Roger is Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Industries & Liveable Cities. He is co-lead of the Systemic Risk, Disaster and Resilience group with Celeste Young.

The group focuses on developing effective decision making in response to climate change, natural disasters and the need for sustainable development. The approach is transdisciplinary, bringing together stakeholders, knowledge of their experience and decision-making context with formal knowledge drawn from the physical and social sciences, including economics. They have a track record of producing research impacts on issues that require a systems-based approach to decision making.

He is also the architect of the Living Climate, which describes climate as a complex, self-organising heat engine. Records from observations and coupled models show that a changing climate progresses through a series of steady-state regimes, producing rapid changes in climate risk. Exploration of how this heat engine has evolved has yielded concepts such as evolutionary emergence and thermodynamic metabolism. 

To 2009, Roger worked for CSIRO for 13 years, developing methods for climate risk assessment. Qualified in earth science, he has worked on urban ecology, been a museum curator and technical essayist, public radio host and researcher working on past, present and future climates and their impacts.

He was Coordinating Lead Author on the chapter Foundations of Decision Making in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group II Fifth Assessment Report. He was also Coordinating Lead Author on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and a lead author on the Third Assessment Report. In 2004, he was awarded the Burtoni Prize for Adaptation Science.