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Maynooth University
Ireland’s leading institution for climate change research
MU experts are fighting climate change from all angles Tackling carbon output in land use
‘Of Land and Ocean’: Culture and climate on Inishbofin and Valentia
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.
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?
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.
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.”
