Current role

Max Finlayson is an adjunct Professor in the Gulbali Institute for Agriculture, Water & Environment at Charles Sturt University, and the Chair for the Wise Use of Wetlands, IHE Delft, Institute for Water Education, Delft, Netherlands.

 

Career history

• Professor for Ecology & Biodiversity & Director of Institute for Land, Water & Society, Charles Sturt University, Albury, NSW, Australia
• Principal Researcher, Wetland Management; International Water Management Institute, Colombo, Sri Lanka (2005-07): program leader (budgets, human resources, administration);
• Director; Environmental Research Institute, Department of Environment & Heritage, Darwin, Australia (2002-05).
• Research Manager & Wetland Conservation Program Leader; Environmental Research Institute, Federal Department of Environment, Jabiru (Kakadu National Park), Australia (1993-2002).
• Assistant Director, Wetlands; International Waterbird and Wetland Research Bureau, Slimbridge, United Kingdom (1989-2002).
• Researcher, Alligator Rivers Region Research Institute, Federal Department of Environment, Jabiru (Kakadu National Park), Australia (1984-1989)
• Researcher, CSIRO Division of Irrigation Research, Griffith, Australia (1980-1984)

 

Specialization

He is an international wetland ecologist with experience in water pollution, mining and agricultural impacts, invasive species, climate change, and human wellbeing and wetlands.

He has participated in global assessments such as those conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Global Environment Outlook 4 & 5, and Water Management in Agriculture. Since the early 1990s he has been a technical adviser to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and has written extensively on wetland ecology and management and contributed to the development of concepts and methods for wetland inventory, assessment and monitoring, and undertaken many site-based assessments in many countries.

He was Editor-in-Chief of the major scholarly work, The Wetland Book, published by Springer in 2018, and was Editor-in-Chief of the CSIRO Publishing journal, Marine and Freshwater Research from 2013-2025.

He has also been actively involved in environmental NGOs and from 2002-07 was President of the governing council of the global NGO Wetlands International, from 2019-20 was President of the international board of directors of the Society of Wetland Scientists, and chairs the Environmental Strategy Advisory Panel for the Winton Wetlands Committee in Victoria (Australia).

Website: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/gulbali/find-experts/profiles/aquatic-science/max-finlayson