Brenda Dyack

Dr Dyack is a resource and environmental economist with over 30 years of experience in Parliamentary, Commonwealth, state and local government economic policy as well as academia and the CSIRO.

Brenda’s career focus has been on incorporating research evidence into new policy. Her particular talent is in creatively facilitating multidisciplinary research team efforts. Her interests focus on research that combines disciplines for better understanding how we in society can make better decisions in support of a more sustainable and equitable future path of development.

Brenda has published in international and Australian journals, including in The Economic Record and the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. She was recently appointed as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra.

With a career that has spanned both the academic and policy spheres, Brenda has experience in teaching economics, leading research at CSIRO and ABARES into policy relevant aspects of water use reform, developing water reform policies at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and then implementing those reforms at the Murray Darling Basin Authority.

In Australia, Brenda is well regarded for her supervision and personal work measuring the social and economic impacts of policy, and particularly for developing projects for estimating non market values for use in cost benefit analysis. In Canada she is known for her early economics and financial analysis work developing consistent costing methods across municipal employee groups to underpin wage negotiations; providing Commonwealth advice on commercialisation of alternative fuels; designing a system of performance indicators for the Ontario Council of Universities; forecasting expenditure streams for the Ontario Finance Department; and for her advice on the impact of the introduction of the GST in Canada.

• University of Canberra—member of the Murray-Darling Basin Futures Collaborative Research Network. Undertaking research to identify and support paths for sustainable futures for the Murray-Darling Basin. Collaboration with ecologists, other environmental scientists, other economists and social scientists on research projects that pursue best practice in allocating resources across environmental, economic and social goals for a sustainable future (2012-14)

Rolfe, John and Brenda Dyack (2010) ‘Valuing recreation in the Coorong, Australia, with travel cost and contingent behaviour models’, The Economic Record, December, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2010.00683.x/full

ABARE, BRS, ABS (2009), Socio-economic context for the Murray-Darling Basin: Decision Analysis Report, prepared for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, lead author and project manager, http://www.mdba.gov.au/media-pubs/publications/socio-economic-context