Theme 5 - Education, training and capacity building

Theme 5 showcases various undergraduate and graduate programs in tropical environmental and sustainability sciences at James Cook University. In addition, we plan to expand our activities to include outreach to the wider community, together with organising short training courses for targeted stakeholder groups within and outside Australia.

TESS is particularly fortunate to have a large number of its academic staff involved in one of JCU’s flagship courses, the Master of Development Practice. This two-year degree provides graduate-level students with the skills and knowledge to identify and address the global development challenges of poverty alleviation, health, conservation, climate change and agriculture. JCU is one of a network of universities worldwide to develop and offer this program with generous funding from the US-based MacArthur Foundation. Southeast Asia and the Pacific are home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people. From North Queensland in Australia, JCU leads this course in collaboration with universities in Indonesia and the Philippines.

JCU is recognised as an international incubator for sustainability research and future sustainability leaders. Our commitment to sustainable ecological, social and economic advances is the driving force behind our dedicated Bachelor of Sustainability. TESS academics and researchers are providing much of the teaching input to the Bachelor of Sustainability degree, one of only two such degrees offered in Australia. The JCU program is innovative as it provides students with the opportunity to complete the degree with majors in either: science, business or social science.