Offering expert advice on how people – farmers, communities, families – live in, with and from their landscapes.
This expertise area uses a range of techniques to evaluate the relationships between people and their places and landscapes. We combine work with stakeholders with quantitative – sometimes geo-spatial – approaches, to evaluate current system states and identify pathways and trajectories for future development.
Our work in this area can include:
- 'food-scapes' – research applying a land-use (planning) perspective to agriculture and food
- 'energy-scapes'– research into bioenergy, opportunities and threats for renewable energy/under the renewable energy transition
- research that employs metropolitan landscape approaches to evaluate peri-urban conflict and opportunities for resolving them
- regional development, where we harness landscape/place approaches for regional transitions, as well as companies’ and government agencies’ ‘social license to operate’.
Our methods range from quantitative (spatial analysis, remote sensing, mapping; econometrics) to social research focused on industry and community engagement.
PROJECT | 2021
A sustainable future for burials and cremations
A look into the current and emerging practices for the interment industry and how sustainability factors into body disposal options.
PROJECT | 2018-2020
Community perceptions of hybrid solar biomass: the potential for social license and social acceptance
Finding out communities' attitudes towards biomass will help to plan renewable energy innovations in the Riverina and Hunter Valley regions.
PROJECT | 2014-2018
The politics of place identity in peri-urban environments
What role for productive farming landscapes? A case study of Wollondilly Shire, NSW, Australia.
IMPACT STORY
Saving the systems: enabling regional adaptation to climate change
ISF researchers use systems thinking to help guide regional New South Wales to identify and plan for the flow-on effects of climate change.
