Jane in an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland

Growing up in regional Australia, Jane O’Sullivan became aware of the environmental strains caused by human activity, and the limits that the environment would place on the human enterprise. She gained her PhD in Agricultural Science at the University of Melbourne, and undertook postdoctoral research in the UK at the University of Durham and the John Innes Institute. In 1991, she joined a zoological expedition to Andean cloud forests and Amazon rainforests of Ecuador and Peru, witnessing the relentless encroachment of settlers into the wilderness.

Joining the University of Queensland in 1992, she led international collaborative research on tropical root crops, working with semi-subsistence farmers in the Pacific and South East Asia, who struggle to maintain soil fertility as land use intensifies. From 2009, she turned attention to the demographic pressures on food security, economic development and environmental sustainability. She has participated in a wide range of cross-disciplinary collaborations with colleagues in ecological economics, environmental philosophy, climate change responses and family planning promotion and implementation. She has represented Sustainable Population Australia at United Nations climate change conferences, assisting African colleagues to bring their perspectives to these meetings. She is an affiliate of The Overpopulation Project (University of Gothenburg, Sweden).