23-26 March 2009 Scoping Meeting Invited Speaker

Roger McLean

Dr. Roger McLean is Professor Emeritus in the School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, Australia. He has held appointments at two universities in New Zealand (Canterbury 1964-71 and Auckland 1978 -86) as well as in Australia (ANU, 1972-77 and UNSW since 1986 as Head of Geography and Oceanography for 12 years). He has been involved in WG2 activities since the early 1990s being LA in the SAR (Coastal Zones and Small Islands) CLA of the Coastal Zones and Marine Ecosystem chapter of the TAR, and LA of two chapters in AR4 (Coastal systems and Low-Lying Areas, and Small Islands). He was also CLA for two chapters in the IPCC's 1998 report on Regional Impacts (Small Island States and Tropical Asia).

Roger McLean is a coastal geographer with wide research experience in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Oceans. He completed his first degrees in New Zealand and PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, working on erosion processes around the coast of Barbados, West Indies. He has published extensively on shore platforms as well as coastal change and sedimentation on mixed sand and gravel beaches in New Zealand and sandy shores in eastern Australia. Research and publications on tropical coasts has included Australia's Great Barrier Reef, islands in the Pacific including Tokelau, Fiji, Kiribati and Tuvalu and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Major themes have included the impact of extreme events (specifically hurricanes/typhoons and tsunami) on coral reefs and oceanic islands, reconstruction of Holocene and recent sea level history using biological and geological indicators, and the role of sea-level change in the formation and evolution of atoll islands, particularly in Tuvalu and the Maldives.