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At Charles Sturt University we are guided by the ethos yindyamarra winhanganha, a Wiradjuri phrase meaning the wisdom of knowing how to live well in a world worth living in. Students and staff are empowered to become sustainability champions, actively engaging in research, teaching, and community outreach endeavours with a commitment to enhance the well-being of all citizens.

The staff and students at Charles Sturt University have much to be proud of. As Australia's leading regional university and first certified carbon neutral university, everyday our people are undertaking important work to progress the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2022 Charles Sturt marked a number of significant milestones towards the 17 goals, including:

The Gulbali Institute launched new impactful research focused on agriculture, water and the environment.

The Collaborative Teacher's Aide Pathway enrolled 175 teacher education students to address the critical teacher shortages in New South Wales and support the broader delivery of quality education across Australia.

Our commitment to reducing Charles Sturt's carbon footprint improved as a result of expanding the solar panel program on the Bathurst campus and procuring more electricity from renewable sources.

Sustainability in all its forms is a core value embraced by Charles Sturt University staff and students, who passionately lead a variety of initiatives. These efforts include leading community resilience workshops and facilitating access to bicycles for international students to leading global conferences on sustainable development.

The 2022 Sustainable Development Goals report is a testament to the unwavering commitment of the university community to promote and live these goals.

In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, democratic states around the world have massively expanded executive powers. Much of this transfer of power has occurred by the delegation of legislative power from parliament to the executive. As will be explained, delegated legislation is a process of executive law-making whereby government ministers, departments, agencies or other officers are empowered to make regulations with the force of law. Although these powers can arguably be justified in some circumstances because of the need for swift and decisive action, there is room for reaonable debate about the scope, duration and conditions of such executive powers. Concerningly, scholars have demonstrated that the checks and balances that ordinarily constrain constitutional governance have come, during the pandemic, to tolerate many unbounded executive powers.

Agricultural and food networks have become increasingly private and powerful, closely coordinated or fully vertically integrated, self-regulated, global and experience-based. A new cohort of wealthier consumers is demanding new and different goods and services. Delivery of this consumer food experience requires a very well-coordinated value chain or value system. Coordination and cooperation among chain partners involved in these networks are mandatory if they are to be profitable and sustainable. The economic issue is: How should all the chain or system partners be aligned to deliver food experiences that maximise consumer willingness to pay, and also be efficient? And what if any is the role of government in organising or facilitating these systems? To answer these questions we reviewed the literature across a number of discipline areas as well as a variety of published evaluations of red meat innovations. We used this review to develop, outline and explain a new theoretical framework relating to value chain failure and the provision of value chain goods. We illustrated how this framework could have been applied to past red meat investments, and we proposed a procedure for assessing future RD&E proposals within this framework. All red meat stake holders should benefit from a greater appreciation of these issues in RD&E funding.

In the preparation phase for the writing this booklet, the research team (from the University of New England), including myself, Dr Sarah Wayland, and Professor Myfanwy Maple, developed a mixed methods research design. This means combining quantitative data – through an online survey – with qualitative analysis of key informant interviews, as well as a scoping review of all available literature. The study sought to explore:

• What might be the best practice guidelines for providing crisis and ongoing counselling to families of missing people?
• What advancements have there been in the counselling field that may be relevant to families and friends of missing people in Australia?
• How can information regarding supportive interventions be conveyed appropriately to health professionals seeking to support this population group?

The gathering of data from individuals with lived experience had approval from the University of New England Human Research Ethics Committee (HE18-029). The scoping review of the literature followed the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) in identifying therapeutic interventions, reflections on counselling and additional scope for the role of other professionals and the community in responding to families of missing people. The link for the survey was shared, with gratitude, by the FFMPU, via State and Territory police jurisdictions, via the National Missing Persons Coordination Centre (NMPCC), via charities such as the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN), and other social media pages who respond to the needs of families of missing people.

As lead researcher, I also interviewed professionals working in the research or service delivery space, identifying therapeutic trends for those who required counselling support while the person was missing via key informant interviews. These interviews included the FFMPU and Ms Cecilia Hammell from the University of Wollongong, a PhD candidate currently exploring people's ability to tolerate uncertainty and the coping strategies they use to manage the emotions they are experiencing. I also had discussions with Dr Lonneke Lenferink, currently with Utrecht University. Lonneke's recent study examined mechanisms and treatment of psychopathology in people exposed to a potential traumatic loss. The final draft was reviewed by Professor Myfanwy Maple, and a sensitivity reader with lived experience was employed to ensure the booklet accurately identified the lived experience of those living in the space of ambiguity.

Section One provides an introduction to what typically occurs when someone is missing. I discuss how we define a missing person, how often it occurs – by relying on newly released data from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) (2017) – and I also begin to weave together what happens when we don't have answers, especially in a solution-focused society intent on solving mysteries.

Section Two reviews the current empirical research and grey literature available – the technical reports, information guides and support documents available to families of missing people.

Section Three explores the role of 'others' – the people who sit outside of the lived experience of having someone missing, such as the counsellors, police, other families and friends, and the media – and proposes ways in which they can be mindful about how to interact with families and friends of missing people. This section is highlighted for professionals and key collaborators of support to help them in the journey of support provision.

In conclusion, and throughout the pondering of the question presented earlier, this framework reflects on the fact that there is no answer to how much a person can bear, but I am reassured that supportive interventions and social connectedness can ease the burden of not knowing.

The Soil CRC national survey project, Surveying On-Farm Practices, was initiated in 2019 to implement surveys in all six states, in partnership with local farming organisations. The regions were selected to represent a range of different farming systems and bioregions, with a major factor being the willingness of local groups to partner with the survey team to develop the survey and support its implementation. The purpose of the survey was to gain a broad understanding of the drivers of on-farm decision making across, and in-depth understanding within, Australian farming systems.

The 2020 Northern Wheatbelt social benchmarking survey is part of this national Soil CRC project led by Dr Hanabeth Luke of Southern Cross University (SCU), jointly funded by the Soil CRC, and the West Midlands Group. Data gathered will contribute to wider Soil CRC research efforts. For example, Soil CRC researchers will be able to explore farmer knowledge of soil heath and management; the impact of farmer participation in soil health groups; and the implementation of best practice soil management by farmers.

The Soil CRC national survey project, Surveying On-Farm Practices, was initiated in 2019 to implement surveys in all six states, in partnership with local farming organisations. The regions were selected to represent a range of different farming systems and bioregions, with a major factor being the willingness of local groups to partner with the survey team to develop the survey and support its implementation. The purpose of the survey was to gain a broad understanding of the drivers of on-farm decision making across, and in-depth understanding within, Australian farming systems.

The 2020 Eyre Peninsula social benchmarking survey is part of this national Soil CRC project led by Dr Hanabeth Luke of Southern Cross University (SCU), jointly funded by the Soil CRC, Ag Innovation and Research Eyre Peninsula (AIR EP, a CRC partner) and the Eyre Peninsula Natural Resource Management (NRM) Board. Data gathered will contribute to wider Soil CRC research efforts. For example, Soil CRC researchers will be able to explore farmer knowledge of soil heath and management; the impact of farmer participation in soil health groups; and the implementation of best practice soil management by farmers.

1. Understand the experience of being a host for Airbnb.
2. Identify the challenges and opportunities posed by Airbnb as perceived by for the formal accommodation sector.
3. Evaluate the economic performance of Airbnb vis a vis the formal accommodation sector.
4. Identify any relationship between online customer comments and economic performance of Airbnb for the region.
5. Compare the economic performance of Airbnb in the Canterbury region with other key regions in New Zealand.

Art Music (broadly referred to as ‘classical’ music) is often brought to the regions from urban areas as a form of musical missionary work, bringing ‘culture’ to the locals. Art music, however, also exists in and of itself in non-metropolitan regional centres. Separate from urban activity, it takes place over several layers within regional communities; from amateurbased ensembles to professional performers. There is strong audience support for this genre of music in the regions, but measures need to be taken to strengthen the connection, relevance, and accessibility of music for audiences who may not be exposed to, or feel confident in attending ‘classical’ music events or activities.

There is currently no operational method of managing irrigation in Australia's sugar industry on the basis of systematic, direct monitoring of sugar plant physiology. Satellite remote sensing systems, having come a long way in the past 10 years now offer the potential to apply the current ground-based 'FAO' or 'crop coefficient (K_c)' approach in a way that offers a synoptic view of crop water status across fields. In particular, multi-constellation satellite remote sensing, utilising a combination of freely available Landsat and Sentinel 2 imagery, supplemented by paid-for imagery from other existing satellite systems is capable of providing the necessary spatial resolution and spectral bands and revisit frequency. The significant correlations observed between K_c and spectral vegetation indices (VIs), such as the widely used normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) in numerous other crops bodes well for the detection and quantification of the spatial difference in evapotranspiration (ET_c) in sugar which is necessary for irrigation scheduling algorithms. Whilst the NDVI may not serve as the appropriate index for sugarcane, given the potential of the NDVI to saturate at the high leaf area index observed in fully developed cane canopies, other VIs such as the Green-NDVI (GNDVI) may provide the response required. In practise, with knowledge of an appropriate K_c-VI relationship, K_c obtained from time-series (weekly) remotely sensed data, integrated with local agrometeorological data to provide ET_o, would provide estimates of ET_c from which site-specific irrigated water requirements (IWR) could be estimated. The use of UAVs equipped with multispectral sensors, even active optical sensors (AOS), to 'fill the gaps' in optical data acquisition due to cloud cover is conceivable. Cross calibration of any passive imaging system, as with the multi-constellation satellite data is essential. The use of radar images (microwave remote sensing) (for example, Sentinel 1&2 C-SAR, 5m) offers all weather, day-and-night capabilities although further work is necessary to understand the link between the radar back scatter, which is responding to surface texture, and evapotranspiration (and K_c). Further R&D in ascertaining the K_c-VI relationships during crop growth is necessary, as is the testing of multi-sensor cross-calibration and the relationship between radar remote sensing and K_c. Existing irrigation advisory delivery systems in Australia such as IrriSAT should be investigated for their applicability to the sugar industry. The estimated season cost to a user for a sugarcane irrigation advisory service in Australia, based on the use of data from existing optical satellite imaging systems and utilising the K_c approach, is likely to be of the order of US$2-3/ha.

Natural hazards, such as bushfires, cyclones, floods, storms, heatwaves, earthquakes and tsunamis, have always occurred and will continue to occur in Australia. These natural hazards frequently intersect with human societies to create natural hazard emergencies that, in turn, cause disasters.

The effects of natural hazards on Australian communities are influenced by a unique combination of social, economic, natural environment, built environment, governance and geographical factors.

Australian communities face increasing losses and disruption from natural hazards, with the total economic cost of natural hazards in Australia averaging $18.2 billion per year between 2006 and 2016 (Deloitte Access Economics, 2017). This is expected to almost double by 2030 and to average $33 billion per year by 2050 (Deloitte Access Economics, 2016). The social impacts of disasters are also substantial. Costs associated with social impacts may persist over a person’s lifetime and can be greater than the costs of tangible damages (Deloitte Access Economics, 2016).

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of some natural hazard types in Australia (BOM & CSIRO, 2018). An increasing population, demographic change, widening socio-economic disparity, expensive infrastructure and the location of communities in areas of high natural hazard risk also contributes to the potential for increasing losses from natural hazards.

There are two prominent schools of thought about the influence of natural hazards in human societies:

• a vulnerability perspective, where distributional inequalities in physical, social, economic and environmental factors influence the susceptibility of people to harm and the ability of people to respond to hazards (Cutter et al., 2003; Birkmann, 2006; Bankoff, 2019).
• a resilience perspective, where people are learning to live with a changing, unpredictable and uncertain environment (Folke et al., 2002; Bankoff, 2019), of which natural hazards are a part. Resilience is a process linking a set of capacities to a positive trajectory of functioning and adaptation after a disturbance (Norris et al., 2008).

As such, disaster resilience can be understood as a protective characteristic that acts to reduce the effects of, and losses from, natural hazards. Resilience arises from the capacities of social, economic and government systems to prepare for, respond to and recover from a natural hazard event, and to learn, adapt and transform in anticipation of future natural hazard events.

The Australian Educational Technologies Trends (AETT) report provides an overview to assist teachers, school leaders, academics and industry, in understanding and planning for the use of digital technologies in Australian schools over the next five years - 2019 to 2023.

The report explores four research categories: 1. Educational technologies that will be used; 2. Challenges schools will face; 3. Trends that will have the most impact; and 4. Approaches schools will take to computer education. The report presents an overall consensus in each research category, and the views of particular contexts: subgroups such as parents, school leaders, teachers, students, etc. whose perspective often varies from the overall consensus. Cost-benefit and professional learning priorities are also identified.

The AETT report has been a collaborative effort from 118 of Australia’s leading educational technologies teachers, academics and industry leaders, invited to provide guidance on the trends occurring in the use of digital technologies in Australian primary and secondary schools. The AETT report was supported by the Australian Council for Computers in Education (ACCE), the CSIRO through the Digital Careers Australia program, and Griffith University.