Institutions like UCL face some big environmental challenges; whether it’s our energy consumption (and accompanied eye-wateringly large bills), carbon emissions, purchasing or difficult to maintain heritage buildings. But we’re also producing world-leading sustainability research. Our academic community is at the forefront of efforts to tackle many of these same challenges.

We believe that unlocking this expertise can form a vital tool to tackle our own sustainability challenges. So how we can use the huge amount of knowledge and expertise within UCL’s academic community to help improve impact of the institution as a whole?

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Guest blog by Oliver Southwick, PhD student, Department of Mathematics, UCL

Losing everything on your laptop may be a nightmare scenario for many of us, but what if this happened world wide? If, by some bizarre thought-experiment logic, we lost all the pieces of our scientific knowledge, painstakingly collected over hundreds of years? Everything from the sequence of the human genome to the orbits of the planets was gone, forgotten.

Well, we’d have to work it all out again, wouldn’t we? It would surely be easier the second time round. But how would you go about it?

Say you were put in charge of working out how the oceans work, how the water circulates around our planet. This is a seriously important job. We need to understand the ocean circulation to navigate ships, to predict the weather and climate and to understand the rich biology of the sea. So how would you start doing this? (more…)

Concern about differences in priority over Climate Change between specialists and the public

As a young researcher I see a vast disparity in the way in which Climate Change is seen by the general public and in academia. In academia, we are intensely occupied with the solutions for achieving sustainability, supplementing our own work by attending conferences and reading journals. The general public will see Climate Change articles in the media and some may find themselves watching a documentary on the subject every now and then. But this gulf goes with any topic where ‘specialists’ are involved; take medicine for example. The question is – does this matter? (more…)

In recent news, the OECD PISA study on Gender Equality in Education reminded us again of the well-known fact: girls and women are under-represented in science A-levels, university graduates and scientific careers. What’s new, are their survey results, according to which “girls lack the same self-confidence as boys in science and maths” despite achieving high scores. Also, “differences in parental encouragement” seems to “exacerbate the problem”. Considering my parents’ generation this would seem likely, but still? Has the apple really not fallen further afield by now? (more…)

By Tia Kansara, UCL Energy Institute PhD student. Continue the conversation with Tia: @2050city

Thermal comfort is the study of the human psychological, physiological and physical environment. It is a vast subject buried in the science of comfort in the outdoors and indoors. Research, like how we feel comfortable in the buildings and cities we design – is of core value for architects (designers), governments (policy-makers), engineers (construction specialists) and occupants (you and me). (more…)