2024 Scholarship Recipient Announced
“The RMLA scholarship program supports research shaping Aotearoa’s future by enhancing resource management and mātauranga Māori.”
After much deliberation, we are very pleased to announce Katerina Pihera-Ridge (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Rangiwewehi, Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui) as the sole recipient of this year’s RMLA Scholarship Award.
The Scholarship sub-committee noted Katerina’s exceptional qualifications and accomplishments and were delighted to offer her this well-deserved scholarship award of $5,000.00 in recognition of her hard work, dedication, and potential in the field of Resource Management.
The title of Katerina’s masters research (being undertaken via Massey University) is “What inter-Indigenous lessons can be learned from Aboriginal Australian traditional practices that promote Indigenous wildfire management and planning in a changing climate”? We are looking forward to receiving a progress report from Katerina together with the submission of an article for publication in our RM Journal and/or NZJEL.
“Climate change will bring new land management and planning challenges to Aotearoa including wildfire. Aboriginal knowledge of fire as a tool is both applied in practice and recognised in areas of the planning system in Australia. Indigenous planning is practitioner-led planning and by gaining more insights into Aboriginal cultural fire practices, we may learn how traditional knowledge can be applied and considered in wildfire land management in a local planning system that is void of wildfire planning. By interviewing identified Aboriginal fire practitioners, there is potential for inter-Indigenous knowledge transfer as well as assisting with deepening and remembering of Indigenous (Māori) fire (and planning) practices.”
Katerina Pihera-Ridge
Our scholarships are designed to encourage graduate students from a range of disciplines (law, planning, engineering, geography, science, landscape architecture, urban planning and resource management) to focus their research theses or dissertations on topics related to the application of resource management in New Zealand;
For more information on our annual scholarship programme, including eligibility and selection, please visit our scholarship webpage below.
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