Michele Barnes
Associate Professor Michele Barnes is Director of the Social Dynamics and Environmental Change Lab in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. A social network scientist and interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, she draws on sociology and complex systems theory to understand how social dynamics - and the relationships between people and nature - shape sustainability and resilience, particularly under climate change. Her research has earned major national and international honors, including fellowships from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council (DECRA), the Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a Eureka Prize for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Scientific Research. She is currently a Lead Author on the IPBES Second Global Assessment and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Beijer Institute. She previously served on the board of both the International Network for Social Network Analysis and the Australian Network for Social Network Analysis. Committed to research impact, she works in interdisciplinary teams and engages directly with policymakers and practitioners - recently serving on the Expert Working Group behind Australia's National Strategy for Just Adaptation and as the sole Australian author on the Resilience Science Must-Knows report launched at COP30.
Session
Meeting escalating environmental change depends on understanding how people are connected, both to one another and to the ecosystems they rely on. In this talk, I present an approach that treats social-ecological systems as multilevel networks, and I draw on long-term, whole-community panel data from small-scale fishing communities in the Pacific and East Africa, integrating repeated surveys with ecological data. I first show that where people who compete for the same resources are also connected to each other, coral reefs tend to be in better condition. I then turn to behaviour, showing how exposure to others in one's network shapes both responses to climate change and people's agency over adaptation decisions, and how power can enable or constrain these responses. Using temporal network models that account for interdependence among respondents, I then show how these networks evolve under pressure. Communities increasingly form the kinds of cooperative structures linked to ecological benefits, yet the individuals most embedded in them are more likely to experience declines in subjective wellbeing. I close by asking who bears the costs of cooperation in the face of environmental change, and what this means for designing research and policy that serve both ecological and social goals.