Category Archives: Lectures

2025 Earle Lecture

Trumping Climate Change!

Ralph Sims

7.30 pm Wednesday, 11 June, Speirs Centre, Featherston Street, Palmerston North

Held jointly with Engineering New Zealand

New Zealand’s emissions per capita are around the 12th highest in the world. Reducing them has proved challenging, and meeting our internationally agreed targets is looking unlikely. So, is there any hope for future generations? There has to be. A lot has happened since the 2016 Royal Society Te Apārangi report ‘Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy for NZ’. The potential for a low-carbon future remains, but achieving it won’t be easy.

Professor Emeritus Ralph Sims began his energy research at Massey University in the early 1970s, making and testing biodiesel. In 2001, while on the Board of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), he helped establish New Zealand’s first energy efficiency and renewable energy strategy. From 2006 to 2010 he was seconded to the International Energy Agency in Paris. He chaired the panel of experts for the Royal Society Te Apārangi 2016 publication ‘Transition to a low-carbon economy for New Zealand’. He has been a lead author for five Mitigation Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2013, Professor Sims was appointed part-time to the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility, Washington DC, for a 6-year term. He became a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit in the King’s Birthday Honours list in 2023, for services to sustainable energy and climate mitigation.

The Earle Lecture is held every two years to celebrate the work of Professors Dick and Mary Earle, and their contribution to the profession of engineering in New Zealand and abroad.

Martian monsters, giant landslides, and recipes for disaster: Landslide curiosities, hazards, and a slippery future

Sam McColl

7.30 pm Tuesday, 20 May, Palmerston North Central Library, George Street, Palmerston North

Held jointly with the Geoscience Society of New Zealand

Sam McColl is a quantitative geomorphologist who applies cross-disciplinary approaches to solve problems spanning natural hazards, agriculture, engineering, and environment, with primary expertise in landslide processes and Quaternary geomorphology. He is the Engineering Geology Team Leader at GNS Science and the current President of the Geoscience Society of New Zealand.

Sam will take you on a foray through the fascinating world of landslides, from the unbelievably large landslides on Mars to common problems in your back yard. The talk will explore why New Zealand has so many landslides and why they cost more than any other natural hazard. Some thoughts will be given to the big questions in landslide science and projections for landslides in a warming world.

The most un-bird bird in the world: 21 years of discovering North Island Brown Kiwi on Ponui Island

Isabel Castro

7.30 pm Tuesday, 15 April, Palmerston North Central Library, George Street, Palmerston North

Kiwi ancestors were the lucky ones to survive the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago, and today they remain the closest extant branch of the dinosaurs, or, if you wish, the lowest branch of birds. Their physiology, behaviour, and genetics continue to fascinate us. Isabel Castro and her team have been studying one of the kiwi species, the brown kiwi, for the last 21 years and in this talk, Isabel will present some of their extraordinary findings.

Originally from Colombia, South America, Isabel has lived in New Zealand for the last 35 years and during 21 of those has been researching kiwi biology. Isabel is a wildlife biologist with broad interests including animal behaviour, parasite-host interactions, anatomy, morphology, sensory biology, and conservation. Her research is on island species, particularly birds, but also introduced mammals and charismatic land snails. Isabel has a passion for solving conservation problems, making new biological findings, and working with technology.