Robert Skinner

Robert Skinner

Rob Skinner is Professorial Fellow and Director of Monash University’s Water for Liveability Centre and also Deputy Chair of the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities.

Location Melbourne, Australia.

Activity

  • thanks for these specific questions Francis. I will ask Tony Wong to address them and post some answers in the next few days. I also intend to ask Peter Breen to address the issue of nuisance reports - a really relevant question particularly when traditional approaches aim to keep the catchment as drained and as dry as possible and "bury" in pipes nuisances...

  • Robert Skinner made a comment

    referring to Mary-Anne's question below:... WSUD technical solutions that have been proven to work in one city, Melbourne for example, cannot be automatically transferred to other cities with different biophysical conditions. At Monash we have been doing a lot of work to identify what WSUD solutions work (and don't work) in different places, such as in...

  • Retail water companies is a term in Australia which means the provision of water or sewerage services to customers, but it is by a company that is publicly owned, not privatised.

  • thank you all for your feedback. We have been asked to repeat the course later this year so we will take on board your suggestions to improve the course for the next cohort. I agree with some of you who commented that some of the videos were a bit long - but have you ever tried to ask a passionate academic or practitioner to talk less?! We had an aim of...

  • thanks for this feedback Tony - the main reason for presenting the Melbourne experience is to illustrate the principles of a comprehensive flood resilience strategy. In Melbourne's case our planners over the decades have succeeded in minimising the fluvial flood risks by applying strict planning controls that meant development in the flood plains has been...

  • I agree with many of you that Professor Olsson has a wonderful way of putting the water-energy nexus into context. Please pass on his key messages to all your friends and colleagues - we need to have more "evidence based" public debates about water systems in our cities!

  • Green and living walls that are designed to provide filtration systems for grey water, as well as irrigation for the plants themselves, are in their infancy. They are really a new form of biofiltration system - a vertical wetland!

  • it's up to individual water companies to mandate new areas for purple pipe supply - it is not a universal (across all of Melbourne) requirement. this makes sense because not all areas are suitable for third pipe solutions.

  • Thank you for such thoughtful feedback on this quite session. John Holland reminds us that there are links to the 2004 Monash/CRC Winter School that goes into these topics in much more detail. If you have the time we recommend that look at the Winter School videos. they often include quite interesting Q&A sessions that you will also find useful.

  • The work being done in Adelaide is with aquifers is quite impressive. Unfortunately Melbourne does not have aquifers and ground water resources that are as amenable to MAR, although City West Water (in Melbourne) has been investigating this sort of approach. You may wish to approach them to see how their work in this area is going.

  • Robert Skinner made a comment

    A number of people are saying the content in the first two weeks is a bit too technical for them. This is good feedback for any future courses we develop. We had to strike a balance with the technical input because some of the social/political aspects in the later sessions have more relevance if the scientific and technical aspects of the strategies and...

  • This is really interesting feedback, thank you. A lot of the commentary is around how this approach to planning can happen in practice - it's all very good in theory, but can it be made to happen in the "real world". We have dedicated Week 6 of this course to this very question.

  • Hello everyone. We at Monash are delighted to have such a wide spread of participants. it means that we will all be able to learn from the wide range of experiences and insights of people from around the globe.

  • thanks you for your constructive comments on this topic. It is interesting to note that in many countries the biggest impact of climate change is not lack of water, but too much water in the form of damaging floods. However, in the case of floods, the principle of "resilience through diversity" still applies - as we will discuss in detail in Week 4.

    It is...