ProfessorAinhoa Gonzalez Del Campo

This staff-student partnership wil create a toolkit on Brightspace for students to access resources about climate change, sustainability, as well as ways to make positive changes in their own lives and communities.

Low income and vulnerable households, social groups, and communities living in rapidly growing cities across Africa face concurrent challenges of maintaining food security whist coping with experienced impacts of climate change. The aim of SYNERGI is to investigate the potential for co-creating socially inclusive edible Urban Green Infrastructure (UGI) as a strategy to support food security and climate resilience in two such rapidly growing cities in the context of Mozambique: the national capital Maputo and Nampula city. Our focus is on socio-economically vulnerable communities whose access to sufficient and good food is limited, as is their participation in food system structures and outcomes. Our research team will work with CSOs and community groups, using participatory action research and citizen science to co-design, implement and evaluate edible UGI initiatives as practical ways to improve food security outcomes while enhancing climate resilience. Our research will be guided by the following questions: 1) How can edible UGI in Maputo and Nampula be made more socially inclusive? What is required for edible UGI in these cities to effectively address the practical and strategic needs of vulnerable groups? 2) What are the most effective edible UGI designs in Maputo and Nampula for addressing affordability, sustainability, social inclusion, food security and appropriateness? What aspects might be transferable to other city contexts in Africa? 3) What contributions do community UGI initiatives make to food security and climate resilience at micro (household and community) and meso (city) scales in Maputo and Nampula? 4) What governance and policy supports are needed to ensure an enabling environment for socially inclusive edible UGI at these city and local scales? 5) How do our co-produced, bottom-up, empirically-grounded understandings and conceptualisations of socially inclusive edible UGI in Maputo and Nampula advance scholarly debates on urban agriculture and climate resilience strategies in Africa’s cities?

The project aims to develop an innovative, holistic, interdisciplinary research and educational approach to the area of sustainable development and climate change studies. This will be achieved through a series of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and capacity building activities concentrating on: a) research; b) education and skills, and; c) curriculum development

Collaboration with an artist for the preparation of a graphic video to illustrate the development and application of the Environmental Sensitivity Mapping web tool.

Updating the datasets included in the ESM web tool, addressing user difficulties and gathering user feedback to continue improving the web tool.

The project aims to develop an integrative framework of coupled models for predicting the immediate and long term consequences of land-use and climate change for the delivery of ecosystem services and the underlying biodiversity and ecosystem processes in freshwater and marine ecosystems; and to co-design a mechanism for the application of the framework to environmental policy & practice.

This project aims to develop an online decision support system to facilitate the preparation of Local Area Renewable Energy Strategies by local authorities.

The research will undertake an analysis of light loss using remotely sensed data to inform the development and deployment in the Irish marketplace of competitive energy-related products, processes and systems by providing an assessment of the current energy use indicated by light at night and identifying areas where more energy efficient hardware and methods can be used in lighting.

The proposed research aims to undertake an inner city green gap analysis, through remote sensing and GIS-based mapping which will then inform a green co-created neighbourhood plan, and pilot green actions to enhance Dublin’s existing green infrastructure.

Research to inform the CSD work n support of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The project aims to update the on-going progress made in implementing SEA in Ireland, to identify areas where further improvements are required and to provide guidance and make recommendations on the actions needed to address any identified issues. The findings of the project are anticipated to inform the EU evaluation of the SEA Directive.

Supporting and Enhancing Collaboration in Research and Teaching on Development and the Environment from a Social Sciences Perspective: Building Learning and Knowledge Exchanges between Vietnam and Ireland

The project aims to develop a practical and interactive online ESM tool to support Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) processes in Ireland. The Webtool avails of GIS to visually present relevant spatial data. It thus provides an evidence-base that can be geographically and quantitatively examined. More importantly, it incorporates innovative geoprocessing technology to enable the incorporation of public perceptions and the tailored combination of environmental datasets to produce context-specific environmental sensitivity maps. It thereby, supports legislative public consultation requirements and promotes evidence-based planning and decision-making.

The objective was to identify commonalities and differences between methodological approaches for selecting preferred and non-preferred areas for wind energy development and, thereby, examine the implications for achieving Ireland’s renewable energy targets. The project made best practice recommendations to inform and support the preparation of Local Authority Renewable Energy Strategies (LARES), promoting a more systematic, consistent and transparent approach to the identification of wind energy resources and formulation of wind energy development policies

The objective was to develop a good practice practitioner's manual to facilitate the identification, development and assessment of alternatives in Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA). This SEA stage is one of the most poorly undertaken in practice.