In our Inside UQ Research series, we spotlight existing work from across UQ, sharing research and ideas that are shaping the future, whether or not they sit within our programs.
This edition highlights innovative research in “blue carbon” and the role of wetland systems in fighting climate change.
Meet Professor Catherine Lovelock from The University of Queensland's School of the Environment, a leading voice on “blue carbon” whose research explores the influence of environmental change, including climate change, on the ecology of coastal and marine plant communities and helps to inform conservation practices.
Role
Professor in the School of the Environment at UQ, and an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow (2020 Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellow) specialising in coastal and marine ecology and blue carbon.
Title of Research
Wetland Conservation and Restoration for Climate Resilience, Human Wellbeing, and Biodiversity Outcomes
Research Aim
To understand how environmental change, including climate change, affects the ecology of coastal and marine plant communities, and to provide the knowledge needed to underpin conservation and restoration of these ecosystems now and into the future, so that wetland restoration benefits the climate, communities and nature alike.
Most of the damage to the world’s coastal wetlands happens where nobody’s looking, underwater, or out on remote floodplains that few people ever visit. Professor Catherine Lovelock has built her career on making that loss visible, and on a deceptively simple idea: that repairing these ecosystems can fight climate change and put money and agency back in the hands of the people who have always cared for them.
Professor Catherine Lovelock is an ARC Australian Laureate Fellow in UQ’s School of the Environment and a leading voice on “blue carbon”, the carbon locked away in mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows. She’s a marine ecologist by training, though she’s the first to admit the job has grown well beyond science.
“I’m actually an ecologist, but I do a much broader range of things than I ever imagined I would when I first started as a scientist.”
The injustice that drives the work
Ask Catherine what excites her, and she doesn’t lead with carbon accounting. She leads with justice. The communities with the deepest knowledge of these places, Indigenous and local communities, are often the ones with the least secure finances to manage them. The work she’s most energised by is the work that changes that: projects that let Indigenous people get back on Country, run their own businesses, and build livelihoods on their own land.
“It excites me because they’re excited about it, having the capacity to do these projects on their own land, get back on Country, build a business. All the things we all aspire to. And repairing a wetland is good for biodiversity, good for everything. That part just makes me feel good.”
It’s the same thread running through her thinking on climate security: the countries and communities least responsible for the problem, like low-lying Pacific island nations, are the ones bearing the brunt of it. For Catherine, that makes this fundamentally an equity issue.
Getting feral animals out of wetlands – and credits back to communities
One of her biggest current projects is a partnership with the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA) to build a brand-new carbon method around an unlikely culprit: feral pigs and buffalo.
Across the north of Australia, these hard-hoofed animals are tearing up wetlands, a problem for biodiversity, and a biosecurity threat too. The idea is to develop a method that lets communities earn carbon credits for removing them and repairing the wetlands in the process. That means producing science to prove it works, then doing the regulatory legwork to satisfy the government.
The method was prioritised by the minister in 2024, and the team is racing to have everything in place by year’s end so that Indigenous corporations who want to get feral animals out of their wetlands can do the work and be properly resourced for it.
It builds on earlier work where Catherine led the science behind the blue carbon (tidal restoration) method for Australia’s carbon market, and on her current push to “de-risk” community involvement in carbon markets in the Pacific, where she recently joined discussions with representatives from the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu.
When nature is the better infrastructure
Not every coastline can be saved with a wetland. Sometimes, Catherine says, you do just need concrete. But in the right places, nature-based solutions are cheaper and longer-lasting than seawalls (provided they’re maintained, like any living system).
A standout local example is the Sunshine Coast Council’s “Blue Heart” project: rather than simply abandoning low-lying, flood-prone land, the council is retreating from it and turning it back into a coastal wetland, running a carbon project to help fund the work, while removing future flood risk and infrastructure costs.
It’s the kind of forward-thinking model she’d love to see replicated more widely.
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