Climate Change, Inspiring Action @UL
Today we meet PhD Student, Chidi Usanga from the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, S&E, at UL, who shares with us his research on environmental sustainability with a case study on the River Shannon and its ecosystem.
Giving voice to nature is the idea at the heart of an innovative research project by Chidi Usanga, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Information.
The project seeks to enable interaction, communication, and understanding between humans and the natural environment by using digital technologies. Improving the way humans interact with nature and understand its signals can lead to more sustainable restoration and management practices- informing our responses to climate change and biodiversity loss.
Chidi’s focus is the River Shannon and its associated ecosystems. The species that make up these ecosystems such as fish, invertebrates and plants cannot speak or produce humanly intelligible sounds and so cannot explicitly express themselves to humans.
“We cannot hear their ‘cry’ when in distress or when they sense danger, and neither can we receive direct feedback from them on our designs for restoration and habitat management beyond those gained from longer-term monitoring and observation by researchers,” explains Chidi.
The research project, funded by the UL’s Faculty of Science & Engineering under its sustainability programme, explores the role of new and emerging interactive technologies such as mobile and embedded computing and VR/AR to capture, amplify/augment and translate the distress signals of the river and its associated species to humanly understandable and actionable interfaces that anyone, not just computer scientists, can understand and use.
“To understand these non-human entities, I need to understand their closest human ‘friends’. So, I am engaging diverse stakeholders to understand their various perspectives, interests and expectations in terms of design interventions for this context. These stakeholders include fishermen and anglers, recreationists (e.g., rowers, kayakers), environmentalists, wildlife specialists, researchers, water abstractors and energy users.”
The project will potentially help more people to see and understand the changes in biodiversity in and around the Shannon, as well as the water characteristics at any time. It will also enable them to respond in more respectful and responsible ways towards the natural entities in the ecosystem. The results of the project can be scaled up and applied to other freshwater environments within and outside of Ireland.
Chidi points out that sustainability should mean supporting nature to take its course, including its ability to renew and regenerate. “It also means letting natural courses that don’t impede social harmony flow untruncated, including a person’s rights, freedoms and responsibilities.
“We belong in nature, not nature in us. If we over-extract, nature will revolt and collapse on us. In as much as we need to innovate to improve our lives and advance our civilisation, we need to do so only in flow with nature, not against it. Our immediate needs for technological growth should not stunt the growth of other species, our future selves or our future generations. Nature’s resources are inexhaustible, though much may be latent at the moment. It is up to science and technology, with all the good intents of discovery and innovation, to research beyond the shortcuts, find and tap into those infinite resources and leave the finite ones where they belong, at least for our own safety".