2026 Edwin Cuthbert Hall Lecture

Are biodiversity hotspots pyrodiversity hotspots? Deep-time fire stewardship in tropical Asia

Dr. Rebecca Hamilton

Tuesday, 24 November | Chau Chak Wing Museum

Reception- Sounds Cafe from 4:30pm
Lecture- 5:15pm doors for 5:30pm start 

Tropical forests sit at the heart of the twinned biodiversity and climate crisis: they hold the greatest terrestrial stock of carbon and are home to more than half of the world’s plant species. Despite archaeological evidence revealing that people have lived in and used tropical systems for tens of millennia, tropical forests are still primarily prioritised for conservation on the presumption that they are relatively pristine, vulnerable habitats, best shielded from human disturbance. In Southeast Asia, this includes swidden agriculture, on which an estimated 14 to 34 million people depend.

Swidden societies have long occupied highland borderlands beyond the reach of the state, much of which overlaps with global biodiversity hotspots. Today, as these borderlands are increasingly brought under state control, swidden is giving way either to intensive monoculture, justified on the grounds that swidden has already caused ecological destruction, or to strict protection, where traditional land management is suppressed. Both trajectories assume that people are a threat to these forests. Yet the resilience and composition of these forests may, in fact, be dictated by human disturbance in the first place.

In this lecture, I draw on palaeoecological records from highland Southeast Asia to explore the deep history of people in tropical forests, and what it means for how we conserve them.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Rebecca is a senior lecturer in geography at the University of Sydney who is interested in how long-term connections between people, landscapes and climate shape our understanding of planetary sustainability. Her research combines palaeoecology, exploring how landscapes respond to climate, fire and human disturbance over decades to millions of years, with historical ecology, reconstructing how shifting social perspectives have shaped ecosystems and how communities value and manage protected places today. These threads come together in two ARC Discovery Projects investigating how agriculture and ecology have interacted through time in tropical Asia. Underpinning her work is the goal to use the past to inform how we sustain a habitable planet in the face of accelerating global change.

A reception will precede the event at Sounds Cafe from 4:30pm.

Venue 

Chau Chak Wing Museum
Nelson Meers Auditorium
University Place (Across from the Quadrangle)
Camperdown Campus
Click here for map

Image: courtesy of Rebecca Hamilton