Educated at Sir Henry Parkes Primary and later Tenterfield High School, Cameron said his rural upbringing helped shape his love of the land.

“My interest in environmental issues started when I was around 16 or 17-years-old.

“Growing up on a farm, I probably had more opportunities to interact with the environment generally, than if I had grown up in a city,” Cameron said.

“When I was attending high school, I did a couple of geography type courses with some insightful teachers that emphasised social justice and environmental justice challenges - this opened my eyes to a lot of important environmental issues.”

Cameron went on to Griffith University in Brisbane where he completed a double degree of law and environmental science.

“It was here that a lot of really great teachers helped me to become immersed in environmental law and I found it to be an incredibly rewarding and interesting area.

“Environmental law is still a developing area – it has only been around since the 1970s, which is relatively young in legal terms, so there is still a lot of work to be done.

Government repeals, sweeping climate deviations and swelling environmental interest groups are some of the things the Senior Lecturer is contending with in today’s world of environmental lawmaking.

“We are really still experimenting with how best to design and implement environmental regulation to achieve environmental, economic and social outcomes that benefit society as a whole,” he said.

With the carbon tax and drought issues everyday talking points in the news, Cameron said environmental law was forming an important place in 21st century society.

“It is central to the functioning of today’s society. It impacts on us every day, from relatively simple things like rubbish collection and the design of new houses, as well as more complex issues like dealing with water shortages, a changing climate and natural resource management,” he said.

Cameron joined the UNSW Faculty of Law in 2012 as a Senior Lecturer and is currently a Senior Research Fellow (DECRA) and research affiliate of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training.

He has published widely in the areas of environmental law and holds a PhD from the Australian National University.

A pragmatic researcher, Cameron has worked alongside Australian and international government and non-government organisations on a range of environmental and natural resource management research projects.

On July 4 he was awarded the sixth International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law Junior Scholarship Award for his contribution to environmental law scholarship.

He has just returned from Tarragona, Spain where he accepted the prestigious award that saw him trump other academics from 180 universities and 56 countries worldwide.

“I felt very honoured – at the time I was a little embarrassed but it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

“Receiving the award was in no small part attributable to the grounded, value led and generally outstanding education I received at Tenterfield's public schools.”

Still, at such a young age Cameron said he’s excited by future prospects.

“I am developing an international research project that would look at the connections and disconnections between Energy, Water and Food regulations in Australia and internationally, and it would be great to get that off the ground.

“There is so much to do - there is a lot of environmental law reform occurring in Australia at the moment. It would be wonderful to be able to make a positive contribution to those changes,” he said.