Climate Research Accelerator 2025 Showcase

Welcome to this showcase event for the Climate Research Accelerator program. And this is, as you know, one of our flagship initiatives at Melbourne Climate Futures. And what we love to see is interdisciplinary work that's really focused on impact and particularly seeing our early and mid-career researchers taking a spotlight in these types of projects as well. So

we're really proud of all of the projects we've been able to support over the past four years. Today I'll be sharing with you some insights and outcomes from our collaborative project Evidence in Healthy JANDAQ. So JANDAQ is the JARA word for country, JARA country and healthy people for climate resilience. This CRX

project enabled us to think about what it meant to develop a more holistic JARA-led monitoring and evaluation framework for JARA country or JANDAQ.

And just a quote on that from one of the people that we interviewed in the earlier research. It heals mob healing country because a healthy country is a healthy mob. Our project was about a website we've been building.

mob. Our project was about a website we've been building.

The premise of it is we all kind of know fire. For here in Australia, it's a fiery place. But the kind of question is, you know, how do we know it? In what ways do we know it? That was really the driver for

know it? In what ways do we know it? That was really the driver for this particular project is can we build something that shows some of the data that we have about fire and what drives it in a way that's kind of engaging and that can enable research as well as kind of potentially support fire management, maybe, you know, risk communication, education. So that was what it was all about. And I

think the more perspectives we can bring to bear, it's a much better chance we have of actually living sustainably with fire. Both of us have a background of doing research in education systems in small island states. So we bring that to this project. Where the CRX support really came in was supporting us to kind

of pilot this more specific focus on school gardens. It had come out of previous research and discussions in the countries we were working in. That's my passion is sort of how to engage students in the classroom. So learning is interesting and it presents that opportunity. There's a lot of AI work on detecting misinformation and even

that opportunity. There's a lot of AI work on detecting misinformation and even identifying is it misinformation or not, but surprisingly very little on generating debumpings and really no research that tries to do this whole format, which we call the truth sandwich. Like many growl quests, the finish line kept getting further

away as we embarked on this. It was a bit like the end of The Martian where Matt Damon's trying to launch out of Mars and get up to the spaceship and he just doesn't quite get there. We were like that. And CRX gave us the funding just to get us up to the spaceship. So it helped us get to the finish line. So we're very grateful for that opportunity.