Ireland’s leading institution for climate change research

MU experts are fighting climate change from all angles

Tackling carbon output in land use

Microsoft Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) are co-funding a €5m project led by Maynooth University to help tackle climate change. The project will focus on the impact of human activity on land use, with a view to reducing carbon levels. This ambitious project, named Terrain-AI, is being led by Dr Rowan Fealy of the ICARUS Climate Research Centre, and Prof Tim McCarthy of the National Centre for Geocomputation at Maynooth University. Given the challenging carbon reduction targets for Ireland set out by the Paris Agreement, the first phase of the project will focus on terrestrial carbon and more accurately measuring how it is absorbed into our environment, with the ambition of helping farmers, and others who manage land, to become carbon neutral or negative.

‘Of Land and Ocean’: Culture and climate on Inishbofin and Valentia

Does our response to climate change depend on where we’re living? And what is the relationship between our culture and how we consider the environment? An award-winning MU project, ‘Of land and ocean: culture and climate on Ireland’s Islands’, aims to address these and other questions. Basing her studies on Inisbofin off County Galway and Valentia Island off the Kerry coast, Shirley Howe, a PhD student of Geography and Anthropology, is examining how cultural processes influence climate change perspectives and responses. Shirley Howe was awarded an Eda Sagarra Medal of Excellence by the Irish Research Council (IRC) in 2019 for her project, and also named the top-ranking Postgraduate Scholar in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, under the IRC’s 2019 Government of Ireland funding programmes. Discussing her research, she said: “I believe that a cross-disciplinary approach can show how cultural processes influence climate change perspectives and responses today. By complementing existing research, my project aims to contribute to developing communication strategies required to advance culture engagement and development of policies.”

Hurricane Hercules hits Lahinch Photo credit: George Karbus

Storms: a window into the future

Dr Lisa Orme is studying past storms to shed light on recent and future extreme events

A succession of devastating storms have hit Ireland in recent years, eroding coastal defences, and flooding homes and businesses. Storm Ophelia alone left behind damages of €70 million in 2017. Studying past storms can inform our understanding of recent and future events, explains Dr Lisa Orme, of MU’s ICARUS Climate Research Centre and the Department of Geography. Her research examines similar, or even greater, storm intensity and frequency in past decades, to open a window into the future. “We don’t know very much about past weather variability because instrumental records are fairly short. That means that by looking at long records of past storminess we can understand more about the changing frequency and occurrence of storms in the past. And that will also help us understand future climate change as well,” she says. “Another important aspect of examining past climate is that we can look at previous warm periods and see whether storminess increased or decreased during those times.” Weather measurements taken since the late 19th century tell us that there have been some decades, such as the 1910s -1920s and 1980s -1990s, which have had many more severe storms than others. From looking at past climate, it’s apparent that storminess in Ireland has varied over decades, centuries and millennia, posing challenges to human populations and altering ecosystems. “It’s safe to say that similar impacts would be experienced in future if there was an increase in storminess with global warming. “I hope that my research will help to inform coastal communities and decision makers about the potential for changes in storminess in the future.”