Dr Tim Baynes

Dr Tim Baynes has worked on urban environmental sustainability for more than 20 years, particularly looking at scenario analysis of population, transport and infrastructure transitions, resource use and climate change impacts in cities. Tim led the simulations of urban development and infrastructure in the Australian National Outlook series of projects (2015, 2019). The former of these was published in Nature, internationally featuring on the front cover. He was a lead author on the UN International Resource Panel report, The Weight of Cities (2018) and contributing author to the Urban chapter of the Global Energy Assessment (2012). Dr Baynes has also co-authored multiple reports on resource use and efficiency in South and South East Asia for the United Nations Environment Programme. His recent research interests also include circular economy opportunities that are coincident with zero-waste or zero-carbon challenges of urban sustainability.

Concepts and techniques of industrial ecology to investigate the resource needs of society: the circular economy; urban growth and metabolism; direct and embodied impacts in consumption and production.

With researchers from 8 other universities I helped co-found an online virtual industrial ecology laboratory, the IELab, and also co-founded the commercial arm of IELab to provide credible, current, carbon footprint data and expertise at FootprintLab.

I have an enduring interest in industrial ecology at the city scale and the use of material and energy flow accounting, input-output analysis and complex systems science to address problems of urban environmental sustainability