Political theorist, philosopher, and scholar of world politics and international law.
Anthony Burke is professor of environmental politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He is co-principal of the Planet Politics Institute and a senior fellow of the Earth System Governance network.
He also worked as a principal research officer in the Senate environment, communications and arts committee where he led the drafting of reports on Australia’s response to climate change and the Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu national park, among others, and was an activist on campaigns for independence in East Timor and West Papua and against the war on Bougainville with the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.
““Net zero by 2050” has become a widely repeated slogan across governments, business, and parts of the climate movement, but it is a pseudoscientific delusion with no credible basis in physical science. It assumes that time stands still, even as record levels of carbon emissions are polluting the atmosphere every hour, forgetting that the earth is a dynamic system that responds unpredictably to intensifying human interventions.
This temporal assumption of scale fails to account for linear let alone nonlinear effects. Yet, it conveniently allows for further delay while assuming that carbon pollution can be smoothly scaled to (and beyond) planetary boundaries without catastrophic levels of risk. With astonishing hubris, it assumes that states can dictate time to the earth.”
—Anthony Burke & Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic (MIT Press, 2025), p. 178.
Research & Writing
Anthony is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across philosophy, social theory, political ecology, international relations, earth system science, and international law. His recent work has focused on environmental political theory and new models of earth system governance for the Anthropocene: proposals for ecoregion assemblies and an earth system council, a coal elimination treaty, and a climate governance architecture for a net zero world hovering at planetary tipping points.
This research has been published in the books The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene (with Stefanie Fishel, MIT Press, 2025) and Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (with Dany Celermajer et al., Cambridge University Press, 2025), and articles such as “Interspecies Cosmopolitanism” (Review of International Studies, 2023), “An Architecture for a Net Zero World” (Global Policy, 2022), “Blue Screen Biosphere” (International Political Sociology, 2019), and “Planet Politics” (Millennium, 2016).
Anthony is also an engaged public commentator and analyst, publishing articles on the Paris Agreement COPs for the Lowy Interpreter, environmental crimes and nuclear crisis in Ukraine for The Washington Post and Nature, and ecocide and biodiversity politics for The Conversation.