Rob Wallace

Green Adelaide Education Officer, Green Adelaide

Personally, working in natural resource management is about my passion for the environment as much as it is a career. While I have a passion for biodiversity, it became clear from the early 1990s that the effects of climate change were going to have a big impact on our wonderful plants and animals, as well as our human modified environments.

Because of this, I take small steps at home from using blankets instead of heaters, opening windows to let gully breezes in and keeping my gas and electricity use to a minimum. I also walk and ride when I can and have a fuel efficient car.

I work in Green Adelaide Education with a dedicated team at the City of Onkaparinga on a sustainability education program with schools in our region. It is funded by the Adelaide and Mt Lofty Ranges Natural Resources Management Board.

Our focus is to work with each school on their sustainability journey. Increasingly, climate change is a focus in many aspects of what schools are doing with sustainability. We are working on a Climate Ready Schools Program with Resilient South to get schools looking at ways to adapt to climate change in their school grounds and classrooms.

It is really rewarding to know we are helping to sow the seeds with students that they will hopefully use now, and into the future to adapt to climate change and to address sustainability issues more generally in their local and wider environment.