UNGA-78 | Innovation Policy for sustainability : Reflections from Australian agriculture

Science Summit around the 78th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78)

ISC and its partners will organise the 9th edition of the Science Summit around the 78th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA78) on 12-29 September 2023. The role and contribution of science to attaining the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be the central theme of the Summit. The objective is to develop and launch science collaborations to demonstrate global science mechanisms and activities to support the attainment of the UN SDGs, Agenda 2030 and Local2030. The meeting will also prepare input for the United Nations Summit of the Future, which will take place during UNGA79 beginning on 12 September 2024.

Innovation Policy for sustainability : Reflections from Australian agriculture

23 September, 2023 | 07 PM Canberra 

05 AM EDT & NY | 9 AM GMT | 10 AM UK | 11 AM South Africa | 2.30 PM India | 05 PM China

Jointly Organised by Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES), The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Guru Nanak Dev University, Patyala & ISC Intelligence in Science, Brussels  

Panellists: Andy Hall, Rohan Nelson, Amelia Olsen-Boyd, Michael Battaglia, Peat Leith, Heleen Kruger & Rajesh GK 

UNGA Conveners: Rajesh GK, Swati Mehta, Mammo Muchie,  Declan Kirrane

Agriculture is as a foundational pillar of Australia's economy, deeply intertwined with its cultural identity. Australia occupies 7.5% of global agricultural land use. Agriculture contributes to 2.5% of the country’s GVA and 11.6% of export earnings. Over the past two decades, the sector has witnessed a 59% increase in gross (real) value. Nevertheless, Australia’s agriculture faces challenges, ranging from climate variability and resource depletion to evolving consumer demands and global market dynamics. Agriculture remains one of the hardest to abate sectors with respect to emissions. Achieving significant change requires aligning interests of government, industry and society and demands synchronous changes in policies, technologies and implementation capability. Such moves towards directional innovation are being advanced to address multiple societal goals simultaneously. The sector's interdependence with natural resources, coupled with the imperative to meet SDGs, necessitates a comprehensive revaluation of its practices and policies. A crucial question is whether current innovation policy is equipped to guide the sector in the right direction? There is a growing consensus that while successful in meeting short term incremental goals its ability to produce transformative innovation needed to address the ‘cross-industry, long-term grand societal challenges’ remains questionable. 

This panel brings perspectives from two major Australian public sector organisations aiming to support directed innovation for sustainability. Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) and The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have a set of programs and projects which variously aim to shift innovation policy, re-format innovation action and build greater capability to do so.

Panelists

Andy Hall

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)

Senior Principle Scientist

Andy Hall is a science and technology policy analyst with a specialization in the study and design of agriculture innovation processes, policies, and practices. Andy did pioneering research on the nature and performance of agricultural innovation systems and more recently has explored the conditions and enablers of transformational innovation in agri-food systems. He has published extensively on these topics in peer reviewed and non-academic literature. Andy obtained a PhD from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in 1994. He has held positions at the Ugandan Agricultural Research Institute, the Natural Resources Institute (UK), the International Center for Research in the Semi-Arid Tropic (ICRISAT), India and the United Nations University Institute for Economics Research on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), Netherlands/ India, and the Open University, UK. He also worked as a consultant advising numerous international agencies on effective innovation practice. Since 2014 Andy has been a Senior Principal Research Scientist in the Agriculture and Food business unit of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia where he undertakes research and advisory work on innovation in agri-food systems.

Amelia Olsen-Boyd

CSIRO

Executive Manager, Mission-Oriented Innovation

Australia

Websitehttps://csiro.au/en/about/challenges-missions

Amelia Olsen-Boyd is Executive Manager- Mission Innovation, Strategy & Design at CSIRO. Amelia leads a multidisciplinary team to identify and develop new missions in collaboration with CSIRO researchers, with a focus on iterative design and portfolio strategy. Prior to joining CSIRO, Amelia helped establish the Entrepreneurship and Innovation program at the University of New South Wales. Amelia holds degrees in Government and International Relations, and Law.

Heleen Kruger

ABARES

Heleen Kruger is a social scientist who has been investigating the social and institutional aspects of Australian agriculture for more than 15 years, including projects on community engagement, general surveillance, agricultural innovation systems, area-wide management of pests, social network analysis, labour productivity, and the social impacts of pests, weeds and diseases. She works in the Social Sciences team of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) within the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Before that she has worked on on-farm quality assurance and food safety in the Australian pork industry and rural development in developing countries.

Rohan Nelson

ABARES

Rohan Nelson is an institutional economist working on agriculture and natural resource management with ABARES. His current interests include innovation policy in agriculture, and how this nest within national innovation policy. He is also developing an interest in the use of fore sighting to reveal and recalibrate deeply held assumptions about future policy. Rohan has previously worked for the Productivity Commission, the University of Tasmania, the Department of Climate Change and CSIRO.

Peat Leith

CSIRO

Peat Leith leads CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform and is project lead for the Sustainability Science Scaffolding Project. His research background as a social scientist in natural resource management across marine and coastal zone management, agriculture has focussed on how science can effectively underpin sustainability outcomes.

Michael Battaglia

CSIRO - Net Zero Mission

Michael Battaglia is Mission Lead for Towards net zero mission which looks to build capability to assist Australia's transition to net zero with particular focus on hard to abate sectors (Steel, Agriculture and Transport), regional economies and scaling negative emission technologies. Dr Battaglia was an advisor to the LETs soil carbon area, has held governance on multiple international and international collaborations include the $400M CGIAR Dryland Cereals and Legumes Program, the DFAT Australia-Vietnam Innovation collaboration, and multiple national programs on carbon accounting and mitigation of emissions from agriculture. He received the IUFRO global science excellence prize for contributions to forest systems modelling and carried out the first Australian assessments of our plantation estate vulnerability to climate change. He was a founder and a Board Director for FutureFeed, a company that is commercializing anti-methanogenic seaweed to tackle livestock emissions. I am a recipient of the US$1M Jens Bergfor Global Food Prize, AFR sustainability award winner and a Finalist in the Australian Museum Eureka Applied Environmental Award.

Rajesh Gopalakrishnan Nair

CSIRO

CERC Fellow

Rajesh Gopalakrishnan Nair is a CERC Postdoctoral Fellow with CSIRO’s Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform.