2025 Wen Family Chair in Conservation Public Lecture: The promise and peril of the blue economy.
The ocean holds great potential for providing sustainable sources of food, energy, and minerals, and can store an enormous amount of carbon to help mitigate climate change. For these reasons and others, governments and businesses are rushing to the blue economy to help address global sustainability needs. Yet done poorly, these expanding uses of the ocean could tip the ocean, already facing numerous assaults from human activities, past a tipping point. Understanding where the potential for transformative benefit exists, and where the risk of peril lies, is critical to forging a sustainable path forward. In this talk Professor Ben Halpern shares the science underpinning these paths and how we can measure our progress along them, and in doing so challenge us to think differently about our relationship with the ocean.
Professor Ben Halpern, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Ben Halpern is a marine biologist and ecologist specializing in marine conservation and ecology. He is currently a Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and serves as the Director of the UCSB National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). He earned his B.A. in Biology from Carleton College in 1995 and completed his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UCSB in 2003. After his Ph.D., he held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at NCEAS and The Nature Conservancy's Smith Fellowship Program, later becoming a research scientist at NCEAS before joining UCSB faculty in 2013. He also served as Chair in Marine Conservation at Imperial College London from 2013 to 2018.
Halpern's research focuses on marine ecology and conservation planning, addressing topics such as spatial population dynamics, trophic interactions, cumulative human impacts on marine ecosystems, and marine protected areas (MPAs). He is well known for leading the development of the Ocean Health Index and cumulative impact assessments at global and regional scales. His work aims to inform and facilitate marine conservation and resource management worldwide. Ben Halpern is also recognized for his interdisciplinary collaborations involving economists, anthropologists, and decision scientists, and has conducted extensive fieldwork in diverse marine ecosystems around the world.He has received multiple honors, including the 2016 A.G. Huntsman Award for Excellence in the Marine Sciences, the Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Science, and fellowships in the California Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America.
This lecture was made possible through the generous support of: Wen Giving Foundation, supported by Hawaiian Property Group,The Jock Clough Marine Foundation, the Forrest Research Foundation, and the UWA Oceans Institute.
Wednesday 18 June,
6.00pm arrival for 6.30pm start
Theatre Auditorium, Ground Floor
The University Club of Western Australia
1 Hackett Drive, Crawley
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13/06/2024
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