prof.dr. TH (Tiffany) Morrison

Tiffany Morrison is a fractional personal professor in the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University & Research. Her expertise is in the governance of environmental change, policy responses to warming ecosystems, and governance of new interventions in warming ecosystems. Through working directly with governments, NGOs, and funders, her overriding agenda is to transform governance of climate impacted systems. In the coming years, she will focus on this mission with faculty and PhD students in the Environmental Policy group.

The research of Prof. Morrison combines political science, public administration, geography and ecology to improve the governance of complex environmental problems. Morrison is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (elected 2022) and the Regional Studies Association (2020) and has held visiting appointments at Stanford University, University of Oregon, University of Kyoto, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her PhD in 2004 at the University of Queensland, supported by a Land and Water Australia scholarship and a visiting fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Between 2004-2008 she taught in the Master of Public Administration program in the School of Political and International Studies at Flinders University. During that time, she was awarded a visiting Fellowship at the University of Kyoto Disaster Prevention Institute in Japan. In 2008, Prof. Morrison joined the School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland where she co-led an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, geographers, planners, economists and lawyers on an ARC Super Science Project, Defend or Retreat?. She co-led the People and Ecosystems Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University between 2015-2022 and joined the newly formed School of Geography, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne in 2023.

She currently leads a new international team on Governing Environmental Change funded by the Australian Research Council discovery program (2022-2025) and the US Science for Nature and People Partnership (2023-2025).

Prof. Morrison has served on Scientific Advisory Committees for CGIAR-WorldFish, the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre, the Australian Institute of Marine Science-JCU Partnership, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and the Australian Government’s Reef 2050 Expert Panel. She is Associate Editor for npj Climate Action, and member of the Editorial Boards for Global Environmental Change and Earth System Governance. Her recent findings on the governance of changing ecosystems have been published in Nature, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, and WIREs Climate Change and featured in BBC documentaries and global media outlets such The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Le Monde. Her research has explained both the causes and consequences of complex environmental governance and the ways in which better policy can benefit the environment, economy and society.