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Empower Eco

Empower Eco™: an integrated Green Innovation, Research and Enterprise multi-actor platform meeting societal challenges and opportunities.

About Empower Eco™

Peatland Aquaculture and Circular Economy (Mount Lucas Wind Farm, Irish midlands)

Empower Eco™ is a multi-actor interdisciplinary quadruple helix HUB that connects key stakeholders (academia, industry, government, society) to advance solutions for complex societal challenges with a focus on agri-food, the environment, bioeconomy and climate change. It also embraces cross cutting activities with Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) with the discipline of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) to address these top-down policy challenges from a bottom up operational perspective.  Central to Empower Eco™ is to support and enable companies and entrepreneurs through bespoke training, testing, piloting and scaling of new innovations at (TRL 6 and beyond) to realize new Green Deal opportunities.  Empower Eco™ is embedded in important strategic initiatives including the Midlands Regional Development Plan 2024 to support and drive regional job creation. It’s operation is to inform and advance beyond-state-of-the-art solutions to pressing societal challenges using a holistic stakeholder approach underpinned by defining, applying and developing key performance indicators (KPIs) with stakeholders. Empower Eco™ also supports early-phase ideation (early TRLs) and for de-risking of complex projects through the use of appropriate business models that includes co-development of environmental models beyond typical life cycle assessment (LCA) monitoring tools.  

Empower Eco™ platform is managed by Professor Neil Rowan who has 3 decades of experience of delivering solutions in these areas through appropriate collaborations with partnering academic institutions (RPOs), industry, policymakers and communities.  These collaborative activities include linkages to relevant national (such as EPA, DAFM) and international (such as Interreg, Marie Sklodowski Curie [MSCA] RISE and international training networks; Erasmus plus, Cost Actions, and Regional University Network – European University [RUN-EU]) funded projects for open knowledge and technology exchanges that also includes important staff mobility and specialist ‘subject-matter’ training.  Central to the success of Empower Eco™ is the seamless integration of sophisticated “living labs” with in field monitoring and development for new products and services linked to education, entrepreneurship and industry.   

Our plan is to develop and inspirational Empower Eco™ innovation HUB/living lab complex for enterprise development, innovation in biodiversity and circular economy, community regeneration, social innovation tacking societal challenges, all underpinned by education, learning and entrepreneurship. This will mobilize the next generation of innovators, leaders, entrepreneurs, learners and communities to stimulate regional job creation and environmental knowledge base with a global orientation with a strong nexus to education. Empower Eco™ will also help unlock important opportunities for the midlands Just Transition territory through a holistic approach to addressing key issues for end-users.  

Examples of important projects include: 

Connected “living labs” on TUS Athlone Campus and on linked environmental sites (such as Peatlands).
  • Development of first integrated-multitrophic aquaculture (IMTA) system in the peatlands at Mount Lucas Windfarm with stakeholders that embraces digital transformation and climate action 
  • Development of bioeconomy demonstrator blueprint for the Midlands with a global orientation (example DAFM 2022 funded “BioMDJT” project) with an ‘All Ireland’ orientation that embraces appropriate ‘Biorefinery’ activities, commercial products and services.  
  • Development of new appropriate technologies for treating of contaminated honey bee pollen for commercial pollination and related ecosystem service management (such as EPA project) 
  • Training and development of established and new techniques for novel food processing that embraces effective waste streams and management (such as through Interreg Neptunus, Marie Curie ICHTHYS, and RUN-EU projects) and  
  • Development of DarkSky tourism (such as through Erasmus Plus)  
  • Development of risk assessment models for evaluating environmental performance of new green technologies and to mitigate threats such as that posed by emerging contaminants of concern (such as DAFM funded) 
  • Renewables, energy, low carbon, carbon sinks that embraces impact of climate change on innovations (such as Interreg projects).  
  • New Green Deal Innovations including AI, educational and augmented reality/immersive technologies.  
  • Smart eco-functional packaging (such as through Interreg and MSCA projects).  
  • Nexus between environmental and implicit drivers and antimicrobial resistance bacteria that includes co-development and testing potential solutions  
  • Bioinformatics, next generation sequencing and the machine learning to unlock opportunities in Green innovation  
  • Outreach to schools and communities (such as SFI funded projects) 
Hosting ‘All Ireland’ Aquaculture Research and Enterprise Workshops at TUS Athlone campus (such as DAFM “Morefish” project, in partnership with University of Galway).

Publications

Rowan, N.J, Casey, O. (2021). Empower Eco multiactor HUB: A triple helix ‘academia-industry-authority’ approach to creating and sharing potentially disruptive tools for addressing novel and emerging new Green Deal opportunities under a United Nations Sustainable Development Goals framework. Current Opinion in Environmental Science and Health, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coesh.2021.100254 

Rowan, N.J., Pogue, R. (2021). Editorial overview: Green new deal era — Current challenges and emerging opportunities for developing sustaining and disruptive innovation. Current Opinion in Environmental Science and Health, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coesh.2021.100294 

Rowan, N.J., Murray, N., Qiao, Y., O’Neill, E., Clifford, E., Barcelo, D., Power, D.M. (2022). Digital transformation of peatland eco-innovations (‘Paludiculture’): Enabling a pradigm shift towards the real-time sustainable production of ‘green-friendly’ products and services. Science of the Total Environment, Vol 838, part 10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.156328 

Rowan, N.J., Galanakis, C.M. (2020). Unlocking challenges and opportunities presented by COVID-19 pandemic for cross-cutting disruption in agri-food and green deal innovations: Quo Vadis? Science of the Total Environment, Vol 748, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141362 

O’Neill, E.A., Stekskal, V., Clifford, E., Rowan, N.J. (2020). Novel use of peatlands as future locations for the sustainable intensification of freshwater aquaculture production – A case study from the Republic of Ireland. Science of the Total Environment, Vol. 706, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.136044 

Laso, J. et al. (2022). Achieving Sustainability of the Seafood Sector in the European Atlantic Area by Addressing Eco-Social Challenges: The NEPTUNUS Project. Sustainability, 14(5), 3054; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14053054 

Eakins, J., Lynch, M., Carolan, J.C., Rowan, N.J. (2023). Studies on the novel effects of electron beam treated pollen on colony reproductive output in commercially-reared bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) for mass pollination applications. Science of the Total Environment, Vol 899, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165614 

Masterson, K., Meade, E., Garvey, M., Lynch, M., Major, I., Rowan, N.J. (2021). Development of a low-temperature extrusion process for production of GRAS bioactive-polymer loaded compounds for targeting antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) bacteria. Science of the Total Environment, Vol 800, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.149545