A/Prof Michele Barnes (University of Sydney Engineering)

Title: Networks, behavior, and the environment: understanding how people navigate global change

Abstract:

The scale and magnitude of environmental change are escalating, and meeting this challenge increasingly depends on understanding how people are connected, both to one another and to the ecosystems they interact with and rely on. In this talk, I present an integrative network approach for studying these connections, conceptualizing social-ecological systems as social-ecological networks in which the structure of relationships shapes collective and individual outcomes. Drawing on empirical work in small-scale fishing communities across the Indo-Pacific and East Africa, I show how patterns of social-ecological alignment relate to cooperative outcomes and ecological conditions. I then turn to individual behavior, showing how a person’s position in a social-ecological network, alongside other dimensions of adaptive capacity, shapes their responses to climate change. I close by looking to current frontiers, including how people adapt their networks and their relationships with the environment in the face of escalating global change and exogenous shocks; and to the questions at the intersection of networks, behavior, and human wellbeing that motivate the next phase of this work.

Bio:

A/Prof Michele Barnes is Director of the Social Dynamics and Environmental Change Lab in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. A social network scientist and interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, she draws on sociology and complex systems science to understand how social dynamics – and the relationships between people and nature – shape sustainability and resilience, particularly under climate change. Her research has earned major national and international honors, including fellowships from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council (DECRA), the Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. She is currently a Lead Author on the IPBES Second Global Assessment and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Beijer Institute. Committed to research impact, she works in interdisciplinary teams and engages directly with policymakers and practitioners – recently serving on the Expert Working Group behind Australia’s National Strategy for Just Adaptation and as the sole Australian author on the Resilience Science Must-Knows report launched at COP30.