We celebrated sustainability at our Green Festival from 19-21 with a series of different events, workshops and drop in sessions. Over 500 staff and students attended throughout the festival, which is an amazing turnout. Thank you to everyone for giving up their time to show their commitment to sustainability and to all the event organisers for their enthusiasm.
It’s difficult to pick out some highlights, but our team really enjoyed:
- The Introduction to Carbon Literacy workshop with Jen Gale from Sustainable (ish). This session was informative, impactful and inspiring. Jen illustrated brilliantly the scale of the climate change challenge, but showed how each of us can take action to make meaningful change at home, at work and in our local communities.
- The spinning, anxiety relief yoga and meditative nature walk all engaged people in a different way to sustainability and showed the importance of looking after yourselves in challenging times.
- The Green Careers event provided inspiration and ideas to people who are interested in moving into the sustainability career space.
- The calculating carbon from trees workshop provided a practical insight into how much carbon is absorbed by the beautiful trees on Whiteknights. Did you know the cedar tree in front of the Palmer building can absorb 33.5kg of carbon in a year? This is same amount of CO2 that is emitted by an average car driving 158.6 miles, highlighting the importance of decarbonising the way we travel.
- The Universal Voices event in the Great Hall celebrated sustainability through the power of song.
- Staff and students enjoyed the film screening of Six Inches of Soil, with Q&A afterwards which generated some fruitful conversations.
- The Clothes Upcycling workshop with Reading Sewing Bee was a great success, teaching staff and students simple but beautiful techniques to mend clothes – encouraging reuse and reducing consumption.
- The Walker Institute put on a brilliant and interesting session with students who had attended the COP29 UNFCCC climate conference in the first week and then connected live to Baku so we could hear the experiences from students who were actually there at the time. This session highlighted the tremendous complexity of these events, with 198 countries attempting to negotiate to reach a consensus. You can watch the recording of the session here.
