Climate Commissioner and co-director of the Canberra Urban and Regional Futures initiative, ANU Emeritus Professor Will Steffen has died aged 76, ABC Radio Canberra reported this morning, 31 January. The Sydney Morning Herald reports he had advanced pancreatic cancer.
Born in the US in 1947, Steffen completed a BSc in Industrial Chemistry from the University of Missouri in 1970. The University of Florida awarded him an MSc in 1972 and a PhD in 1975. Steffen moved to Canberra in 1977 to do post-doctorate research at ANU followed by a decade at the CSIRO, where he studied land systems.
According to his profile on the ANU website, Will Steffen had a long history in international global change research, serving from 1998 to 2004 as Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), based in Stockholm, Sweden, and before that as Executive Officer of IGBP’s Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems project.
Steffen was the Inaugural Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute, from 2008 to 2012. Prior to that, he was Director of the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society. From 2004 to 2011, he served as science adviser to the Australian Government Department of Climate Change.
At the time of his passing, he was a Climate Councillor with the Climate Institute, and from 2011 to 2013 was a Climate Commissioner on the Australian Government’s Climate Commission; Chair of the Antarctic Science Advisory Committee, Co-Director of the Canberra Urban and Regional Futures (CURF) initiative and Member of the ACT Climate Change Council.
Professor Steffen’s interests spanned a broad range within the fields of sustainability and Earth System science, with an emphasis on the science of climate change, approaches to climate change adaptation in land systems, incorporation of human processes in Earth System modelling and analysis; and the history and future of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.
Professor Steffen was also serving on the Science Advisory Committee of the APEC Climate Centre in Korea. He was honorary professor at the Copenhagen University‘s Department of Geography and Geology and visiting researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He was the chair of the Federal Government’s Antarctic Science Advisory Committee, and advised the Australian Government in further roles as scientific adviser to the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency and as expert adviser to the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee.
