About

Dr. Tadhg O´Mahony Ph.D. B.Sc. Dip.

Dr. Tadhg O´Mahony is Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy at UCD in Ireland and Adjunct Professor at the Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC)/ Turku School of Economics in Finland. He has been a visiting fellow at the Environment Institute at Princeton University, the Demand Centre at the University of Lancaster and at the Research Centre for Soft Energy Science at Nanjing University in China.

As a systems scientist, futurist and ecological economist, his work concerns transformations to sustainable futures. He is a double EU Marie Curie fellow having held the prestigious Individual Fellowship for ‘talented researchers’ from 2015-2017 at the FFRC, which led to development of a globally groundbreaking approach to ‘sustainable wellbeing.’ This work forms the first transdisciplinary integration of the social sciences of wellbeing with sustainability science that is found in the global literature, and offers a framework for both conceptualisation and implementation, at the frontier of thinking on emissions mitigation and sustainable development internationally. The fellowship also led to construction of two global scenario models of material consumption and related emissions footprints, and one of the first books worldwide dealing with the political economy of the low-carbon transition. His Marie Curie fellowship at IMDEA Energy Institute in Madrid, from 2013-2015, produced outcomes that included changing the standard approach used internationally to calculate the Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare and developing the first regional energy model for Madrid.

At Dublin City University he was Research Fellow on Ireland’s first national Climate Change Assessment (ICCA) from 2022 to 2023, working on Volume 4 Transformations, including authoring chapters on Transforming: Livelihoods; Development; and on Governance and Policy. Dr. O’Mahony’s work directly-led to noteworthy innovations including Ireland’s first comprehensive strategic identification of the economic development opportunities in transition and transformation (Chapter 6), and characterisation of the role of foresight in the long-term transformative governance required for deep emissions reduction and realising related synergies (Chapter 7).

As researcher, consultant and lecturer he has over two decades of experience in academic, government and private roles, on projects from Europe to Asia. He received his PhD in 2010 for Ireland’s first scenario analysis of national energy and related carbon emissions, and first related application of systems thinking. The study went beyond standard techno-economic modelling to explore the wider national development paths that fundamentally underlie changes in emissions. This was achieved through integrating qualitative futures methods with quantitative modelling. From 2018 to 2019 he was the Senior Economist at the secretariat of the Irish Climate Change Advisory Council. There he pioneered the major change that occurred in Irish national transport mitigation policy, from technological transition to systems transformation, as later taken up in studies by the OECD and others. This significant policy impact was an extension of the application of systems thinking to mitigation of transport found in his PhD (2004 – 2010), blending spatial, transport and technology planning. He has worked extensively for his own consultancy on national climate action, including deepening the national application of the transformative approach to transport in 2020, an approach now both embedded in Irish national policy on climate action and lauded internationally. His research covers empirical analysis and policymaking including in: climate action; sustainable development; sustainable wellbeing; consumption; ecological and environmental economics; energy; transport; and future scenarios.

ORCID ID 0000-0003-2480-7186

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Affiliations

Assistant Professor in Environmental Policy at University College Dublin School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy

Assistant Professor at Chang’an-Dublin International College

Adjunct Professor (Docent) at Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland

Member Earth Institute UCD, Dublin, Ireland.

Member of Sustainable Development Futures Research Group at Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku, Finland

External Member DCU Centre for Climate & Society, Dublin, Ireland

Editorial board, Frontiers in Environmental Economics

Member SCORAI Europe (Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative)