Professor Hannah Daly:

I thank the Senator for raising the issue of the structure of research, the issue of contracts and the role of universities. We have a dedicated part of the summary for policymakers in volume 4 focusing on this. For the role of research in universities in enabling transformative change, the potential is very strong. There is a growing body of literature to discuss the role of universities as anchor institutions in driving this. We refer to specific knowledge gaps in transformative change, and we have discussed many of those. Universities and research institutions can themselves undergo transformative change to align their own academic practices with societal, environmental and economic priorities. There is research that discusses the role of universities as agents of transformative change. Universities perpetuate and disseminate knowledge and research themselves. They can be exemplars of social change and agents for the kind of sustainable change that we want to bring. However, there are challenges.

Climate change is a wicked problem and it requires people to work across disciplines. We are often incentivised to work in silos and working across disciplines is challenging for various reasons. The nature of research funding contracts is often challenging. The small-scale competitive research bids with time horizons often of one to two years mean that researchers, some of whom are here, do not have long-term career certainty in their contracts. Instead, we need to develop strategic, transformative and interdisciplinary research across these really important societal challenges. We also identify that an overemphasis on industry co-funding can militate against public good research, which is a characteristic of much of the research on climate and biodiversity, particularly in the humanities, arts and fundamental science. The short-term contracts for highly skilled research staff have made it very challenging to recruit and retain skilled researchers, which diminishes Ireland's human capacity and expertise in climate change across the public sector and higher education, as researchers move abroad or move to private industry. I thank the Senator for raising the subject. On the issue of engaging with global south research, it is something we did not cover.