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How we understand the contemporary socio-environmental challenges associated with climate change is shaped by our research disciplines. This paper explores how interdisciplinary collaboration can form new understandings of, and communication about, environmental change. On Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, mass coral bleaching prompts researchers to consider how our work can contribute to environmental stewardship that more effectively addresses the causes and consequences of climate change. Here, we report on one element of an ongoing collaboration involving researchers working in the fields of coastal geomorphology, human geography and art. In the spirit of geohumanities as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding places, we explore the work of narrative as a device for engaging with and communicating about the environmental challenge of coral reef degradation. Through independent and plaited narratives based on field research on the Great Barrier Reef, we undertake a deconstructive practice of “uncommoning” to consider what interdisciplinary collaboration enables, and how it opens up possibilities for engaging with, and communicating about, environmental crises. Sharing a curiosity about the island environment, each participant uses metaphors to evoke landscape features; however, they each work through different imaginative and emotional connections to place, by: reducing observations to measurements, evoking emotional responses, and provoking thinking about the multifarious, often global, processes contributing to the state of the environment.

Damming rivers causes two main problems affecting a river's geomorphic ecosystem and its water quality. The Tallowa Dam on the Shoalhaven River in southeastern NSW, Australia, provides a case study to find the best sustainable solutions to avoid these problems. The project uses a civil-infrastructure idea to design a grid of collector pipes from the reservoir bottom surface. Spatial data analysis using ArcGIS 10.2 is used to determine the best grid location for the pipes in the reservoir. Water and sediment samples have been analysed for grain size, heavy metal and organic matter contents. The dam has led to a significant decline in sediment transport and water discharge to the lower reaches of the river which has resulted in greater erosion of sediment and higher salinity rates within the lower river and coastal streams. Water quality in the reservoir has been affected by increased sediment accumulation, particularly mud, which has increased the amount of heavy metal and nutrient pollution that could eventually affect the water users. A proposed solution is to use over-storage water to remove accumulated sediment from the base of the dam through a net of collector pipes controlled by auto-mechanical gates, instead of flowing over the top of the dam. This would maximize the volume of upstream sediment and contained pollutants that can be released from the reservoir into the downstream river ecosystems as well as providing better water quality and a longer water storage time.