Members
Stuart Browning
Stuart is a Climate Scientist at Risk Frontiers, with extensive experience studying the weather and climate of coastal and alpine environments in the Australian and Asia-Pacific region.
Stuart’s research focuses on understanding the large-scale climatic drivers of extreme weather events to better quantify risk over seasonal to multi-decadal timescales. Stuart has produced a range of scientific publications, consultant and technical reports on extreme coastal weather, wave climate, east coast lows and bushfires.
Previously Stuart was a Lecturer in Climate Science at Macquarie University where he taught and convened subjects ranging from atmospheric dynamics to long-term climate change. Using a range of data and tools, including reanalyses, model simulations, and paleoclimate records, Stuart’s research spans multiple timescales, from the dynamical evolution of individual weather systems through to the multi-centennial scale evolution of the climate system.
Mark Grenning
Mark represents all aspects of electricity and gas supply to large companies in the National Energy Market. He is involved in a wide range of industry and regulatory advisory bodies.
Previously, he was a member of the AER’s Consumer Challenge Panel for five years and lectured in the Energy Masters program at the University of Melbourne for five years. Prior to that, he worked around the world for 30 years with Rio Tinto specialising in electricity and gas supply to operations.
Alexandra Humphrey Cifuentes
Alexandra is an economist with a focus on using economics to help address the challenges and opportunities in the energy, water, liveability and broader public policy areas. She is at the forefront of non-market impact monetisation across a range of sectors, including the social cost of outages, and the value of reduced urban heat-related disease burden and energy infrastructure requirements from investment in tree canopy.
Alexandra has led numerous projects at Frontier Economics aimed at valuing the benefits of resilient blue, green and grey infrastructure. This includes leading the teams assisting Energy Policy WA in understanding the resilience value of underground powerlines, a NSW Government department in understanding the value of flood resilience and a range of water utilities in assessing options to improve water security across Australia.
Benjy Lee
Ever since becoming an environmental engineer in the late 1990s Benjy has been involved in the translation of climate-related science and technology development to assist infrastructure planning. This has spanned from undertaking extreme rainfall analysis to inform water resource planning at Sinclair Knight Merz (now Jacobs), to designing climate change training programs for councils and businesses, and then leading energy and climate policy at energy utility Jemena for over a decade.
Benjy now works as an independent consultant and continues to collaborate closely with a wide range of policy, regulatory, research, consumer, community and industry stakeholders on climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives in Australia and internationally. Benjy is an Advisory Board Member to the UNSW ARC Research Hub for Integrated Energy Storage Solutions.
Katie Vines
Katie is a climate change adaptation and resilience expert, with over 15 years experience. She brings systems approaches to understanding risk and building resilience in complex and interconnected contexts.
As an Industry Adjunct Associate Professor at UTS and Associate Director of Climate Risk and Resilience at Aurecon, Katie leads the development and execution of projects implementing scenario-based climate risk assessment and planning. She has experience in developing and implementing monitoring and evaluation systems for climate adaptation and resilience, deploying innovation and sense-making approaches in a resilience context, and making the case for resilience investment.
Previously, Katie was the Director of Adaptation and Resilience at the Climate-KIC Australia delivering complex multi-party climate risk and resilience projects. She has also held senior roles at C40 Cities Climate Leadership Coalition and the NSW Government, as well as time working in the Australian Government.
