Where my PhD sits: FUSION and FORESIGHT
A personal website makes it easy to write as though ideas arrive from nowhere. They do not. The questions I ask, the models I use and the policy problems I encounter are shaped partly by the research environment in which I work.
I am doing my PhD within FUSION, the FUture Sustainable economy Integrated mOdelling Network at the University of Galway. The group brings together work in life-cycle assessment, integrated assessment, land-use modelling and environmental software. What I find useful about that mix is that an agricultural or climate problem does not have to remain inside one disciplinary box.
Much of my PhD also connects to FORESIGHT, a project funded by Ireland’s Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications under a services contract to provide agriculture and land-use modelling to the Climate Action Modelling Group. The project is led by FUSION with the University of Limerick and FERS Ltd.
That funding relationship is worth stating plainly. I expect to write about Irish agriculture, climate and land-use policy on this site. Readers should therefore know that I work within a government-funded modelling programme connected to those questions. The views I express here are my own and do not represent the position of the University of Galway, the Department, funders or collaborators.
One of the main modelling tools in this environment is GOBLIN, which links agriculture, forestry and other land uses within a national land-balance framework. My own interests increasingly begin at the point where a national pathway has to meet geography and heterogeneous farms. A nationally coherent change may look very different when it reaches dairy, beef or other production systems in different parts of the country.
That is the part of the research environment I value most: models are treated as tools for interrogating difficult decisions rather than as ends in themselves. A result is more useful when its assumptions are visible, when alternatives can be tested and when the limits of what the model claims are clear.
This site is much broader than that work. I will write about policy, economics, technology, Ghana, Ireland, the United States, land use, useful code and repositories, books and personal observations. But when my writing touches Irish climate or agricultural policy, this is the institutional context readers should have in mind.