Colin Butler is an Honorary Professor in the College of Health and Medicine at the Australian National University (ANU) with a longstanding interest in health, development, the environment, and social justice. He is recognized internationally for his activism for sustainable health and poverty reduction, including being named “one of a 100 doctors for the planet”, in 2009, by the French Environmental Health Association. In 2018 he received the Tony McMichael public health, ecology, and environment award, from the Public Health Association of Australia. In 2014, he became the first health contributor to the IPCC (and 1st Australian contributor) to be arrested for civil disobedience over climate change; in this case for protesting Australian coal exports.
He has published ~300 articles, chapters, and letters in scholarly journals and books, or as refereed conference papers or reports. He served as sole editor of the book “Climate Change and Global Health” (CABI, 2014, 2016) and senior editor of the book Health of People, Places and Planet: Reflections based on Tony McMichael’s four decades of contribution to epidemiological understanding (ANU Press, 2015). For several years he was a co-editor of the journal EcoHealth.