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Goal 5: Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls

23/10/2018

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Biography: Carmel Nolan has recently completed an MSc ‘Geographies of the Global South’, in University College Dublin. Her Masters thesis was titled ‘An Examination into the Impact of the Tourism Industry on Hmong Gender Roles and Hmong Livelihoods in Sapa, Vietnam’. As part of the Masters, she carried out three weeks of fieldwork in Vietnam among Hmong women. She is interested in the idea of gender roles and how they differ among social groups and over time. carmel.nolan@ucdconnect.ie


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The fifth Sustainable Development Goal aims to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls. The United Nations state that they aim to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment through providing women with equal access to education, healthcare, decent work and representation in the political sphere. The United Nations believes that by achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment this will benefit humanity at large. My own research for my Masters thesis focused on women’s empowerment, particularly women’s economic empowerment. My research also examined how the term ‘empowerment’ emerged in relation to women’s empowerment and how the term became an important aim in development discourse. My Masters research focused specifically on Hmong women’s empowerment. The Hmong are an ethnic group which mainly reside in the mountainous areas of south-east Asia.

The term empowerment was first formally used in international development discourse in relation to the feminist movement in the Global South. The empowerment concept was then formally recognised in the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, where it was stated that women’s empowerment and gender and sexual rights were central to population issues. Then, in 2000, at the United Nations Declaration, the third Millennium Development Goal referred to directly to empowerment: ‘promote gender equality and empower women’. Since then, the term has become increasingly common in theories of development and gender and also among policy makers. Cornwall (2016: 356) describes women’s empowerment as “a process that engages women in thinking differently about themselves, about situations they are in, about their social worlds and relationships”. It is relevant to speak of ‘empowering women’ because as a group they are often disempowered relative to men. In terms of women’s empowerment, Kabeer (2000: 22) claims that women are “constrained by the norms, beliefs, customs, and values through which societies differentiate between women and men”. She states that this can manifest itself in a wide variety of different ways such as through gender pay gaps or gender-based physical or psychological violence. In patriarchal societies, this can lead to men holding power over women by making major decisions within a household, not allowing women to work, curtailing women’s access to resources, and so on.

One way in which the Sustainable Development Goals aim to promote women’s empowerment is through increasing women’s access to decent paid work. Women’s economic empowerment can be defined as “when a woman has the ability to succeed and advance economically and has the power to make and act on economic decisions” (Golla et al, 2011: 3). Women’s economic empowerment has become an important global policy priority and is seen as a vital contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. There is evidence to suggest that economic strength is the basis of social, political and physiological power in society, and so with a higher economic status, women often benefit socially and physiologically. Economic empowerment can have positive effects on women. With economic power, women have the ability to make more household decisions as economic empowerment can increase self-confidence and women’s voice within the household. Women’s economic empowerment can also have positive effects on the development of their country. Evidence suggests that women are more likely than men to spend their income on nutrition, health, and education of both daughters and sons. As a result, this can lead to economic growth, poverty reduction, increased health and welfare. Increased income can encourage as well as facilitate mothers to send their daughters to school as well as their sons.

The positive impacts of women’s economic empowerment were evident among the Hmong women I interviewed in Northern Vietnam. From my research, I discovered that by Hmong women being employed, Hmong gender roles in the household underwent a change. Prior to Hmong women working full-time jobs, they mainly stayed at home to care for their children and carry out other household tasks. In the past, Hmong men used to carry out work on the farm and were generally not involved in household tasks. Since Hmong women have begun to work full time outside of the home, their husbands have begun to look after the children and cook for the family and carry out other domestic chores. This has almost led to a reversal in Hmong gender roles. I gained a sense of Hmong women’s empowerment through my interviews with these women. The women stated that they no longer felt restricted to their household chores and were able to earn a large income which meant that they no longer depended on their husbands for money.
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It is evident from my research that the fifth sustainable development goal is an important one.  Achieving women’s empowerment has the potential to reduce gender inequality and have a positive impact on wider society. My own research has proven that decent paid work for women can certainly increase women’s sense of empowerment and in turn reduce gender inequality.

​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

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Bloodlines of Citizenship: Putting Equality at the Heart of Sustainable Blood Transfusion

16/10/2018

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​Giselle Eugenia Connell is a geographer with interests broadly in geopolitics, postcolonialism, and the body. Her first class honours degree in Politics and Sociology from Maynooth University Ireland, was subsequently followed by an M.Litt thesis in the Department of Geography in the same university, which explored the intersections of the geopolitics of blood, and medical themes of AIDS and which was passed without further amendment by colleagues at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, Glasgow University. In 2017, she was awarded an NUI Travelling Doctoral Studentship for her PhD examining the geopolitics of dance and development in post-conflict societies, and which she currently studies for at Durham University, UK. Giselle’s interests in dance relate to an expanded aesthetic field, but she has trained primarily in Irish dance, having performed competitively at the City of Dublin Championships 2016 and the South County of Dublin Championship 2012 and having worked with a multiplicity of dance artists and choreographers in Ireland and in Newcastle, UK on a number of dance projects both in theatre as well as open-air spaces. Giselle has published reviews in 'Cultural Geography' as well as 'Studies in Social and Political Thought' and has a further article in development on the cultural politics of AIDS Quilts and memory in Ireland.


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Blood and blood transfusion therapies are indispensable to sustainable healthcare systems worldwide, and people have a right to give and receive blood in a way that best supports the health and well-being needs of society  [1]. In Ireland, we ensure the availability of a sustainable and safe supply of blood through a combination of voluntary donors, and public agencies such as the statutory non-profit Irish Blood Transfusion Service’ (hereafter; IBTS) which routinely collects, fractionates, and screens the blood for pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, as well as responding to the more unexpected and undesirable outcomes of blood transfusion [2]. Because Ireland is one of the least materially rewarding countries in which to give blood, [3] eager and altruistic donors often couch their willingness to give in terms of citizenship, responsibility, and compassion towards those in medical need; sentiments which help to solidify one’s sense of belonging and inclusion within the wider body-politic [4]

The World Health Organisation has affirmed ‘voluntary self-sufficient’ blood donation as the safest and most sustainable means for meeting the state’s statistical blood requirements [5] and together with the European Union Directive  2002/ 98/EC [6] has mandated that a preemptive screening of potential donors through rigorous onsite questioning and potential donor deferrals be established as a routine and permanent fixture of this process. What this has amounted to in practice is excessive and often discriminatory exclusion guidelines that centre around controversial and intimate aspects of one’s race or sexual orientation, and which work to sustain nothing more than a naturalized association between blood, risk, and security.

​The aim of my Research Masters was therefore to investigate the moral and political economies of blood donor regulation in Ireland, examining in what ways the geography of global disease outbreaks from hepatitis, and later HIV/AIDS, cultivated an exclusionary and often inaccessible blood donation regimen that is still visible in the Irish Blood Transfusion service today. Using blood donor practices in the Republic of Ireland as a case study, and as a frame of reference, my research focused on the spatial tactics and surveillance techniques adopted by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service as a way in which to regulate and exclude potential donors between the years of 2015-2016 as well as the narratives, voices and opinions of non-normative donors who themselves embodied and experienced exclusion at this marginalized site of citizenship.
 
Since the height of the hepatitis and AIDS crisis, both gay men as well as immigrants have been central to the exclusionary logic that has at times prohibited them from contributing to the national blood supply [7]. Racial exclusions often masquerade as travel based restrictions which target particular bodies that are believed to be located closer to the epicentre of infection. Blood transfusion services, on the other hand, typically paint a monochromatic picture of power, claiming that their donor selection criteria is standardized, fair, and in the interests of “safeguarding” a national blood supply. Exclusions on the behavioural collective ‘men who have sex with men’ MSM from donating blood have historically taken the form of either temporary or indefinite deferrals in over twenty countries including Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the US, without any scientific evidence to support it, and rather, a mounting international evidence to suggest it’s indefensibility. The most recent litigation case taken by a French citizen to the European Court of Justice as of April 2015 [8] ruled that EU countries should seek a “less onerous” means in which to protect the national blood supply, and together with a High Court challenge by Irish blood donor activist, and student Tomas Heneghan, [9] it compelled the state to introduce a one year deferral on MSM, bringing it’s policy into line with international developments. While the recent decision taken by the Irish government to move away from an indefinite MSM deferral has been welcomed by many as a step in the right direction, the continued exclusion of  monogamous same-sex couples which the new policy entails, has likewise been criticised for perpetuating an “inequitable risk tolerance” [10] between ineligible same sex partners and sexually promiscuous heterosexual men. During a time when blood donation is at its lowest rate in almost a decade [11], and only 3% of the eligible Irish population donate blood, [12] valid questions need to be asked as to whether it is indeed sustainable for us to continue meeting our national blood requirements through the presence of scientifically unsupported donor exclusions. 
 
My research was to largely reveal that what is accepted as the most sustainable model of blood donation internationally, is still premised on the fear and mistrust of the spaces within which so-called ‘panic figures’ move [13]. Lengthy and esoteric ‘health and lifestyle’ questionnaires are designed to confuse and unsettle potential donors from the outset, while questions addressing one’s size and weight often render implicit that the appearance of the body acts as the ultimate marker of one’s health, productivity, and thereby safety. The corporeality of the flesh remains an important visual modality in which to construct a spatial, as well as temporal geography of the body that assesses and surveills all aspects one’s moral behaviour; arms are scanned for signs of intravenous track marks, while the corporeal proximity of bodies is also often conflated with moral deterioration and given equal cause for expulsion. The ‘queer body’ [14] had, in particular, been mapped as a space in which to project future fears of a diseased and death-ridden polity. MSM who had presented as heterosexual prior to the lifting of the Irish ‘gay blood ban’ in January 2017 feared that their identities would be outed providing they did not regulate or suppress their bodily movements within the space so as not to give away any indiscriminate cues about their sexuality. This was also true of blood drives held in community spaces where MSM who had not yet been open about their sexual practices felt compelled to donate blood as a way in which to conceal their sexual identity among unwitting family, friends or colleagues, even in the absence of STI testing. Especially striking was an Irish trans woman and avid blood donor Ms Aoife Martin, now well documented in the Irish media, [15] who had received an expulsion letter simply for undergoing a male- to- female gender identity transition that exemplified not only the continued inaccessibility and inequality of health care services towards people who identify as Trans [6] but also the way in which biological parts continued to be viewed by medical services as what Seidman (1995) [17] has referred to as an “authentic and unchanging space,” while gender identities are rendered a mere fictitious aberration of the former Self.

mmediate and reactionary decisions that have been taken to date by the IBTS which had excluded non-normative donors from the Irish blood donor registry throughout the research, is illustrative of the ways in which political decisions continue to be taken among objectively positioned medical services; decisions which cannot simply be reducible to scientific evidence regarding blood safety alone. What remains apparent from the research is that the act of  blood donation provides geographers with a useful opportunity in which to more closely interrogate the boundary-making practices of citizenship, the regulation of the national, as well as the biological body, and ultimately, the ways in which sustainable models of blood transfusion, and of our health and development goals more broadly, must rely in equal measure on the equitable and inclusive accommodation of our increasingly socially diverse blood donor pool. 

​​References can be requested from info@geographysocietyireland.ie

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UN SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

8/10/2018

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Patrick Bresnihan
Patrick Bresnihan is the principal investigator on WISDOM: Learning from Group Water Schemes. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin. His work draws influence from political ecology, science and technology studies, anthropology and the environmental humanities to examine the infrastructural politics of water. His research has been published in academic journals and in his book, Transforming the Fisheries: Neoliberalism, Nature, and the Commons. His work combines the histories, ecologies, and politics that surround key areas of environmental governance, including the fisheries, alternative energy, and the restructuring of the public water supply in Ireland.

Arielle Hesse
Arielle Hesse is a postdoctoral researcher on the EPA funded project WISDOM: Learning from Group Water Schemes, led by Dr. Patrick Bresnihan in the Department of Geography at Trinity College Dublin. Trained as an environmental health geographer at the Pennsylvania State University, her previous research examined the regulatory politics of occupational and environmental health exposures in the US oil and gas industry. Drawing influence from environmental history, science and technology studies, public health and health geography, this work focused on federal and state efforts to regulate the activities of the hydraulic fracturing industry to protect water resources from chemical contamination and to protect workers from exposures to carcinogenic dust.

UNSDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation
The WISDOM project, based at TCD, examines group water schemes and their work to provide clean drinking water to communities in rural Ireland
Inadequate drinking water – an issue of both water quality and water quantity – presents a public health imperative requiring comprehensive action. Recognising that many people lack access to clean drinking water, the 6th UNSDG, clean water and sanitation, has several aims, including to enhance the work of local communities in water and sanitation management. Our project seeks to understand the contexts and relationships that shape how community managed water suppliers deliver clean drinking water to rural parts of Ireland.
Water scarcity and water quality are issues that cut across different contexts. While our project is focused in Ireland, the challenges of addressing clean water and sanitation are vast and varied. Attention to clean water and sanitation has often centred on challenges in the global south, where basic water infrastructure may be absent and many face life-threatening disease from their waters’ quality. Yet, increasingly contamination events and water shortages in the global north have revealed the fissures, oversights and contradictions of drinking water systems, highlighting them as a point of research and intervention. Upgrading water infrastructures is a key element of this work.

However, challenges to providing clean drinking water in Ireland, as in other places, are not just a question of water availability and its adequate treatment but also the legacies of infrastructural (dis)investment, economic policies, and, more fundamentally, the contradictions that exist between


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The SDGs and the map of global development

1/10/2018

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​Bio: Rory Horner is a Senior Lecturer and ESRC Future Research Leader at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research focuses on globalization, trade and development, with a particular interest in South–South trade and the pharmaceutical industry in India and sub-Saharan Africa.
@rory_horner and @globaldevinst

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight the need to rethink the dominant imaginary of the global map of development.
 
Through much of the 20th century, a classic macro-geographic division of the world into two, and according to standard of living, has prevailed. While the nomenclature has changed from First and Third World, to developed and developing, to global North and South lines, the territorial categorisation of the world into two has continued.
 
Under such an understanding, from the perspective of many in the global North, development was largely a challenge for far away countries in the global South. Aid was provided by rich countries to poor countries under a moral geography of charity, often justified by the aim of helping developing countries become more like developed countries.
 
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which preceded the SDGs, reflected just such a geography. The MDGs were largely designed by rich countries. Their focus was almost exclusively on targets for poor countries. The SDGs, which apply to all countries in the world and present universal development goals, challenge this dominant map.
 
Of course, the SDGs highlight continuing major development challenges in lower-income countries. These include poverty (SDG 1), hunger (SDG 2), health care (SDG 3), education (SDG 4), water and sanitation (SDG 6), energy services (SDG 7), decent jobs (SDG 8) and infrastructure (SDG 9).
 
Yet, rather than just relating to lower-income countries, the SDGs highlight major development challenges that are present in high-income countries too. Initial indicators of progress towards the SDGs point to sustainable consumption and production (SDG 12), climate change (SDG 13) and ecosystem conservation (SDG 14 and 15) as high priorities for countries such as Ireland in the global North. Other major challenges in such countries include agricultural systems and malnutrition (related to obesity) (SDG 2), malnutrition (related to obesity), jobs and unemployment (SDG 8), and gender equality (SDG 5).
 
Although major development challenges, including those highlighted by the SDGs are present in all countries in the world, considerable geographic variation is present in the nature and severity of those challenges. It is not a flat world, but one characterised by vast inequalities.
 
As well as applying to all countries, the SDGs also had a very different process of formation from the MDGs. Brazil, in particular, as well as the G77 (a collective of the UN’s 130 ‘developing countries’), played prominent roles in converting the ‘post-2015 Development Agenda’ into the United Nations General Assembly-agreed Sustainable Development Goals.
 
The SDGs have been made within a very different context from the MDGs. New geographies of wealth, middle classes, poverty, health and environment have been observed this century. Patterns of global inequality have changed, with some fall in between-country inequality across a number of different indicators, while inequalities within many countries have risen. The Paris Agreement of 2015 requires climate commitments by all countries, not just ‘developed’ or ‘Annex 1’ countries. We are also living in a world of multi-directional development cooperation, justified by a morality of solidarity, rather than just aid from North to South justified by a morality of charity.
 
The SDGs also provide a challenge to dominant understandings of development trajectories. Rather than seeking to become like developed countries under a developmentalist logic, the SDGs seek to put forward a goal for all countries of transformation towards sustainable development.
 
Considerable debate revolves around the SDGs as to what effect, if any, they have in practice. Fascinating research has suggested that rather than setting development agendas, national and local governments in Ecuador engage with global goals which reinforce or serve their own interests.
 
While much more evidence is needed as to implementation, the SDGs do help point to a very different geography of contemporary development challenges facing our planet and global society. Instead of an earlier era of international development, we are now operating in an era of global development.
 
This blogpost draws on research on the changing geographies of global development, published in Development and Change:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dech.12379
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Passing of David Lowenthal

30/9/2018

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The geographical community has lost a titan. David Lowenthal brought literary flourish and profound humanity to scholarship on the history of environmental ideas (George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter(1958); George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation(2000)) and on modern society’s complex and sometimes delusional relationship with its own past (The Past Is a Foreign Country(1985); The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History(1997); The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited(2015)). He studied under Carl Sauer at Berkeley before moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for his doctoral work and was on the staff at University College London from 1972, translating to Emeritus in 1985. Hugh Clout has affectionately evoked David’s life and work in a piece for the Guardian,
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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/sep/27/david-lowenthal-obituary.

By Gerry Kearns, 
Professor of Human Geography, Member Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University

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Geography, education and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

17/9/2018

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By - Ainhoa Gonzalez del Campo, Christine Bonnin, Eoin O’Mahony from the School of Geography, UCD. 
PicturePhoto 1: a view from Hanoi's Opera House.
The SDGs span a continuum of interdependent social (e.g. no poverty, zero hunger, quality education, and well-being), economic (e.g. economic growth, innovation in industry) and environmental considerations (e.g. life on land and water, and climate). Aptly, Goal 4 which focuses on ‘quality education’, refers to the importance of inclusivity and equitability in access to quality education in order to improve people’s lives and sustainable development. While the targets and indicators for Goal 4 concentrate importantly on gender-equality in education and basic literacy (i.e. primary and post-primary completion), it also includes the provision of appropriate skills to promote sustainable development which are of particular relevance in higher education.
 
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – digital systems that enable us to work with, analyse and visually represent geographic information – are important tools that can help societies make evidence-based decisions to address pressing global sustainable development challenges. While GIS have become an important support tool in the global development and humanitarian sector, at present, very few higher education programmes in development studies integrate it as a key component. This is a problem for the implementation of the SDGs locally. Yet, highly promising opportunities arise for the use and proliferation of free and open source geospatial software in development education and practice. Of particular importance is the easy accessibility of this technology to institutions in the Global South at little to no cost, which can contribute to reducing global spatial inequalities in access to educational resources through its adaptation into online education. However, in spite of the ongoing technological advancements in both the practice of online education and free software, research on the contribution of open source GIS and open data to the educational sphere, and ultimately to student preparedness and employability, is very limited.
 
In this blog post we would like to showcase how a project we are working on in Vietnam enables university students there to avail of free and open source software to aid in the implementation of the SDGs, particularly around the goal of quality education. All human interventions on human and natural landscapes have a spatial component and GIS software analyses these components in relation to each other. Moreover, they represent key analytical software for seeking solutions to critical current and future global sustainable development challenges like climate change, migration, poverty alleviation and food security.

As a country, Vietnam is relatively well developed, with significant improvements in human health and infrastructure in recent years. The Vietnam 2035 report has however identified numerous lingering challenges, linked to the spatial inequality of socio-economic development, environmental sustainability and climate change. On the basis that these development challenges can benefit from a geographical perspective, as socio-economic and environmental issues are intrinsically spatial, a proposal was put forward to incorporate GIS teaching and learning into development studies in Vietnam. As a result, in 2017, geographers at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland were awarded funding by the official development and aid agency Irish Aid under their Vietnam Ireland Bilateral Education programme (VIBE) to develop an online open source GIS module for deployment by project partners at the Faculty of International Studies, Hanoi University (HANU) in their development studies programme.

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Photo 2: (L to R) Quoc Long Dang (HANU), Christine Bonnin (UCD), Ainhoa Gonzalez del Campo (UCD), Eoin O'Mahony (UCD) and Nguyen Hong Nga (HANU)
PicturePhoto 3: Students at HANU during the delivery of the first GIS for Development Studies module.
Free and open source geospatial software (such as Quantum GIS or QGIS[1]) is now at a sufficiently mature stage to be used across a variety of contexts, and it is used by many municipal authorities, planning agencies and private sector companies. Their use is also growing in research and higher education contexts.

​In the light of this, QGIS was purposefully adopted in the project to ensure continued accessibility to the technology by HANU’s staff and students both during and after module completion. Complemented by online instructional videos and task-based assignments, the UCD team developed a fully-fledged GIS module for use at HANU.

​The module was provided as a set of practical handouts on GIS tools and functionality with accompanying video tutorials. Vietnam-specific data and examples were used to illustrate applications so that the module context would be directly relevant to the national and local development contexts. The students can access the lesson handouts locally on a USB drive and follow the accompanying demonstration videos on a dedicated private YouTube channel.


[1]               https://qgis.org

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Bio-the-economy

11/9/2018

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Bio-the-economy: Killing multiple birds with one biobased stone: development of diverse global bioeconomies

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Dr Laura Devaney is an experienced social scientist with research interests in environmental, food and bioeconomy governance. With a PhD from the Department of Geography Trinity College, she has held postdoctoral positions at Trinity and Teagasc as well as visiting research positions at Dalhousie University Nova Scotia (Dobbin Atlantic Award 2017) and the University of California Berkeley (Fulbright-EPA Scholar 2017-18). She positions her work at the research policy interface, preoccupied with the quest for a more sustainable future and has collaborated with the Department of the Taoiseach advising on the most appropriate development pathways for the Irish bioeconomy. Her research features heavily in the National Policy Statement on the Bioeconomy (released March 2018), the work of the Irish bioeconomy Implementation Committee and the German Bioeconomy Council with respect to international bioeconomy policies and progress (available here).

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Not content with addressing just one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I would like to propose a concept that has the potential to address at least nine of them and has formed a central research interest of mine as an environmental geographer. Couched within the quest for a more sustainable future, the bioeconomy represents an alternative economic system to the fossil fuel based economy on which we have come to rely; the very system that caused unprecedented levels of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation that led to a need for the Sustainable Development Goals to be established in the first place. A vicious cycle. But how about creating a cleaner, greener, more efficient and biobased cycle to address, and perhaps even reverse, these concerns?

With potential to reduce waste, mitigate climate change, develop food and energy security,
address resource scarcity, cut emissions and minimise pollution, the bioeconomy involves the creation of an economic system where fossil fuels are replaced by renewable biological resources and biomass is processed and transformed to meet everyday needs for food, feed, fuel and fibre (Staffas et al., 2013; Bugge et al., 2016; El-Chichakli et al., 2016; Devaney and Henchion, 2016; Devaney et al., 2017). It combines the outputs of agriculture, marine and forestry resource sectors with the transformative capacity of food, biochemical, biomaterial and bioenergy industries. As a “still-evolving” concept (Bracco et al., 2018), the bioeconomy has been translated in different ways internationally with varying emphasis on its biotechnological, bioresource and bioecology aspects (Bugge et al, 2016). Such alternate visions reflect not only the different motives behind bioeconomy development but the range of opportunities it presents to address global sustainability challenges. The bioeconomy thus continues to gain traction across policy, industry and academic spheres.

Sounds too good to be true? Well of course, the caveat is that the bioeconomy MUST be developed in an environmentally and socially sustainable way so that it does not become self-defeating in its sustainability aims. It must not replicate the extractive, destructive nature of the fossil-based economy that came before it. This requires careful consideration and management of both production and consumption dimensions such that biological resources are produced in an environmentally sound manner and that we simply are not just producing more unnecessary ‘stuff’’ for heedless consumption; biobased or otherwise. Having recently returned from a research visit to the US, I have also become increasingly conscious of issues of environmental justice associated with the bioeconomy so that its benefits truly filter to all parts of society. After all, if executed ‘correctly’, the bioeconomy holds promise to reduce rural-urban divides and revitalise marginalised communities to supply the biomass that forms the very foundation of global bioeconomies. From a consumption perspective, uncomfortable conversations (for some) are required on the need for de-growth alongside bioeconomy developments to fundamentally shift our consumption patterns, practices and behaviours.

Combining these caveats and concerns, there is a need and indeed desires (as experienced in the US context), for the creation of regenerative and socially just bioeconomies worldwide that not only reduce environmental ‘bad’ but also create environmental ‘good’ (e.g. through carbon sequestration) and are enacted in a socially sound and inclusive manner (Devaney and Iles, 2018). Such an ideal sustainable future will require a robust governance system to guide it, one that ensures that all voices are heard, marginalised actors are included and environmental checks and balances are in place to truly achieve sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth (in keeping with the eight SDG). This is a fundamental research interest of mine, and as a geographer, with particular consideration as to how these governing relationships are, and should be, formed, organised and perform across scales from local to global. How and where stakeholders are embedded and invest in the bioeconomy is important to develop shared bioeconomy visions and commonly agreed bioeconomy principles to guide this economic transition. Considering ‘good’ governance in the bioeconomy has been a cornerstone of my work and policy influence, developing frameworks and conditions for sustainable bioeconomy development that have subsequently guided both national and international bioeconomy policy development (for example, the Irish Government’s National Policy Statement on the Bioeconomy (Department of the Taoiseach, 2018) and the German Bioeconomy Council’s analysis of bioeconomy trends and progress worldwide (GBC, 2018)).

​This preoccupation has led me
to conduct geographical research across Ireland, Europe, Canada and the US, assessing the development and governance of diverse global bioeconomies and the stakeholder influences, supports and hindrances present across scales. After all, bioeconomy development must be geographically tailored to reflect different resource bases, industrial capacities, markets, governing regimes, histories, priorities and agendas at national and local scales. There is also potential for developing regional bioeconomy clusters to provide support and cohesion to the biobased transition nationally and internationally (Devaney and Iles, 2018).

Enacted in this way, the bioeconomy can begin to address multiple SDGs including:
  • Goal 2 - End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture
  • Goal 7 - Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
  • Goal 8 - Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
  • Goal 9 - Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation
  • Goal 10 - Reduce income inequality within and among countries
  • Goal 12 - Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
  • Goal 13 - Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
  • Goal 14 - Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
  • Goal 15 - Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Connecting the development of the bioeconomy with the achievement of the SDGs is essential and appropriate at local, national, regional and global scales. The concepts should not be seen as mutually exclusive or in isolation of one another (for example, when developing bioeconomy strategies and SDG implementation plans). The two can go hand-in-hand and indeed act as essential measures of progress for one another. Further research interests include the development of diverse global bioeconomies along these lines and investigating how these contributions can be made in practice. I look forward to continuing my work in this area, grounded in my geographical understanding that while we can kill many SDG birds with one stone, one size certainly does not fit all in this promising arena.


For References contact info@geographicalsocietyireland.ie

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Introducing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

3/9/2018

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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were announced at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2012. The objective was to produce a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges facing our world. 

The SDGs are a continuation of the work of the Millienium Development Goals started in 2000 and 
establish measurable, universally-agreed objectives for tackling extreme poverty and hunger, preventing deadly diseases, and expanding primary education to all children, among other development priorities.

There are 17 Goals which are all interconnected. This means that success in one affects success in other areas. For example dealing with the threat of climate change impacts how we manage our fragile natural resources, achieving gender equality or better health helps eradicate poverty, and fostering peace and inclusive societies will reduce inequalities and help economies prosper. In short, this is the greatest chance we have to improve life for future generations. (UNDP, 2018)

Looking at the 17 goals it is clear that geography and the work of geographers has an important role to play in the achievement of these goals and this is why the GSI has chosen to focus on this relationship for GEOWEEK 2018. 

For the next few weeks we will feature blog posts from geographers that focus on how their work intersects with the themes and goals of sustainable development. If you would like to submit a post please check here for more details. 

Ireland has developed
'The Sustainable Development Goals National Implementation Plan 2018 - 2020' in direct response to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As part of our GeoWeek activities we are running a conference 'Geography and the SDG's' to create a stakeholder forum for geographers across the state to explore ways to achieve the SDG's. ​

If you have anything you would like to share or contribute, please feel free to contact us via the email button above! 
​

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Relations between second-level and third-level Geography in Ireland

2/9/2018

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The writer of this piece, Arnold Horner, formerly lectured in Geography at University College Dublin.
​H
is engagement with second-level has included acting as NUI consultant in Geography for the State Examinations Commission for 25 years. Between 1995 and c. 2011, he also represented NUI on National Council for Curriculum Assessment syllabus committees for senior and junior cycle Geography. He was for more than twenty years a Teaching Council subject advisor in Geography.

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The issue of the low level of third level interest in what goes on in second level Geography is rightly raised by Sheelagh Waddington (‘Does Geography have a future’, 24.5.18). Let us hope it is not something that is going to blow up in the face of Geographers in Ireland over the coming decade. News that the numbers doing A Level Geography in Britain declined by 11% in 2017 (admittedly after some years of growth) may be an omen. There the decline seems to coincide with a growing uptake of STEM (science, technology and mathematics) subjects. Here those subjects also deserve a greater level of interest but there is also pressure on Geography from other rising subjects such as politics. With Geography no longer privileged at Junior Cert, the subject will have to fight if it is to maintain its current high take-up at senior level.

In an era of globalization and environmental challenges, the case for Geography as a key component of post-primary education should be strong. Yet one has only to look as far as the United States to see that nothing can be taken for granted. Third-level Geography struggles for a profile, and public ignorance about global issues is manifest daily. Is it possible that a similar situation could develop in Ireland? To repeat, nothing should be taken for granted. Subjects/ disciplines need both a self-critical awareness and a worthwhile, and genuine, public offering if they are to continue to be seen as relevant and worthy of a role in a crowded educational curriculum.



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GeoWeek 2018- Share your Story

19/8/2018

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As part of GeoWeek this year we are hosting a public conference on Geography and the SDGs this November in association with the Dept of Communications Climate Action and Environment, the CSO and the OSI who are all working on the National Implementation Plan.
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In advance, blog posts will be posted weekly on the Society website from Sept 3rd up until Geoweek, with a different SDG highlighted each week (see schedule here: http://www.geographicalsocietyireland.ie/share-your-story.html)
In order to ensure that this is a success, we are asking you to share your story if your work touches on any or many of the SDG's. Why not send in a short informal piece to share online and get more visibility for your work? The idea of the programme is to highlight the relevance and diversity of the work of geographers and to build greater public visibility for, and interest in, what we do.
Please email us with any suggestions or to contribute your work.


Booking for the conference is available at 
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/geography-and-the-sdgs-tickets-48520758896 
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