With eight weeks as Science and Innovation Director under her belt, we sat down with Prof Cheryl Desha to find out more about the new role, her passion for disaster risk reduction and sustainability and how she got here.
Watch the series below, or the full edit covering more on thought leadership, disaster risk reduction and tricky conversations as opportunities, on our YouTube channel.
Q: What is the Science and Innovation Director role and how does it fit within Natural Hazards Research’s mission? CD: The Science and Innovation Director role is a way to inspire and support decision makers as we work towards our vision of communities around Australia feeling safe, resilient and sustainable in the face of natural hazards that are increasing in intensity and severity. It’s a responsibility and a burden in a way, one that I am really excited to sign up for because we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with a sense of timeliness and importance of the work that we're doing.
Thought leadership in Australia around preparing for disasters - being able to respond to them and support recovery before the next natural hazard (and the next), is challenging to fit in at the best of times. We used to have quite a bit of blue sky between disasters to do this but with multiple disasters coinciding and their frequency, we just don't have much blue sky to this kind of planning.
To have this capacity within NHRA as an enabler of space to think is such an opportunity. Something that often comes to mind is the poem ‘water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink’ and a few years ago a colleague and I came up with the alternate phrasing of ‘data, data, everywhere but not the time to think’. This inspired me to take on disaster management in my research agenda and move to NHRA because that creation of space and time allows our experts to do what they do best.
Q: How did your career journey lead you to the area of natural hazards and to Natural Hazards Research Australia? CD: I spent two decades inside the university sector working on a variety of problems. In the early days, it was quite intentionally focused on the sustainable development agenda, providing evidence for decision makers to shift from incremental change to transformative societal shifts around resource productivity waste reduction and turning that into a resource opportunity. looking at Energy Efficiency, ultimately having the Millennium Development Goals back then, then the Sustainable Development Goals subsequently, the SDGs, being that long-term Horizon Driver.
In around 2016, a number of things came together around events and other disasters in Queensland and it had me thinking, am I in the best place to do the work that I need to do? I had a bit of an epiphany around that time - young kids, looking at the future and realising that unless we deal with the local and immediate disruptions, the challenge of horizon goals like the Sustainable Development Goals, becomes almost impossible.
I had the luxury as an academic of thinking about the long-term horizon goals and what I could do in the immediacy of disruption - which disaster are - so I often talk about it like potholes in the road. For me, disaster risk reduction is dealing with those potholes powerfully so that there are fewer future potholes. That's what gives me energy every day, sufficiency and planetary well-being, bringing them into the disaster resilience conversation so that community well-being is central to immediate problems and the planet and people are around for future generations.
Q: What is your favourite food and why?
CD: My favourite food is connected with a core life experience – learning Japanese and living there for a year when I was 14. It was before the internet when you wrote those little blue letters to your family and called home on the phone three or four times. It was pretty deep experience. During that time, I learned a lot of old-fashioned Japanese expressions, including ikigai. Within ikigai, there is the expression haru hachi-bun, meaning the stomach at 80%. Eating until you feel you’ve just about had enough.
Re-reading this recently, I realised it’s another way we can talk about sufficiency at a core level. When we feel like we've almost had enough, we pause for ourselves and to allow others to partake. I think it's a wonderful philosophy and it also helps with my love of Japanese food. Rice has a tendency to expand once eaten - haru hachi-bun is also about making sure you don't feel like you've eaten too much!