Australian ecological economics conference in July

The Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics is holding a conference on Queensland's Sunshine coast on 3 to 6 July this year, with the theme Re-inventing Sustainability: A climate for change.

The conference program is here. Some of the topics sounds pretty interesting:

• Resilience, thresholds and surprise in interdependent natural and social systems
• Experimental economics
• Modelling the relations between the environment and the economy
• Analysis and communication of uncertainty, risk, and extreme events
• Understanding complex adaptive systems
• Environmental accounting

If you're interested in presenting a paper, abstracts are due 15 April.

Ecological economics is a transidisciplinary field that looks at the connections between ecology and economics and views the economic system as a social system that operates within a broader physical / ecological system. Traditional economics certainly doesn't ignore the environment, but tends to view it as an element of the economy that provides inputs and services. If you want to know more about ecological economics, check out the International Society for Ecological Economics or the Ecological Economics Blog.