Peter Newman

Peter William Geoffrey Newman AO (born 1945) is an environmental scientist, author and educator based in Perth, Western Australia. He is currently Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University and was awarded an Order of Australia for sustainable transport and urban design in 2014. He has a PhD degree in Chemistry (1972, University of Western Australia) and completed post doctoral studies in Environmental Science, Delft University, Dip EST, Environmental Science, 1972. Newman has written 20 books and over 330 papers on sustainable cities and is most known for creating the term ‘automobile dependence’ in the second half of the 1980s. He was closely associated with the redevelopment of Perth's rail system from 1979 to the present, which is now seen as a model for how car dependent cities can change towards more sustainable transport. He is a Lead Author for Transport on the IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.