Today marks the start of Global Climate Change Week, which aims to encourage academic communities – including academics, students, and non-academic staff at universities – in all disciplines and countries to engage with each other, their communities, and policy makers on climate change action and solutions. In this piece, Aurelie Charles describes how the University of Bath is marking the week, and considers how students are leading the way in taking a multi-disciplinary, partnership approach to tackling climate change.
In October 2015, in the build-up towards the COP21 meetings in Paris, a group of staff members at the University of Bath organised themselves to take part in Global Climate Change Week (GCCW). GCCW is a global initiative taking place across universities worldwide to bring together staff, students, and local communities in order to raise knowledge and awareness of climate change. We started by inviting all students on campus, regardless of their field of study, to attend lectures around issues of sustainability. These lectures were already embedded in the university curriculum and spread across faculties from Chemical Engineering and Architecture, to Management and Social and Policy Sciences. Last year, numerous events took place in our arts centre, the Edge, across campus and in lecture theatres. Since GCCW started, a COP21 Implementation group has also been set up, bringing together academic and non-academic staff members to promote teaching and learning activities both across campus and in the university curriculum, supported by the Teaching Development Fund.
In this year’s GCCW, we are supporting an event led by Bath Sustainability Postgraduates, a group of Bath postgraduates who are leading the way in closing the gap between individual intention of climate action and actual behaviour. The event takes place on Wednesday 11th October in the Harvest area of the Edge from 11am to 3pm. The aim is to bring together students and staff in one-to-one discussions on how to reduce our daily carbon emissions. As part of this event, we will also be launching the first university wiki on sustainability. This will be used to gather together all relevant resources around sustainability on campus, with a database of units across faculties addressing sustainability issues, but also advertising events happening on campus during the year.
In effect, there is much more to come this year in terms of public engagement events and learning activities around sustainability on campus, and students are leading the way. The Students' Union is running its annual Go Green week in the last week of October, and other student-led groups such as Student Switch off, People and Planet, and our Green Champions are all feeding into the self-sustaining loop from individual awareness to public action.
Student leadership is inspiring and this is precisely the highlight of all these initiatives. With our support, students are preparing themselves for a sustainable future. They are going beyond subject-specific knowledge as they are not afraid to build bridges across disciplines in order to address our current major global challenge. Kostas Iatridis recently wrote about the necessity of public-private partnership in order to address our environmental challenges, which echoes in many ways Mariana Mazzucato’s voice for such partnership to think about and to finance inclusive growth. Yet, our students are already wiring their brains to go beyond the public-private divide and beyond the mental barriers of disciplinary knowledge. They are already aware of the necessity to embrace the public impact in our daily private decisions.
Image by Garry Knight
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