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UOW’s Professor Colin Woodroffe is sharing in the Nobel Peace P... |
UOW’s coastal expert shares in Nobel Peace Prize
The University of Wollongong’s Professor Colin Woodroffe will share in the Nobel Peace Prize when it is officially awarded in Oslo, Norway today (Monday 10 December) to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), along with former US Vice-President Al Gore.
The Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded to the IPCC and climate change activist, Al Gore, for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.
The IPCC’s award recognises the contribution made by several hundred scientists from around the globe. Professor Woodroffe is one of Australia’s participants on the IPCC and the only one from UOW. He is a lead author of the Fourth Assessment report, having written on coastal systems and low-lying areas in the volume on ‘impacts, adaptation and vulnerability’.
The report, from the IPCC’s Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability Working Group, considers the impact of global warming on issues ranging from threats to coastal and island communities from rising sea levels to the viability of agricultural industries in the face of changing temperatures.
Professor Woodroffe, who is the Co-ordinator of the GeoQuest Research Centre in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is an internationally renowned coastal geromorphologist.
His research is focused on the effects of climate change on islands and coastal communities on the east coast of Australia and in Torres Strait, as well as islands in the Pacific Ocean including the Kiribati group and Lord Howe Island. His publications include a scholarly book entitled Coasts, form process and evolution and published by Cambridge University Press in 2003, as well as more than 100 scientific papers in prestigious journals.
When the Nobel Peace Prize recipients were announced on 12 October this year, Professor Woodroffe was in Cambridge. Having undertaken his undergraduate studies and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, he was re-visiting the UK campus to accept a Doctor of Science degree. A Doctor of Science is a degree awarded on the basis of a collection of published works which make a distinct and original contribution to the advancement of science or learning.
“It was a doubly noble occasion for me to be receiving my Doctor of Science and also to learn that I was one of this unique group of scientists who was going to be recognised in this way,” he said.