Meet Dr Jaco Fourie, Chief Investigator at the Institute for Climate Risk & Response, whose research examines the organisational challenges posed by extreme climate crises.
I began my academic journey with a commerce degree at , focusing on business ethics and sustainability. This interest led me to research Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the banking sector in the wake of the Banking Royal Commission. My curiosity about how corporations go about meeting their ethical obligations led me to pursue a PhD on modern slavery in global supply chains. My research examined governance and regulatory changes in France, the UK, California and Australia, aimed at increasing corporate transparency and improving working conditions in highly fragmented global supply chains.
I would say my overarching interest has always been in trying to understand complex societal problems that involve multiple actors with potentially diverse interests and how we can more effectively collaborate to deal with them.
Currently, I am a researcher on a project . This project, funded by the Australian Research Council, explores . This work has allowed me to work with a number of eminent scholars with similar interests here at Sydney, namely Professor David Grant, Deputy Director of the Institute for Climate Risk & Response, and Markus A. Höllerer, Professor in Organisation and Management at Business School, who is also a Chief Investigator here at the institute.
I am intellectually drawn to complex issues involving multiple actors, often called “wicked problems” or “grand challenges”. Climate change is a prime example. I guess it was a natural transition for me to start doing work on climate. On a more personal level, my wife was pregnant during the Black Summer, and at the time, I was finishing off my PhD. So, seeing the most visible instantiation of climate change that we've had here in Australia really got me thinking that I would like to contribute to understanding the problem in my academic career and, you know, contribute to a path forward in some way.
I don’t claim that my work will be a “solution to climate change,” as it’s a vast and complex issue. Our work, as a research team, aims to improve our responses to large-scale and complex climate events like the Black Summer. These events, in the medium term, and potentially long term, are here to stay, so notwithstanding the need for more systemic change, we need to think about how to deal with these events in an improved way now.
One challenge at the heart of responding to climate change is improving collaboration and organisation. Our work tries to unpack some of the organisational and collaborative challenges that more extreme climate events pose. We are exploring questions like what pain-points in crisis response arrangements did the Black Summer reveal and how should we reorganise to avoid these moving forward? How should we, and what should we, learn collectively from these events? And how can we better support communities impacted by events of this scale and complexity?
Our current project is at a mid-point, and we aim to share our findings more broadly soon. We’ve presented our work at several global conferences and are involved in seminars with government bodies like the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water to translate some of our findings. We are excited to continue to build relationships through the Institute for Climate Risk & Response and engage in some interdisciplinary research moving forward.
As I mentioned, a central focus in our current project, and which we plan to develop, is community resilience to climate disasters. We saw in the Black Summer how communities banded together to weather the worst of the fires, and then to rebuild. With major climate events, like bushfires and floods, evolving, I think it’s important for us to better understand how communities can build up their resiliency and adapt to these kinds of events. We plan to build a research program around developing strategies and resources to support communities, especially those in isolated or vulnerable areas, to enhance their capacity to handle such crises.