After finishing a science degree in zoology and ecology and a PHD focusing on ants, Professor Lesley Hughes switched her focus to researching climate change and fighting to stop our climate crisis.
“Once I started reading about it, I got more and more interested in it and have stayed in it ever since,” Lesley begins.
After growing up in Normanhurst, Lesley is now a woman of so many hats, it’s almost difficult to keep count.
Not only is she a professor of biology at Macquarie University, but the North Shore local is also the executive dean of the university’s Faculty of Science and Engineering; a former Federal climate commissioner; a director for World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Australia; a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists; and a founding councillor with the Climate Council of Australia.
Lesley’s impressive career is driven by her passion for positive change on an environmental, political, and social level.
Her advocacy to tackle the climate crisis led, in part, to the establishment of The Climate Commission in 2011
The body was set up as the then-Labor government thought there needed to be more communication about climate change science.
“I was appointed as one of the six climate commissioners by the government, and we spent the next two and a half years giving talks in regional centres, cities and towns everywhere,” she explains.
“When Tony Abbot became Prime Minister, he abolished the Climate Commission. We knew that was coming, so we already had a plan to keep going. We started the Climate Council, which is publicly funded.”
After starting with five climate councillors and a staff of one, the Council now has 15 councillors and a staff of more than 50 people.
“We started the Climate Media Centre, the Emergency Leaders of Climate Action, we started another organisation called the City’s Power Partnership which supports local government action, and we are still going.”
Lesley tells North Shore Living that people often ask her, ‘What can I do?’ to which she responds:
“If people are feeling helpless and a bit hopeless and depressed, the best thing to do is to take action collectively, to join together with like-minded people”
Professor Lesley Hughes.
“If people are feeling helpless and a bit hopeless and depressed, the best thing to do is to take action collectively, to join together with like-minded people.”
Lesley says that her main research focus has been around the impacts of climate change on species and ecosystems.
“Australia’s got such wonderful wildlife and such interesting ecosystems, there’s more than enough to research here and we know that our species and ecosystems are in grave danger from the impacts of climate change,” she says.
When asked about some of her biggest achievements, Lesley gave the unsurprisingly modest response that ‘not any one individual, scientist or communicator can achieve anything substantive on their own’.
“I think what I’m most proud of is being part of a group, like the Climate Council, which is full of very diverse people with very diverse expertise,” she says.