The GEC Sustainability Cluster and Techies Go Green present the Urban Sustainability Forum!
Urban environmental quality is no longer just a planning issue, it’s a growing business performance issue affecting talent attraction, employee health, operating costs, climate resilience, and regulatory exposure.
This will be an interactive series of sessions using Dublin as a real-world case study of a fast-growing city with growing transport and environmental problems that are currently damaging the health and welfare of residents and slowing the growth prospects of its businesses.
Sessions will identify problems, demonstrate the role of good data for planning, and propose practical solutions businesses, residents and urban planners can take to mitigate these problems.
Expect lively discussions, cool presentations, and a chance to meet others who care about urban sustainability. Don't miss out on being part of the change—see you there!
Event Speakers And Presentations
Why The Environment Is Important For Business
Kevin will speak about how urban environmental conditions can directly influence workforce wellbeing, productivity, and operating risk. Businesses operating in poorly performing urban environments face hidden costs.
For Staff: Air quality, noise exposure, public transport accessibility, and access to green spaces during breaks.
Transport Logistics: The ability to plan and execute the efficient movement of goods is critical for many types of business. Congestion represents a “tax” on productivity.
Environmental Reporting: ESG reporting - employee commute, health and welfare and environmental transport emissions and their related costs.
Data-Driven Decisions: Tools Businesses & Urban Planners Can Use Today
Paddy walks us through what they are currently working on and what their tools show at city and neighbourhood level - emissions estimates, transport mode share, routing data.
Paddy will speak about Google’s Environmental Insights Explorer which is founded on the idea that data and technologies can help accelerate the world’s transition to a low-carbon future. EIE aims to simplify the process of setting an emissions baseline and identifying tangible reduction opportunities, which sets the foundation for effective action.
By surfacing environmental information in a robust platform, Google aims to serve decision makers and researchers working on these issues and solutions for cities globally.
Dublin Transport
Build It And They Will Come
Prof. Caulfield will look at the current transport challenges facing Dublin and other cities in Ireland, and explores the decade of construction that is ahead for Irish cities in order to achieve our climate goals in transport.
Ireland has the legally binding target of reducing transport emissions by 50% by the end of the decade. Brian will explore how large scale public transport projects (Metrolink, Luas and DART+) can help achieve an emissions reduction but also an improvement in quality of life.
Presentations Will Be Followed By A Lively Panel Discussion
This session brings our speakers and guest panellists together to reflect on the insights from the presentations and explores what they mean in practice. This lively panel debate with audience input, will look at how different sectors can work together to make better decisions about mobility, location, sustainability, and infrastructure in Dublin.
In this session we will:
Bring together perspectives from business, infrastructure, sustainability, and city planning
Reflect on the key themes from the presentations.
Discuss practical actions stakeholders can take.
Purpose Of This Event
The event aims to build a shared understanding of how urban conditions shape economic performance, workforce wellbeing, and long-term resilience. Participants will gain a better understanding of urban environmental data and its practical uses for city infrastructure planning, and business decision-making.
The forum should spark practical conversations about how organisations can use available data and tools to make better decisions about commuting, their location strategy, and engagement with city planning processes. Get early insights into infrastructure projects, their effects on the urban environment, and data driven sustainability initiatives that can influence operational decisions.
Who Is This For?
This event aims to gather broad group of stakeholders including business managers, urban planners, property managers, construction and infrastructure project managers, property developers, sustainability consultants, and anyone who cares about urban sustainability.
About Our Speakers
Dr Kevin Credit
Assistant Professor at the National Centre for Geocomputation at Maynooth University
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As an Assistant Professor at the National Centre for Geocomputation at Maynooth University, Kevin’s research broadly focuses on understanding how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can be designed to more explicitly integrate spatial information and spatial ways of thinking, assess problems of causal inference, and provide better insight into the explanatory relationships driving model results.
As a former urban planner, Kevins work also addresses a range of substantive topics related to cities, including walkability, non-auto commuting patterns, and the economic and environmental impacts of transportation systems; 2) energy efficiency and retrofitting activity in residential buildings (and how these fit into larger urban energy and transportation systems); and 3) the social, spatial, and environmental determinants of health and well-being (among others).
Paddy Flynn
VP, Geo Data Operations at Google
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A full biography for Paddy Flynn coming soon.
Prof Brian Caulfield
Professor in Transportation in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering in Trinity College Dublin
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Prof Caulfield is a Professor in Transportation in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Since joining the Department Prof Caulfield has embarked on an intensive research program addressing global issues such as the environmental impacts of transport and methods to reduce the carbon impacts of transport and in 2017 he addressed the Irish Citizens Assembly on this topic. He recently provided advice to the Climate Change Advisory Council on pathways to decreasing transport emissions by 2030. Prof Caulfield was a member of the Steering Group for the review and update of the GDA Transport Strategy with the National Transport Authority. Prof Caulfield has published over 200 papers in these areas in high impact international journals and international conferences and to date has been awarded aprox. €12 million in research funding (from EPA, SFI, FP7, CEDR, TII, DoT, RSA, SEAI and HORIZON Europe).