Rowan will be talking about his subject of expertise, ocean plastics, explaining their impact on ocean fauna and flora as well as on our civilisation.
Rowan Byrne is an Irishman, a Marine Biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. His decades-long career has included swimming with sharks in Australia, South Africa, Bahamas and Belize; as well as saving baby sea turtles across the Philippines and in Dominica in the Caribbean for many years. Rowan also successfully pioneered the satellite tracking of nesting leatherback sea turtles all the way to Ireland from Dominica in 2007! He's the Marine Plastics Lead for Mott MacDonald, a global engineering consultancy, and steers their global focus on research and solutions to the challenge of plastics in the marine environment.
As a keen innovator himself, Rowan's focus is very much on legacy and how we can - and should - all work with a wide range of industry partners and governments to integrate environmental and social considerations into all our activities. As founder and chair of the Mott MacDonald Plastics Working Group, Rowan is constantly collaborating on research projects with key UK stakeholders to identify and mitigate plastics in the environment. His work won him the Institute of Environmental Management & Assessment Sustainability (IEMA) Leader of the Year Award in 2020 and his management of the installation of two Seabins at Howth Harbour in Dublin in 2019 has received multiple media accolades. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx