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A sustainability scientist by training, Professor Wiedmann is interested in using ecological economics to create more sustainable planetary systems. He has built a significant body of work in the area of consumption-based accounting, which is a way of looking at both the direct and indirect environmental impacts of human activity.

A sustainability scientist by training, Professor Wiedmann is interested in using ecological economics to create more sustainable planetary systems. He has built a significant body of work in the area of consumption-based accounting, which is a way of looking at both the direct and indirect environmental impacts of human activity.

He approaches his work from the perspective of the planetary boundaries, which are nine systems that regulate Earth’s stability and resilience. As of last year, humans had transgressed six of these nine boundaries, increasing the risk of sudden, massive and irreversible environmental changes that threaten life as we know it.

“We know from climate scientists, from earth system scientists, from sustainability scientists, that we need to transform our economic and social systems so that we can reduce humanity’s environmental footprint on the planet and adapt to the challenges ahead,” Professor Wiedmann says.

“The broad picture for me is how we can achieve individual, societal and planetary wellbeing at the same time.”

Professor Wiedmann is well known in sustainability circles, having been part of a CSIRO team that calculated, for the first time, the material footprint of nations. That work led to the adoption of the material footprint indicator that features in two of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

Based on his broader body of work, Professor Wiedmann received the Thomson Reuters Citation Award in 2012 and has been named a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics every year since 2015. This puts him in the top 1% of researchers globally in his field.

More recently, he’s been turning his attention to the question of post-growth economies, the result of a research collaboration with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 2019 and 2022. That work — an analysis of the drivers of climate change — clearly showed that economic growth in developed countries is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We need to think about economic growth and whether it’s really improving our lives. For the last 70 years, we’ve followed an economic growth paradigm, but in the last few decades, it has become clear that it cannot continue,” Professor Wiedmann says.

“The question is, what can take its place and how can we transform systems of provisioning like food and agriculture, transport, the built environment, mobility and social care?”

While Europe has invested tens of millions of euros into post-growth economic research, the discipline is only really starting to emerge in Australia. Professor Wiedmann is excited to be at its forefront. In the coming months and years, he’s planning to integrate more of this type of work into the remit of the Sustainability Assessment Program, the research group that he leads at the Water Research Centre.

Researchers in the Program come from a large diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, including environmental and natural sciences, engineering, geography and economics. This diversity is necessary, Professor Wiedmann says, because of the complexity involved in addressing sustainability challenges.

“The problems we face when we think about sustainability are very much interlinked. There is no one simple solution,” he says.

“To find an effective solution really requires us to work together across different disciplines.”