Olivia Dun

Landscape Preferences, Amenity, and Bushfire Risk in New South Wales, Australia

This paper examines landscape preferences of residents in amenity-rich bushfire-prone landscapes in New South Wales, Australia. Insights are provided into vegetation preferences in areas where properties neighbor large areas of native vegetation, such as national parks, or exist within a matrix of cleared and vegetated private and public land. In such areas, managing fuel loads in the proximity of houses is likely to reduce the risk of house loss and damage. Preferences for vegetation appearance and structure were related to varying fuel loads, particularly the density of understorey vegetation and larger trees. The study adopted a qualitative visual research approach, which used ranking and photo-elicitation as part of a broader interview. A visual approach aids in focusing on outcomes of fuel management interventions, for example, by using the same photo scenes to firstly derive residents’ perceptions of amenity and secondly, residents’ perceptions of bushfire risk. The results are consistent with existing research on landscape preferences; residents tend to prefer relatively open woodland or forest landscapes with good visual and physical access but with elements that provoke their interest. Overall, residents’ landscape preferences were found to be consistent with vegetation management that reduces bushfire risk to houses. The terms in which preferences were expressed provide scope for agency engagement with residents in order to facilitate management that meets amenity and hazard reduction goals on private land.

Opportunities and challenges for mangrove carbon sequestration in the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam

Increasing value is attributed to mangroves due to their considerable capacity to sequester carbon, known as ‘blue carbon’. Assessments of opportunities and challenges associated with estimating the significance of carbon sequestered by mangroves need to consider a range of disciplinary perspectives, including the bio-physical science mangroves, social and economic issues of land use, local and international law, and the role of public and private finance. We undertook an interdisciplinary review based on available literature and fieldwork focused on parts of the Mekong River Delta (MRD). Preliminary estimates indicate mangrove biomass may be 70–150 t ha−1, but considerably larger storage of carbon occurs in sediments beneath mangroves. These natural stores of carbon are compromised when mangroves are removed to accommodate anthropogenic activities. Mangroves are an important resource in the MRD that supplies multiple goods and services, and conservation or re-establishment of mangroves provides many benefits. International law and within-country environmental frameworks offer increasing scope to recognize the role that mangrove forests play through carbon sequestration, in order that these might lead to funding opportunities, both in public and private sectors. Such schemes need to have positive rather than negative impacts on the livelihoods of the many people living within and adjacent to these wetlands. Nevertheless, many challenges remain and it will require further targeted and coordinated scientific research, development of economic and social incentives to protect and restore mangroves, supportive law and policy mechanisms at global and national levels, and establishment of long-term financing for such endeavours.

The Migration of Horticultural Knowledge: Pacific Island seasonal workers in rural Australia-a missed opportunity?

In 2012, Graeme Hugo wrote the article ‘Migration and Development in Low-income Countries: A Role for Destination Country Policy?’ for the inaugural issue of the journal Migration and Development. That article, which continues to be the journal’s most viewed work, used the case of Asian and Pacific migration to Australia to question ‘whether policies and practices by destination governments relating to international migration and settlement can play a role in facilitating positive developmental impacts in origin communities’ (Hugo 2012, 25). The importance of such structural support for development has been underscored, in relation to seasonal worker programs, by growing evidence that their broader development benefits—beyond the household or family unit—cannot be taken for granted (Basok 2000; Craven 2015; Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) 2016). In this essay we take inspiration from the above-mentioned paper (Hugo 2012), as well as an earlier discussion of ‘best practice’ temporary labour migration for development (Hugo 2009). Reflecting on Australia’s Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP), we make a case for the importance of maximising ‘development benefits for origin countries via the transfer of remittances, skills and knowledge’ (Bedford et al. 2017, 39; emphasis added). Remittances have been a regular area of policy and research focus. However, less attention has been directed towards the knowledges and skills that move with seasonal workers as part of this circular and temporary migration process—in which the choice is not reduced to one ‘between staying or going’ (Methmann and Oels 2015, 53), but both staying and going (often repeatedly). Here we draw on our own ongoing research with Pacific Island seasonal workers in Australia’s horticultural sector, which points towards the potential for the SWP to facilitate the bi-directional transfer of horticultural knowledges and skills. Many seasonal workers have extensive farming experience developed in their countries of origin. Acknowledgement of their farming skills and identities prompts contemplation of how the horticultural knowledge transfers that already happen spontaneously under the SWP could be better supported.

Labour and Environmental Migration in the Asia-Pacific: in memory of Graeme Hugo

It is with great pleasure, honour and sadness that we present this second special issue of Australian Geographer in memory of Graeme Hugo: ‘Labour and Environmental Migration in the Asia-Pacific’. This issue follows on from the first special issue, ‘Population, Migration and Settlement in Australia’ (vol. 47, no. 4). Together, these two issues of Australian Geographer mark the broad coverage of many of Hugo’s key areas of research focus. Pleasure and honour stem from the privilege of observing the vast extent of Hugo’s influence through the sound intellectual contributions made in essays and articles contributed by 36 special issue authors. Sadness stems from missing out on the opportunity to know how Hugo himself may have engaged with these works. Possibly, to find merit in their messages for ‘developing appropriate population and development policies’ as his ‘persuasive concern for social justice’ often led him to do (Connell 2015, 273). As two guest editors born at the time when Hugo was beginning his career in geography, we find it interesting to reflect on Graeme’s early areas of research focus. At that time, Hugo was establishing himself as an expert on labour mobility and circular migration dynamics in Asia, alongside his always present focus on Australian demography and population distribution (Connell 2015). In his early works about Asia, Hugo (1985, 75) demonstrated ‘the nature and importance of temporary population movements’, highlighting their significant—and often undetected and underestimated—social and economic implications for both sending and receiving countries. A focus on the importance of temporary migration and its implications for origin and destination locations, as well as for migrants’ identities, rights and well-being, persists to this day. It has emerged as a key theme in papers featured across both of these special issues. Situating Australia in the context of a rapidly globalising world, Castles’ (2016) contribution, in the first special issue, drew attention to the dramatic and very swift rise in temporary skilled and student migration to Australia over the past decade—reflecting on its implications for notions of multiculturalism and transnational citizenship. In the same issue, Breen (2016) reflected on the emotional toll, at a family scale, of misunderstandings relating to temporary skilled migration opportunities. Temporary migration (both skilled and ‘low-skilled’)—and its dynamic consequences for social, economic and/or environmental changes in both migrant sending and receiving countries—has also emerged as a consideration among three works focused on labour migration in this second special issue (Bedford et al., Walton-Roberts et al., and Dun and Klocker). This common area of focus suggests a persistent need to continue with the work that Hugo commenced decades ago. Explorations of temporary migration— across all forms of skilled, ‘low-skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ migration—are needed now as much as ever. A concern with ‘what sort of society we want in the twenty-first century—and how immigration can contribute to achieving this’ (Castles 2016, 7) was certainly maintained by Hugo until the time of his passing. Returning to Hugo’s Asia-focused work in the mid-1980s, Associate Professor Alan Gamlen (Gamlen et al. 2016) recently explained that Graeme’s interest in Indochinese refugees led to