2013 Press Releases
UCC hosts sustainability conference
The world is facing into ever greater ecological, social, political and economic turbulence and evidence suggests that the many tumultuous events that are unfolding are increasingly interconnected.
Yet there is a growing sense that our conventional academic approach, whereby we treat different problems in isolation and use narrow disciplinary expertise to understand and resolve such problems, is no longer adequate. Rather, a case is being made for a radically different approach involving much closer research collaboration between diverse disciplines from across the university, variously labelled as inter- or trans-disciplinarity.
This approach is becoming especially important as we tackle some of the most complex, unpredictable and intractable challenges facing us today, for example climate change, food insecurity, land and water use, and energy management. Finding ways of moving toward more sustainable – and more equitable and secure – societies is the key challenge for the 21st century. To achieve this natural scientists and engineers, social scientists and humanities scholars must all find ways of working in more genuinely collaborative ways to achieve breakthroughs in knowledge and practice.
Over the 5 and 6 September 2013, around 30 UCC researchers from a wide variety of disciplines will participate in the conference, Trans-disciplinary conversations on transitions to sustainability. They will be joined by three distinguished experts: Prof Andrew Stirling (University of Sussex), Prof Michael Narodoslawsky (Technical University of Graz) and Dr John Barry (Queen’s University Belfast). Papers representing a cross-section of current research in UCC addressing sustainability will provide insights into specific sectoral problems while others will grapple with questions of method and approach.
The conference is a project of the Environmental Citizenship/Sustainability in Society Research Priority Area that was established in 2011 and is led by Dr Colin Sage (Department of Geography). The conference has been organised by Dr Edmond Byrne (Process & Chemical Engineering), Dr Ger Mullally (Sociology) and Colin Sage. Prof Anita Maguire, VP for Research and Innovation, will open the conference on Thursday morning 5 September 2013.
Although this is a closed event, it is intended to produce a publication of proceedings that will be made available to the wider research community. It is hoped that this event will mark the first phase of a journey leading to UCC becoming an internationally recognised focus of trans-disciplinary research on global change and sustainability.