Biography
Frank Sperling is a Senior Principal Research Scientist with Agriculture and Food, CSIRO. He is part of the leadership team of the Ag2050 initiative, which explores implications of different future scenarios for Australia’s agriculture, and co-author of the recently released CSIRO led multi-stakeholder report ‘Reshaping Australian Food Systems’.
Frank joined CSIRO in June 2022 bringing over 20 years of experience in sustainable development working for the World Bank, the World-wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He has managed multi-disciplinary teams, working at strategic and operational levels. Frank has engaged in global initiatives and project and programmatic activities in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and South East Asia and is linking his international experience with the focus now on the Australian and Pacific regions.
Frank enjoys researching and engaging in a broad range of sustainability issues, including food system transformations, sustainable land management, climate change mitigation and adaptation, carbon finance, REDD+, sustainable land management, green and blue economy concepts, biodiversity and natural resource management, sustainability transitions in the context of the SDGs and Paris Agreement. He has led and contributed to flagship reports, strategies and technical documents, book chapters and publications, including Nature Sustainability, One Earth, Global Change Biology, Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, Sustainability Science, Oceanography and Limnology and Climatic Change. Frank has previously held contributing and lead author roles with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).