasting benefits to Australian communities, industries and nature.

Delivering Nature-Positive Climate Transitions

These themes are designed to focus the ways in which we deliver thoughtful, deep, lasting, and crucial transitions in energy, urban life and infrastructure, and landscapes.

Our programming and initiatives focus our efforts on translating nature-positive climate transitions through three specific themes: futures thinking, understanding and predicting, and transition pathways.

Our deliverables are expressed through our stable of partner-shaped research programs, our academy for developing early to mid-career researchers and professionals to champion nature-positive climate transitions and collaborations, and our Partner Innovation Lab.

CENPCT Outcomes

  • In the next five years the aim of CENPCT is to steer closer conversations between research, policy, grassroots communities, and private sector about the knowledge and governance required to achieve a just and nature-positive transition.

    We will facilitate direct support to government and businesses through a period of rapid transition, offering a sounding board of strong expertise and education-rich networks for this change.

  • The potential perverse outcomes of transition, including inequities, averted through judicious advice and partnership.

  • New nature-positive and just ways of doing business and measuring and communicating outcomes are normalised, socialised and operational, within a society that is culturally shaped by nature.