Supporting research for vulnerable communities

The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network – AURIN – provides crucial data and digital infrastructure to support evidence-based urban and regional research, and policy development. AURIN is a connecting point between academia, government and industry, facilitating access to hard-to-get data and offering digital solutions for hard-to-do analytical workflows. 

Supporting researchers and analysts, their work focuses on three priority challenges: the impact of climate change, energy transition and demographic transformation in Australia’s towns and cities as detailed here:  

1. Impact of climate change – From the heat island effect to devastating floods and bushfires, climate change will increasingly threaten population wellbeing and safety, infrastructure resilience and sustainable housing. Effective adaptation will require access to broader more granular datasets, as well as more sophisticated analytical and predictive tools. 
2. Impact of energy transition – Decarbonisation of Australia’s energy supply chains and economy-at-large, from transport to food production, will need significant changes to our national infrastructure, economic drivers and social behaviour. Anticipating the consequences of such changes and optimising the roll-out of a zero-emission circular economy will require the coming together of data owned by public and private sector, in secure digital environments.  
3. Impact of demographic transformation – Australia faces significant challenges associated with an ageing population, a sustained flow of immigration, a workforce in transition, an inadequate housing market and an unsustainable concentration of population in capital cities. Policy and lawmakers will need better evidence-based information to drive Australia’s sustainable growth. 

In the absence of the AAF’s single sign-on and trusted identity framework, collaborative efforts in social planning – spanning academia, government, and industry – face significant hurdles due to restricted access. Through integration with the AAF’s Federation, AURIN enables users from all sectors to seamlessly access critical datasets and analytical tools, driving forward research into Australia’s urban and regional development. 

The AAF operates Australia’s identity Federation for research and is a member of a global network of over 78 federations. Providing secure, federated identity services, that are universally adopted across Australian universities and the CSIRO. Internationally, the AAF is recognised for its leadership in facilitating secure access to both national and global research ecosystems. 

“AURIN is committed to ensuring that its research community can access FAIR data in a secure and reliable environment,” said Professor Pascal Perez, Director of AURIN. “This commitment demands a robust trust and identity framework.”  

 By leveraging the AAF, AURIN empowers researchers nationwide with authenticated access to essential data and tools – enabling evidence-based solutions to Australia’s most pressing social planning challenges. 

Learn more:  

• AURIN – High Impact Projects 

AAF has partnered with Microscopy Australia exploring impact tracking through persistent identifiers (PIDs).

Microscopy Australia are a consortium of university-based microscopy facilities that more than 3,500 researchers across Australia use each year. They aim to empower Australian science and innovation by making advanced microscopes accessible to all researchers.

One of the greatest challenges in research is to connect and report on distributed services and this incubator explores how richer reporting, impact tracking and usage data can be provided through ORCID iDs and PIDs across national research infrastructure.