The 21st century is northern Australia’s century—a region historically disregarded as intractable and useless is now recognised as being both ripe for economic exploitation and rich in biological diversity. Negotiating the transition from prehistory to futurism and balancing conservation and development is arguably one of Australia’s greatest challenges.

This symposium will interrogate serious questions about what sustainability means in practice. What is a sustainable city? Economy? Society? What makes for sustainable resource and energy use? Land use?

Will northern Australian development follow the same trajectory as southern Australia? Should the great rivers of the north be used to ‘drought proof’ southern Australia? Can Australia afford not to develop and people the north? What is the vision for northern development? At what point does the NT become economically self-sustainable and reduce its reliance on interstate subsidy? Is resource extraction the answer?

Can the nation find an economic basis that allows the conservation of the largest tracts of tropical savanna landscapes on Earth? Will biotechnology make currently marginal lands economically productive? Can new technologies substitute the intensive and localised management of biodiversity by Indigenous people? How can Indigenous people maintain cultural links to their ancestral lands yet find their place in the national and global economy? What are the research priorities to underpin the solutions to these problems?

This Symposium will explore these and many related questions about achieving sustainable northern development. If you are in the business of resource extraction, environmental management, water and waste, agribusiness, city planning and urban design, flora and fauna conservation, energy technologies, construction and infrastructure, mining and mineral processing…and if you want to have your say about the kind of Territory that will attract enterprise and create economic opportunities, while meeting our responsibility to sustainably manage a globally significant and vulnerable environment, then this is a symposium you should attend.