Professor Tiffany Morrison FASSA

Chief Investigator (JCU/UniMelb)

I am a tenured professor with co-appointments at the University of Melbourne (School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences) and James Cook University (College of Science & Engineering) in Australia, and Wageningen University & Research (Environmental Policy Group) in the Netherlands.

I grew up in Queensland, Australia. I completed a PhD on complex environmental governance in the USA and Australia in 2004, supported by a highly competitive Land and Water Australia scholarship at The University of Queensland and a visiting fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research focuses on improving how society governs complex environmental change. My interest in complex environmental governance began in 1996 while working on the first CSIRO experiment in regional environmental governance, an experiment fundamentally challenged by hidden political-economic dynamics.

From 2004-2008 I taught in the Master of Public Administration program while tenured faculty in the School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University. In 2005, I was awarded a visiting Fellowship at the University of Kyoto, where I became interested in the complex governance challenge of climate adaptation. During 2008-2014 I held an ARC Super Science Fellowships grant, where I focused on developing integrated governance solutions for sea level rise. This project which was profiled by The Australian newspaper (2 November 2011) as in the top 10 of innovative collaborative Australian research projects. Throughout this time, I was tenured faculty in the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at The University of Queensland.

I joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University as tenured Social Science Research Leader and co-leader of the People and Ecosystems Program in 2015. Since then, I have developed a major new research program on multiscale governance of climate adaptation and conflict in large-scale reef systems. In 2017, a BAFTA-awarded BBC documentary producer interviewed me about my work on the complex governance of the Great Barrier Reef. A two-part documentary Costing the Earth was aired on the BBC in early 2018. In 2022 I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. I currently serve on the Australian Government’s Reef 2050 Expert Panel and lead a new international program on Governing Changing Oceans funded by ARC Discovery and US SNAPP awards (2022-2025).

You can contact me at tiffany.morrison@unimelb.edu.au or tiffany.morrison@jcu.edu.au