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Speaker abstracts and biographies
Chair: Tristan Edis, Research Fellow - Energy, Grattan Institute
Tristan Edis is a research fellow with the Grattan Institute in their Energy Research Program. His work is concerned with analyzing how government policy should be best structured to enable Australia to meet its energy needs on a secure basis while substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
He has also held prior roles in finance and business advisory with Ernst and Young’s Cleantech Group, Ferrier Hodgson and Arthur Andersen. In addition he was the Manager Policy and Research at the Clean Energy Council and its predecessor the Business Council for Sustainable Energy where he worked on policy issues related to the development of the Australian Renewable Energy Industry, and improving Australia’s energy efficiency. Prior to this role he was a policy analyst in the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Office working on energy efficiency regulatory standards and information programs as well as motor vehicle transport issues.
Retrofitting 1,200 buildings in Melbourne
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Krista Milne, Sustainability Manager, City of Melbourne
Krista Milne is Manager of Sustainability at the City of Melbourne. She has responsibility for leading the city's Sustainability Programmes including the 1,200 Buildings Program, adapting the city to climate change and integrating sustainability into the way it delivers services.
Distributed systems - for low carbon and resilience
As the scale and speed of the social and economic transformation needed to prevent runaway climate change (and to deal with looming 'Peak Oil') becomes clearer, the importance of a paradigm shift toward localised, ‘distributed’ production systems is also coming more sharply into focus.
Around the world many local governments and communities are exploring the potential for localised and networked systems for producing and delivering energy, water and food, to lower carbon emissions, increase efficiency, build community resilience and strengthen local economies. This ‘distributed’ systems model is over-turning old ideas of services and is re-shaping our image of the future. With communities and business becoming active adopters of solar panels, wind generators, rainwater tanks and neighbourhood gardens, people are breaking out from the role of passive consumer - redefining themselves as active producers of critical resources.
Distributed systems represent an innovative approach for responding to risk and uncertainty. They can build adaptive capacity by increasing the diversity and flexibility without locking utilities, customers and future governments into rigid pathways for delivering critical services. By creating distributed systems through infrastructure design choices at the building-to-precint-to-regional level, societies can reduce social, economic and environmental vulnerability to climate change and energy supply shocks.
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Che Biggs, Research Fellow, Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab, University of Melbourne
Che Biggs is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne focusing on strategies and tools for climate change mitigation and adaptation. He has a background in environmental science, management and policy and has worked in the environmental sector since 2001 as a consultant, spatial analyst, researcher, and within local government.
Key projects have involved coordinating building retrofits to improve water efficiency; developing and assessing planning strategies in Libya and Rwanda; and working with green-building design issues in Jordan. Che has an interest in holistic strategies that address sustainability challenges - particularly those affecting people's relationship to place and nature.
Reduce your office’s energy consumption
This presentation will provide a brief overview of the CitySwitch program and include practical information on steps that office tenants can take to improve their energy efficiency.
More information on CitySwitch can be found on the national website www.cityswitch.net.au.
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Brett Munckton, CitySwitch Program Manager, City of Melbourne
Brett Munckton is the CitySwitch program manager at the City of Melbourne. Brett’s work involves speaking to office tenants about CitySwitch and the support it offers and assisting and supporting program signatories reduce and manage their energy consumption.
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