Libby Lester
Located at Monash Caulfield
Libby Lester is Professor (Research) and Director of the Monash Climate Communication Hub.
Professor Lester’s research is focused on understanding and promoting the role of communications and media in good decision making about shared social and environmental futures, and she is recognised internationally for her work in the field of environmental communications. She has published seven books and more than one hundred journal articles and chapters. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. Before joining Monash in 2024, Professor Lester worked at the University of Tasmania, where she was the UNESCO Chair in Communication, Environment and Heritage, and Director of the Institute for Social Change
Australian Research Council-funded research has asked how communities, industries and politics adapt in the face of climate change and land degradation, and expanding networks of communications, travel and trade within the Australia-Asia region. Other ARC-funded projects have investigated social licence across a range of industries – forestry, mining, dairy and aquaculture – and sport as a communications platform for environmental issues.
She coordinates multi-disciplinary partnerships with government, science, community and industry to support immediate and longer-term decisions by providing useful, evidence-based and timely information about environments and communities in times of change and stress related to climate change.
For more than a decade, Professor Lester worked as a journalist, reporting on social, political and environmental issues for major Australian newspapers and magazines, including The Age and Good Weekend, and she continues to write and produce journalism, most recently radio documentaries on environmental and Indigenous politics for Radio National. She has degrees from ANU (Prehistory and Physical Geography) and the University of Melbourne (Media and Communications).
Professor Lester has supervised more than 25 PhDs on topics in environmental communications, social change and politics, and media and communications, and is keen to work on projects within the Hub that seek to build knowledge and positively contribute to social and environmental outcomes related to climate change and the energy transition.
Read more about Professor Lester's research: ORCID | Google Scholar