News & Events

The Earth Institute is delighted to announce the two new 2020 strategic priority projects supported by the Earth Institute Strategic Priority Support Mechanism (SPSM). The SPSM encourages interdisciplinary activity across the Earth Institute, UCD, and beyond, in environmental research and its cognate disciplines.

Measuring Sustainable Actions at Community Level (Community SDG Dashboard)

Community SDG Dashboard aims to create an academic-community partnership between the UCD Earth Institute researchers and the Dundrum 2030 community group to foster social engagement for systematically monitoring the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the local level.

It will develop an academic-community partnership with Dundrum 2030, to: 1) facilitate and influence national Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) monitoring, by developing a UN-aligned local indicator set and building the capacity of communities to measure progress in the achievement of SDGs; and 2) track progress on the ground towards the achievement of SDGs. The outputs will ensure replicability in local monitoring efforts by creating an indicator-led toolkit and supporting dashboard for communities. Community SDG Dashboard will address current local data and knowledge gaps on the achievement of SDGs, feed into national and UN reporting mechanisms, and trigger similar actions in other communities.

Community SDG Dashboard is led by Ainhoa Gonzalez Del Campo (School of Geography).

Re-EcoNet: Reconstructing Ecological Network to predict systemic crisis

Network systems provide humans with essential services but can crash dramatically, a case in point being the financial collapse in 2008. Can these crises be predicted before it is too late? The answer is yes, and the key tool is network theory. Re-EcoNet is an UCD based multidisciplinary collaboration between theoretical ecologists, physicists, geomorphologists, and biologists who use network science to discover the processes that control the stability and resilience of ecosystems . The overarching goal is the formulation of a research platform to develop large scale projects and a COST Action focusing on the detection of the onset of systemic crises in ecosystems under global change threats.

Re-EcoNet is led by Tancredi Caruso (School of Biology and Environmental Science).  

Learn more about the Earth Institute 2019 and 2018 strategic priority projects.