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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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…)