The Joint Centre of Excellence in Environmental Intelligence (JCEEI) hosted the second annual conference on December 16th and 17th 2021, which was themed ‘Beyond COP26: The Road to Net Zero’.
The virtual conference brought together presentations from international leaders in the field with the keynote address delivered by Professor Paul Monks, Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy.
Kirstine Dale, Principal Fellow, Co-Director of the JCEEI, chaired the event with her counterpart at the University of Exeter, Professor Gavin Shaddick. She shares her reflections on the conference:
“We had an exciting line-up of speakers showcasing their work using transformative technologies to support the UK’s Net Zero ambitions, as well as a session exploring opportunities to engage with, and support, the next generation of environmental and data scientists (‘El Next Generation’).
“The 2021 JCEEI conference demonstrated the wide variety of data science research now being undertaken across the UK and beyond to deliver the Net Zero challenge. An important overall theme to emerge was the vital importance of interdisciplinary working, bringing together varied teams encompassing data and environmental scientists, engineers, social scientists, behavioural researchers and other experts. As Professor Monks highlighted in his keynote address, Net Zero is a system of systems problem – which makes it both highly complex and necessarily inclusive. No single academic discipline alone can solve it: those applying EI approaches will need to draw on a truly diverse community of practitioners bringing other forms of knowledge, experience and skills.
“Gavin and I would like to thank everyone who helped organise the event, the speakers, panellists and attendees. The Conference showed our ongoing commitment to harnessing the power of Data Sciences, and I believe its real value was having a diverse multidisciplinary community with different perspectives and ideas in one place virtually. Almost 500 people from countries as far apart as Hong Kong, United States, Ireland, Sweden, China, and Ukraine, as well as from the UK, registered for the conference and we’ve received lots of positive feedback from attendees and guest speakers.”
For anyone who missed the conference, recordings are available to view on YouTube:
