David Holmes Email & Phone Number

I am an award-winning researcher in climate change communications, and Founder, in January 2024, of Climate Communications Australia (CCA), a not-for-profit charity dedicated to deep systems change in how media cover climate change. CCA incubates and delivers programs that influence upstream media industry responsibilities toward climate change reporting and audience attention. My expertise has developed out of academic research as a media sociologist and the experience of founding, in 2016, the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub (https://www.monash.edu/mcccrh), where I served as Inaugural Director for 7 years. Whilst at the Hub, I was responsible for brokering 7.5 million dollars in philanthropic and government funding, for over a dozen projects on climate communications, including the flagship programs: climate communicators and changing climates. In overseeing the establishment of these projects I brokered partnerships with weather presenters across the ABC, the Nine, Seven and Ten Networks as well as Sky TV which led to the broadcast of over 1000 time-series graphics of climate trends around Australia in every capital city media market. As monitoring and evaluation of our programs during this time showed, the Hub played a major role in ending the climate wars in Australia and also demonstrably improved climate literacy in Australia on a national scale. I was very proud of these achievements as well as the role I played in establishing nodes in Indonesia and Malaysia in 2022, to replicate the impact the Hub had in Australia. During this time, I co-edited, with Dr. Lucy Richardson, the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Communicating Climate Change (2020), that involved 45 authors from 39 universities around the world. Since 2018, I have been a member of the Media-Climate Network of Climate Journalists across 22 countries. Since 2019 I have served as a National Council Member of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, and a Climate Science and Knowledge Management Expert Panellist for the Australian Pacific Partnership Support Unit. Also since 2019, I was very proud to receive, from Monash, the Dean of Arts Award for Excellence for Research Impact (2019), the Dean of Science’s Award for Excellence in Research Impact (2020) and Dean of Arts Award for Excellence in Research Enterprise 2022.

Listed skills include Lecturing, Higher Education, Teaching, Research Design, and 9 others.