About me
Richard Harper is a Professor in the Food Futures Institute. His research is devoted to devising new approaches to soil, water and biodiversity management; an area where globally there are many long-standing and intractable problems. His major focus since 1995 has been on unlocking carbon markets to drive landscape-scale change; this both solving these intractable problems but also dealing with global greenhouse gas emissions and allowing governments and industry to meet their ambitious emissions reduction pledges. A parallel program is investigating solutions for soil water repellency, which causes severe problems in agricultural and forested environments.
He joined Murdoch in 2009, following twenty years science and policy experience with the Western Australian Government in programs addressing salinity, plantation and farm forestry and climate change mitigation. He has a B.Sc. Agric. (Hons) and PhD (Agriculture) (UWA). His research program currently comprises 4 PhD and 2 MSc students and a range of Murdoch, national and international collaborators.
Many publications and presentations have explored the science and policy aspects of climate mitigation, using bioenergy or carbon sequestration in plants and soil. This work has ranged across agricultural land, plantation and natural forests, rangelands and near-shore environments.
Some highlights include:
- Exploration of soil carbon stores to depths of 37 m,
- Novel bioenergy production systems, using fast-growing, intermittent tree phases in rotation with cropping to manage landscape hydrology,
- Restoration of mangroves for carbon mitigation,
- A review on the influence of reforestation, deforestation and forest management on water yield and quality,
- Consideration of how to gain water and biodiversity benefits from carbon reforestation projects,
- Development of site selection protocols for plantation forestry,
- Elucidation of the effect of wind on Western Australian inland soils and landscapes,
- A review on soil water repellency, describing the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon, and insights for management.
He was a lead author on the 2014 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGIII) chapter on mitigation using Agriculture, Forestry and other Land-Uses (AFOLU). He was the chair and then co-chair of the recently completed International Union of Forest Research Organization (IUFRO) Taskforce on Forests and Water, a visiting Professor with the Chinese Academy of Forestry and an associate editor of Soil Research. He is a past President of the Australian Council of Agricultural Deans, and a past member of the Australian Government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee (under the Carbon Farming Initiative Act) and Threatened Species Scientific Committee (under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act), and various State and Australian Government climate change committees.
His undergraduate lectures are in soil science, climate mitigation and hydrology (Units ANS100, ENV243, ENV554).
Publications:
Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=_QNddPMAAAAJ&hl=en)