Theme Leaders
Dr Sarah Jennings (University of Tasmania) is a natural resource economist with particular expertise in applied welfare analysis, including cost-benefit analysis and non-market valuation.  Her involvement in marine economics includes the evaluation of climate change impacts and adaptation strategies, and exploration of the behavioural responses of recreational fishers to climate-induced changes in the quality of recreational fishing opportunities and policies.  Sarah leads the FRDC’s Fisheries Economics Capability Building Project.

Dr Ingrid van Putten is a post-doctoral fellow with the ecosystems modelling team at the CSIRO Centre for Marine and Atmospheric research. She is a social scientist and has been working with biophysical scientists to gain a better understanding of coupled social-ecological systems. The main focus of her research is to formulate, implement and apply quantitative models of human behaviour in the context of the ecosystems models for the marine environment and climate change. Because complexity in the bio-physical sphere is mirrored in social and economic systems, she focuses on the tools that effectively model social and economic data and aims to find the optimum level of complexity for human behaviour models.