Prof. Dr. Lauren Rickards – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Lauren Rickards

La Trobe University
Human Geography

External Senior Fellow (FRESCO Programme)
July 2023 – December 2025

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Lauren Rickards studied Environmental Change and Management at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. She obtained her Doctor of Philosophy at the School of Geography & Environment in Oxford. From 2015 to 2020, she worked as a teaching and research academic at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. She became the director of the RMIT University’s Urban Futures Enabling Impact Platform in the following year and as of 2023, she is the director of the La Trobe Climate Change Adaptation Lab at La Trobe University. Lauren Rickards has been the chief investigator on $4.3m of completed research and $1.9m of current projects, such as “Understanding the resilience of lifelines in rural and remote regions”, published on Natural Hazards Research Australia (2022-2023). She has also occupied the position of a Senior Research Fellow on the Earth System Governance Project (since 2015), an editor of the academic journal Dialogues in Human Geography from 2016 to 2022, and of an expert on the Expert Review Group in the International Science Council and UN Office Disaster Risk Reduction (2020-2021). She has been awarded multiple awards and distinctions, for example, the 2022 Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Wiley’s 2021 Best Journal Article Award.

Selected Publications

Anderson, B., Grove, K., Rickards, L. and Kearnes, M. (2020) Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance. Progress in Human Geography 44: 621-639.
Preston, B. L., Rickards, L., Fünfgeld, H. and Keenan, R. J. (2015) Toward reflexive climate adaptation research. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 14: 127-135.
Rickards, L. and Watson, J. (2020) Research is not immune to climate change. Nature Climate Change 10 (3): 180-83.
Steele, W. and Rickards, L. (2021) The Sustainable Development Goals and Higher Education: A Transformative Agenda? Palgrave Macmillan.
Waters, E., Webber, S., Keele, S., Osborne, N., Rickards, L. and O’Donnell, T. (2023) Reimagining climate change research and policy from the Australian adaptation impasse. Enviro. Sci. & Policy, 142: 144-152.

FRIAS Project

Well-adapted sustainability; sustainable adaptation

Lauren will work with Professor Dr. Hartmut Fünfgeld, Chair of Geography of Global Change, to explore the relationship between institutional approaches to climate adaptation and sustainability transformations in order to identify synergies and tensions. While it is increasingly well recognised that urgent action is needed on both sustainability (including greenhouse gas mitigation, biodiversity conservation, waste management and pollution reduction) and climate change adaptation/resilience, the complex, multifaceted relationships between the two goals and their practical implications has not been explored. This research will help make sustainability efforts more resilient, and climate resilience efforts more sustainable, by developing a new conceptual framework, research agenda and pilot study. The latter will examine the assumed and practical relationships between environmental sustainability and climate change adaptation policy making and practices. A comparative research design will be used to enable analysis of the relationships at different scales, from the individual and organisational to the national and international. The national scale will be explored using a comparison of Australia and Germany. Overall, the project will identify opportunities for learning between the sustainability and adaptation worlds – such as the introduction of scenario thinking to sustainability policy, and recognition of unsustainable outcomes as an indicator of maladaptation – and for integrating the two more successfully.