Climate change means that those at greatest risk are often the least deserving and least responsible for the current state in which we as a global community find ourselves.
Dr Conor Walsh is an Environmental Scientist in the Natural Resources Institute, and his work relates to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 Climate Action and supports SDG 2 Zero Hunger.
Teaching, Research and Outreach
I am an interdisciplinary environmental scientist. I worked for several years in a Climate Change research centre. The majority of my work is based around resource accounting, looking at the flow of materials from the economy to the bio-sphere and vice and versa as a means of understanding the impact of human activities on the local and global environment. In particular much of my work is framed by established carbon budgets which give a quantified limit to the accumulation of emissions, in order to avert dangerous climate change. Some of my past work has been based on examining the impact of climate change on trade demonstrating the reliance of the food system on a small number of critical export countries that are both big producers and consumers.
In my teaching I serve as Programme Leader for the MSc Global Environmental Change, whose core modules are explicitly designed around climate impact, mitigation and adaptation. I lead a module based on carbon accounting principles.
I am also co-designer and leader for a new Climate Change BSc, one of the few offered in the UK. This is a honours level degree that brings together many of the interdisciplinary skills available at the NRI.
As part the university's COP 26 working group I collaborate on a working paper on Climate Change education focusing on climate education.
I also undertake outreach and knowledge exchange including a series of interviews hosted by cimpatico.com on climate change.
My Future Contributions
Given the range of topics I have worked on its difficult to crystalise a single goal. Having worked on both global and regional scale studies related to climate change and material supply chains, I have come to appreciate the role of global pressures on regional actors and vice versa. Being specific in relation to regional and market-based characteristics (e.g. of a given commodity) is important, as many different regions have unique drivers for resource demands.
Are there wider or new areas or partnerships that you would wish to work on/with?
I am interested to work with novel technologies that have the capacity for dramatic carbon reductions in different sectors. In particular I would like to apply resource accounting expertise to better understand the viability of emergent technologies in contributing to Net Zero targets in the near term. Particularly in relation to integrating insights financial barriers associated with a given emission reduction pathway.
To solve the climate crisis collectively we will need to:
Be honest about the scale and urgency of the problem and the viability of different solutions.
Nothing short of an ambitious alignment of supply and demand-based measures-including behaviour and technological change-will be sufficient to avert more significant climate impacts. Equally, we need to avoid fatalism, this is not an issue of fundamental unknowns, the solutions to this are known and soluble.
The UK needs to be bold and ambitious in the targets that it supports, equally the public needs to demonstrate their support for credible policies aligning with such targets.
Why is sustainability and working on your project important?
Whilst usually couched in a broader ethical framing, sustainability is ultimately anthropocentric in that it seeks to maintain the systems upon which we all depend. Practices which are not sustainable will not be sustained. Especially as problems such as climate change means that those at greatest risk are often the least deserving and least responsible for the current state in which we as a global community find ourselves.
