Climate change is irreversible. While it is important for universities to reduce their carbon footprints to prevent further damage to the environment, this will do little to mitigate current and ongoing threats – including to their own estate. Each year, universities suffer from extreme weather events that are increasing in frequency and intensity as a […] … learn more→
Blog Archives
Universities need to look disaster resilience in the eye
Elite universities are falling short on their green promises
With the world’s annual climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow this year, you would expect the UK’s top research-intensive universities to be leading the response to the climate emergency. After all, they can readily draw upon expert advice. They should be showing the way to becoming zero carbon institutions. But ambitious targets drawn up a decade […] … learn more→
Teenage students suffer the effects of a long year of pandemic
The developmental stage of adolescence is the psychosociological period of transition between childhood and adulthood and is characterized by the gradual acquisition of independence and autonomy to become an adult. Therefore, the distancing of parents in favor of social and affective relationships between equals is gaining ground. A fundamental aspect of adolescents is that practically everything […] … learn more→
«1 2 3 Plant’haie! »: Grow the eco-citizens of tomorrow
If you are shown a painting by Claude Monet (right), what do you see? Two children, walking on a snowy road … And on the next photo? A rabbit on the lookout, ears pricked up… Few people will mention trees with bare branches, in the first case, or meadow daisies, in the second. If you are in […] … learn more→
On Earth, the mass of the artificial now equals the mass of the living
Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) published, on December 9, 2020, a scientific study in the journal Nature entitled “The global mass produced by man exceeds all living biomass”. From the summary, a sentence clearly situates the subject: “We find that the Earth is exactly at a point of intersection. By 2020, anthropogenic mass, which recently doubled […] … learn more→
The forgotten environmental crisis: how 20th century settler writers foreshadowed the Anthropocene
Just as writers and artists today are responding to the Anthropocene through climate fiction and eco art, earlier generations chronicled an environmental crisis that presaged humanity’s global impact. The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch that powerfully expresses the planetary scale of the environmental changes wrought by human activity. Yet almost a century ago, New Zealand and Australia were at […] … learn more→
Climate change is resulting in profound, immediate and worsening health impacts, over 120 researchers say
Climate change is resulting in profound, immediate and worsening health impacts, and no country is immune, a major new report from more than 120 researchers has declared. This year’s annual report of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, released today, presents the latest data on health impacts from a changing climate. Among its results, the […] … learn more→
Tacking climate change demands superheated university collaboration
The call for action on climate change has had new life breathed into it in recent weeks. The US election that delivered Joe Biden a win also brought with it the promise of climate policy being prioritised and the pledge to return the US to the Paris Agreement. This follows the European Union setting out […] … learn more→
Greenland is melting: we need to worry about what’s happening on the largest island in the world
Greenland is the largest island in the world and on it rests the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere. If all that ice melted, the sea would rise by more than 7 metres. But that’s not going to happen is it? Well not any time soon, but understanding how much of the ice sheet might […] … learn more→
The myth of electric cars: Why we also need to focus on buses and trains
California recently announced that it plans to ban the sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, Ontario has invested $500 million in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) and Tesla is quickly becoming the world’s highest-valued car company. It almost seems like owning an electric vehicle is a silver bullet in the fight against climate change, but it isn’t. What […] … learn more→