Guest Work

Marine protection falls short of the 2020 target to safeguard 10% of the world’s oceans. A UN treaty and lessons from Antarctica could help

Guest Author • Dec 15, 2020

• Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources,
• marine ecology,
• marine protected areas,
• overfishing

Natasha Blaize Gardiner, University of Canterbury and Cassandra Brooks, University of Colorado Boulder Two-thirds of the world’s oceans fall outside national jurisdictions – they belong to no one and everyone. These international waters, known as the high seas, harbour a plethora of natural resources and millions of unique marine species. But they are being damaged irretrievably. Research … Read More

Report shows New Zealand’s ‘fragmented’ environmental research funding doesn’t match most urgent needs

Guest Author • Dec 10, 2020

• biodiversity loss,
• climate change,
• research funding,
• Water quality

Troy Baisden, University of Waikato There’s a serious mismatch between what New Zealand’s government identified as the most pressing environmental issues, including climate change and freshwater quality, and the investments in environmental research it actually makes. A report released today by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) shows New Zealand spends about NZ$500m on environmental … Read More

An ocean like no other: the Southern Ocean’s ecological richness and significance for global climate

Guest Author • Dec 08, 2020

• climate change,
• climate modelling,
• marine protected areas,
• ocean warming,
• Southern Ocean

Ceridwen Fraser, University of Otago; Christina Hulbe, University of Otago; Craig Stevens, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, and Huw Griffiths, British Antarctic Survey In 2018, a map named after an oceanographer went viral. The so-called Spilhaus projection, in which Earth is viewed from above the South Pole, was designed to show the connected nature of the ocean … Read More

The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene

Guest Author • Dec 04, 2020

• anthropocene,
• cli-fi,
• climate fiction,
• erosion,
• poetry

Philip Steer, Massey University Just as writers and artists today are responding to the Anthropocene through climate fiction and eco art, earlier generations chronicled an environmental crisis that presaged humanity’s global impact. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch that powerfully expresses the planetary scale of the environmental changes wrought by human activity. Yet almost a … Read More

I Published a Fake Paper in a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Journal

Guest Author • Dec 02, 2020

• Academic journals,
• fake science,
• peer review,
• predatory journals,
• Scams

Bradley Allf Back in April, I received a strange email from a pair of academic journals inviting me to submit my research to one of their latest issues. The email was written in a jarring mix of fonts, and riddled with formatting mistakes and bungled idioms. The editor who sent it to me had, inexplicably, attached a … Read More

Why the way we approach transgender and non-binary healthcare needs to change

Guest Author • Dec 01, 2020

• gender discrimination,
• medical training,
• non-binary,
• transgender

Rona Carroll, University of Otago Demand for healthcare for transgender people is on the rise in New Zealand but training for health professionals to develop basic competencies is lagging behind. There is little teaching on gender and sexuality at either of New Zealand’s medical schools. It’s partly due to lack of time, but also lack of confidence … Read More

Mining companies are required to return quarried sites to their ‘natural character’. But is that enough?

Guest Author • Nov 27, 2020

• ecological restoration,
• mining,
• remediation

Shaun Rosier, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand has more than 1,100 registered quarries. Some of these mined sites are small, rural operations, but a significant number are large and complex, and within a city’s urban boundaries. As part of the resource consent application for a mining project, quarry operators are usually issued with a … Read More

5 reasons why banishing backpackers and targeting wealthy tourists would be a mistake for NZ

Guest Author • Nov 26, 2020

• Environment,
• Sustainability,
• tourism

James Higham, University of Otago and Hazel Tucker, University of Otago Raise your hand if you’ve ever travelled for weeks or months as a backpacker on a limited daily budget. Keep your hand up if you were made welcome in the places you visited on your OE, enjoyed chance encounters and experienced the generosity of strangers. And did those … Read More

‘Courageous’ investment means innovation stays in NZ, not sold off overseas

Guest Author • Nov 24, 2020

• business,
• industry,
• innovation,
• investment

Jessica C Lai, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Jesse Pirini, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand is in an economic recession and the government is trying to spend its way through it with direct investment to boost the economy and jobs. At the same time, the Reserve Bank of New … Read More

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone

Guest Author • Nov 22, 2020

• Amazon,
• satellites,
• SpaceX,
• Starlink

Samantha Lawler, University of Regina I walk outside my rural Saskatchewan house before dawn and look up, expecting to have my breath taken away by the sheer number of stars overhead. I’m a professional astronomer, but I still appreciate naked-eye stargazing as much as an eager child. This is the first place I’ve lived that’s dark enough to easily see … Read More