2023 Laureate Profile: Professor Xuemei Bai

Administering Organisation: The Australian National University

Fellowship Project Summary

FL230100021 - Cities as transformative agents for a climate-safe future

Professor Bai aims to address how cities can transform towards a climate-safe future- achieving net zero emissions by 2050 while also enhancing resilience to climate impacts. This project will build knowledge and identify strategies to assist city managers to transform cities towards zero-carbon, resilient futures. By learning how cities currently deal with climate mitigation, Professor Bai will explore innovative approaches – such as how to coordinate fragmented systems such as transport management, planning and construction and energy investment. Her project will develop tools to enable cities to understand how they can transform their climate mitigation and adaptation practices, such as lowering emissions by lowering the need for motor vehicle travel, or construction of energy efficient buildings, or increasing tree planning and public parks. It will explore how innovations in mitigation and adaptation can be scaled across cities, identify mechanisms to network cities to enhance functional resilience and inform governance that can enable, maximise, and accelerate transformation of cities to zero-carbon. By mapping viable pathways towards low carbon and resilient futures, this project will contribute in the longer term to environmentally safe and economically vibrant futures across Australian cities.

Australian Research Council funding: $3,141,020