Jon Altman is the Oceania regional leader on the major international comparative project: Centre pour la conservation et le développement autochtones alternatifs (CCDAA) or Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives (CICADA) administered by McGill University, Montréal, Québec, under the overall direction of Professor Colin Scott.

Only a rapid transition to a low carbon economy will prevent dangerous climate change and its catastrophic consequences. Achieving such a transition will require vast amounts of finance (some US$7.7 trillion per year) for climate action: finance which only the private sector has the ability to provide. But scaling up climate finance — for low-carbon infrastructure, renewable energy, energy efficiency and other mitigation measures — would involve transforming a finance sector that has only recently begun its journey towards sustainability.

Biometric technologies, as well as predictive algorithms and risk assessment models, are increasingly used as regulatory tools in the context of social assistance, often in the name of cost savings and fraud prevention. In 2019, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty warned that doing so has enabled Big Tech companies to surveil the poor without appropriate accountability or regulation. Beyond the controversial Robodebt scandal in Australia, we know little about how these technologies operate in practice or how they affect recipients in everyday life.