Climate Change Course: Empowering Communities for Action

Prior to arriving at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) in January 2024, Rebecca worked for 16 years as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in the UK. IDS is a research and higher education not-for-profit organisation with a vision to reduce inequalities, uphold climate and environmental justice, and foster healthy and fulfilling lives across the world.  

Since arriving at the University of Canterbury, Rebecca has worked in roles in the School of Earth and Environment, and the Political Science and International Relations Department, both of which are central to climate change education, research, and knowledge within UC. Within Political Science, Rebecca is the Research Manager for the ‘Civics Lab’, a group who are actively engaged with climate change education and outreach across Christchurch and beyond, with a focus on Māori, Pasifika and school groups. Within the School of Earth and Environment, Rebecca has been lecturing on international development issues, with a wellbeing and sustainability (including climate change) focus.

Bronwyn Hayward (MNZM, FRSNZ) is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Sustainable Citizenship and Civic Imagination Research group at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury. Her research sits at the intersection of sustainability, youth, climate change and democracy. She has contributed to major international climate reports, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 (Synthesis report 2023), Cities & infrastructure (2022) and leading the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 Degrees C (2018). Bronwyn is co-primary investigator with the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) at the University of Surrey, where she leads the Children and Youth in Cities Lifestyle Evaluation (CYCLES) study in 7 world cities. She is also a co-primary investigator of the Mana Rangatahi: Climate Change and Decision Making project, supporting Indigenous young people facing climate change.

She was an Erskine Fellow with University College, Oxford in 2017 and has published numerous books, including Children, Citizenship and Environment and Sea Change: Climate Politics and New Zealand. Bronwyn has served in leadership roles for international research initiatives and contributed to UNEP’s global youth survey. Outside academia, she has worked in children’s media and served on the NZ Broadcasting Standards Authority, SPARK Foundation, and Give A Little. Her work has earned her numerous honours, including the 2019 Kiwibank Local Hero Award, and 2021 Supreme Woman of Influence Award.

David is a professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury. His research is concerned with the creation and erosion of wellbeing in places. He has examined processes and events that contribute to lived experiences of distress and difficulty in a number of towns, cities and regions in New Zealand and the UK, while also working to identify the collaborations, policies and practices able to facilitate wellbeing within them. 

His early work considered rural and urban places disrupted by economic restructuring and neoliberal welfare reform, while more recent projects have focused on disaster-affected places. When examining these variously disrupted environments, he has investigated the spaces and settings that people experience as supportive, enabling and therapeutic and even, on occasion, as transformative. Empirical investigations in this regard have encompassed community drop-in centres, retreat centres, respite care agencies, residential care facilities, and urban community farms. He is currently an Associate Editor for Health & Place and the New Zealand Geographer, and an editorial board member for Social & Cultural Geography; Emotion, Space & Society; and the Australasian Journal of Disaster & Trauma Studies. 

Sophie is a lecturer at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury, where she teaches Coastal Processes as part of the Geography Programme. Her research looks at sediment movement and erosion in coastal and river areas.

Sophie is particularly interested in understanding how erosion and other landscape shifts caused by weathering and wearing away manifest in mountain environments and at the coast, and how these two environments are intrinsically linked (Kia uta ki tai).