Researchers

Barney Foran

Barney Foran

B Ag Sc, MSc(Agric)

Adjunct Research Fellow

Barney Foran, who recently retired from CSIRO in Canberra where he was a futures analyst, is at a period in his life of synthesis, pulling all the inter-connections together. An example of this synthesis is a project Barney is working on with the World Wide Fund for Nature to come up with six laws of sustainability which nations, states and regional communities can all do.

Barney's propensity is being able to talk about environmental issues buffered by economic and social forces with a strong numeric/modelling base. He is trying to find big picture solutions to the problems facing Australia and its future sustainability. "When you run the future numbers against our physical realities, then it's very challenging," says Barney. "In State of Origin terms, I'm looking for a line of attack that gets environment against across the advantage line."

Very much a rural man, Barney was brought up in Cunnamulla in Queensland 's south-west near Charleville. After completing a basic degree in agriculture with Queensland University he moved to Alice Springs where he spent the next 23 years. Initially he worked for the Northern Territory Department of Agriculture before joining CSIRO Rangelands Research Unit studying ecology and pastoral management in Australia 's semi-arid country which is 70% of Australia . During that time he spent three years in South Africa where he did his Ecology Masters on the management of high rainfall grasslands in Natal at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. From 1990 to 1993 he was based in New Zealand 's South Island and was involved in a big land-use change program (precursor to Landcare Research New Zealand ).

On his return to Australia and CSIRO Wildlife and Ecology, Barney took on a Canberra-based job looking at the long term environmental effects of human population growth in Australia. On the surface it seemed a major change for a plant ecologist, but for Barney it was a natural progression as his work was taking him more and more, in a science sense, to enumerating the connections between everything that moved. His new research involved modelling the physical transactions that underpin all of the activities in Australia and led him into a "difficult area of science where we started to come up with things that challenged the status quo of how Australia was being run. A lot of these issues are still being played out."

The result was a study "Future Dilemmas" which examined everything that moved in Australia out to 2050. While working on the 'Future Dilemmas' project Barney became "entranced with the area of energy in a fundamental and practical sense. In a fundamental sense the laws of thermo dynamics and how they affect how our economy runs, and in a practical sense how we are going to get the different sorts of energy we are going to need well into the future to sustain our lifestyles."

Barney who is working on a Land & Water Australia funded contract to develop a strategy to revitalise rural Australia by making a transition to a biomass based economy, believes that biomass energy from growing large areas of trees (which would produce wood alcohol) could be part of a renewable energy mix for Australia .

After the 'Futures Dilemma' study, Barney and a group of physicists at Sydney University , developed a study 'Balancing Act' where a triple bottom line analysis was done for each of the 135 sectors that make up the Australian economy for a full-life cycle. The study, funded by what is now the Federal Department of Energy and Water, came out in 2005. The study has since been turned into an accounting tool where corporations, for example, can connect financial accounts with physical realities and come out with a broad-ranging environmental, social and economic account that takes into account all the effects right back through the production chain.

Publication List and Projects

Contact

Email bforan@csu.edu.au or Barney.Foran@gmail.com

CSU (Mondays and Tuesdays) 02-6051-9879