An important thing in science is that you will never know, in the long run, the importance of your work.
Most of the time it turns out it was more important that you thought.
My work in the area of energy sustainability will hopefully contribute to climate action initiatives and as such I would consider it as being important.
My work is very important in saving the limited natural resources (e.g., fertilizer in soil), minimizing waste in farm, increase farm crop yield, and increasing profit for farmers.
In the future, my work will become more and more important as the global population will increase from 7.7 billion currently to 9.7 billion in 2050. This means you and your children in the future will need enough food (bread, potato, milk, etc.) to eat and drink! and I am helping to make the food enough for all!
My research is not on a “whole planet” level of importance. However, if eventually my work will help people recover faster from an injury or something like knee replacement and get back to an active life sooner, I would be pretty happy.
So the thing I am working on is helping find new mineral/metal resources for Europe using my skills as a geologist/geochemist. One of major things that Ireland/Europe want is to make sure we have access the materials that allow us to transition to a carbon neutral society. A lot of materials used for wind turbines, solar panels, and other new technologies needs specific types of metals. These metals are scarce so we have to continually finding new resources. Ideally we want to find them in Europe because we have really good environmental standards so we can extract them in a clean and sustainable fashion.
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