Julia Talbot-Jones amongst greenery in a green jacket

“Then I went away skiing for years,” she says. “I did back-to-back winters, always in New Zealand for our winter and doing Northern Hemisphere seasons in Japan, Canada, and the United States. It was a great way to see the world, to work in different environments, and teach a range of people.”

She had a desire to create long-term environmental change.

“When I was doing my undergraduate study, a lot of the solutions being proffered to address environmental problems were focused on keeping people out—creating mainland islands, national parks—safe spaces away from people.

“I just didn’t know how effective those sort of responses would be on a global scale. I thought that changing human behaviour could be better than safe spaces for flora and fauna.

“But to articulate some kind of change, I needed to try and understand why someone would want to cut down trees or overfish.

“I figured I had to go back and learn what seemed the other side of the coin: economics.”

She returned to study, and after a graduate diploma in economics at Canterbury University and a Master of Arts (Economics) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a Fulbright scholarship, Julia began her PhD at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra in 2013.

She considered doctoral study in the United States, but wanted to generate some change for Aotearoa New Zealand.

“I had always felt lucky with the opportunities New Zealand had given me, and I wanted to give back,” she says.

“It was a three-year PhD programme at ANU that was globally ranked. At the beginning, I didn’t have a strong idea of what I wanted to do, but was interested in ways you could increase environmental-flow protection in a water system. I ended up looking at granting legal rights to rivers.

“I didn’t lead that work by any stretch but I undertook some formative economic analysis to try and ascertain what some of the behavioural implications might be.”

The end of her PhD research coincided with the passing of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Settlement) Act 2017, which brought global attention on how legal rights could be granted to rivers in a practical way.

Julia moved back across the Tasman in 2018 to begin work at Te Herenga Waka. Freshwater has provided a constant source of research since.

“One of the things that drove my choice of postgraduate study locations was water scarcity. California and Australia are both water scarce and both are constantly asking questions about how they can improve water management.

Julia Talbot-Jones standing in front a tree

“Growing up in Canterbury, I started noticing changes in the river systems decades ago. When I arrived back in New Zealand in 2018, it coincided with a growing public awareness of declining ecological health in our water systems and I felt that water was an area where I could contribute positively in terms of improving outcomes for communities and the environment.

“One of the things I really like about economics is it gives you a series of insights and tools for understanding why people make the choices that they do. I’m interested in thinking about ways we can encourage cooperation through incentivising changes in people’s behaviour.”

A three-year Marsden Fund project is under way on freshwater governance and possible ways of designing water markets to increase cooperation and coordination.

Julia says it is a pivotal time for New Zealanders given the massive environmental changes in train.

“I appreciate the Government’s verve and transformational approach to environmental legislation but the impacts it could have are large, and the changes are happening very quickly.

“The Resource Management Act reforms are massive, the freshwater reforms are massive, the Three Waters reforms are massive. The changes that go through could transform local government and decision-making processes for decades,” she says.

“It’s certainly an interesting time to be in environmental policy.”

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