Rate My Professor Sarah Clement

Dr. Sarah Clement served as a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia, where she led research on environmental governance in the Anthropocene. Her work emphasized improving decision-making amid rapid environmental and social change, particularly through enhanced governance, planning, and policy to achieve better ecological, socio-economic, and democratic outcomes. A key focus was bushfire management in Australia, as seen in her ARC-funded project 'Fire and Transformation: Building capacity to manage Australian Bushfires,' which examined governance reforms addressing risks to life, property, biodiversity, and climate change using case studies in southwest Western Australia and the Australian Alps. Clement's interdisciplinary background includes a PhD from Murdoch University (2012-2016) on landscape-scale biodiversity conservation and social-ecological systems-based scenario planning, supervised by Professor Sue Moore. Prior to academia, she worked nearly a decade as an environmental scientist, consultant, and policy advisor across the US, UK, and Australia, tackling issues in water resource management, forest management, contaminated site remediation, ecological restoration, biodiversity conservation, social impact assessment, environmental impact assessment, and behavior change.

Clement's career also includes a tenured faculty position in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool before joining UWA with an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2020. Her influential publications include 'Governing the Anthropocene: Novel Ecosystems, Transformation and Environmental Policy' (2021), 'Knowledge governance for the Anthropocene: Pluralism, populism, and decision-making' (2022), 'To burn or not to burn: governance of wildfires in Australia' (2024), 'A diagnostic framework for biodiversity conservation institutions' (2015), and 'Novel solutions or rebranded approaches: evaluating the use of nature-based solutions (NBS) in Europe' (2020). These works have advanced understandings of collaborative conservation governance, nature-based solutions, green infrastructure, and biodiversity policy. She received the ARC DECRA and is part of the Superstars of STEM cohort. Her research impacts policy on wildfires, biodiversity, and climate adaptation, with collaborations on cross-border protected areas and scenario planning for governance reforms.