Sarah Wheeler

Sarah is a Matthew Flinders Professor of Water Economics and leads the Water, Environment and Food economics policy group (WEF group) in the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University. Sarah is a past President and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES), and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She was an ARC Future Fellow (2014-2018) and has over 150 peer-reviewed outputs in the research areas of irrigated farming, climate change, Murray-Darling Basin, organic farming, water markets, water scarcity, mental health, and food waste.

She is an Associate Editor of Agricultural Economics, and has been past editor of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources, and past Associate Editor of Water Resources and Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics and guest editor for a special issue of Agricultural Water Management. Sarah is on a number of editorial boards, including: International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Water. In 2023, Sarah was awarded the Jill Hudson award for environmental protection at the SA Environment Awards, and the Distinguished Public Policy Fellow award by the Economic Society of Australia in 2024.

Sarah was born on an irrigated dairy farm in NSW, and grew up on a dryland mixed farm at the top of the Great Dividing Range in the New England region. She has worked as an economist both nationally and internationally, in places such as Rural Solutions South Australia, ESCAP United Nations (Bangkok), Environment Agency (UK) and the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies.