“IARU is pleased to announce the 2015 Global University Climate Forum, which will take place during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP21) in Paris in December 2015”
We all started our first year in Creative Sustainability this fall - Caroline, an architect student from Sweden, Anna, a textile designer from Finland and Ekaterina, a business student from Russia. Three persons with a common goal - to change the world! Why not start on a small scale?
We try to convince people from the start that we will have to change our behavior to secure our resources for future generations (live a bit more sustainable in other words). You can argue and say that “we’re already so good here in the north, it’s not going to help if only we change our behavior when the world continues to consume as they do!”, but someone needs to show that it is actually possible to not only be on the zero line but also going plus. It’s not enough to just stop, we need to restore what we have already destroyed, put the ground water back again and let the photosynthesis take care of the increased carbon dioxide in the air so we can keep taking advantage of the great ecosystem services it provides for us (such as oxygen for example).
Of course we can’t do all this by ourselves but we can grow the seeds to make it happen. Our seed is to join the IARU Global University Climate Forum to be able to share our knowledge and also getting the advantage to meet other students from around the world to get to know their stories and experiences around this huge and important topic.
During one year the mission is to create a project that will have measureable impact on our campus, our community or in a broader context. The project will foremost focus on the environmental sustainability, but since we are creative sustainability students we will also take in account the social and economical part of sustainability as they are equally important and highly connected to each other. One can’t argue for a better climate without understanding the impact it will have on the human behavior and our global economy, and of course the other way around.
Everyone who submitted a project couldn’t join so we were one of the lucky teams who were selected out of our proposal for a more sustainable Aalto. In our project proposal we mentioned Aalto University’s goal to be the most sustainable campus in Finland by 2020 and how our project would assist our university to achieve that goal through quantifying sustainability of food production and consumption on campus.
The project is still in the ideation phase and we are visiting different events, startup meetings and hackathons to get new ideas on what we can do to make our project a success. Our intervention has to have a measurable effect on the campus and will therefore need to be a realized project during the year to come.
IARU stands for ‘International Alliance of Research Universities’ and this forum is focused around the words “Think Global; act local”. On the 4th of December we will leave Helsinki for Paris where the forum will start off with a one day workshop co-hosted by Sorbonne Universités and arranged by Yale University. As you may notice if you are a big tree hugger, the workshop will take place during the same week as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP21 in other words).
After the workshop the real work will begin and during the following year we will have to report monthly on our work and give feedback on other teams’ work and also receive feedback from them; “with the aim of keeping students in contact and active for the cause of addressing climate change”. We are really thrilled to be part of this project, Anna will have it as a PET project and Caroline and Ekaterina will place it under the course ‘CS project’ and our mentor is Mikko Jalas.
To be able to get a bigger insight in the campus world and have the chance to get through with our project easier we are all running as candidates in the AYY (Aalto’s student union) election of a new board this week within the coalition group Greener Aalto.
We hope you are as excited as we are and if you have any questions or great ideas you can always contact us (our names with a dot between and @aalto.fi).
To be continued!
Anna, Caroline, Ekaterina
We all started our first year in Creative Sustainability this fall - Caroline, an architect student from Sweden, Anna, a textile designer from Finland and Ekaterina, a business student from Russia. Three persons with a common goal - to change the world! Why not start on a small scale?
We try to convince people from the start that we will have to change our behavior to secure our resources for future generations (live a bit more sustainable in other words). You can argue and say that “we’re already so good here in the north, it’s not going to help if only we change our behavior when the world continues to consume as they do!”, but someone needs to show that it is actually possible to not only be on the zero line but also going plus. It’s not enough to just stop, we need to restore what we have already destroyed, put the ground water back again and let the photosynthesis take care of the increased carbon dioxide in the air so we can keep taking advantage of the great ecosystem services it provides for us (such as oxygen for example).
Of course we can’t do all this by ourselves but we can grow the seeds to make it happen. Our seed is to join the IARU Global University Climate Forum to be able to share our knowledge and also getting the advantage to meet other students from around the world to get to know their stories and experiences around this huge and important topic.
During one year the mission is to create a project that will have measureable impact on our campus, our community or in a broader context. The project will foremost focus on the environmental sustainability, but since we are creative sustainability students we will also take in account the social and economical part of sustainability as they are equally important and highly connected to each other. One can’t argue for a better climate without understanding the impact it will have on the human behavior and our global economy, and of course the other way around.
Everyone who submitted a project couldn’t join so we were one of the lucky teams who were selected out of our proposal for a more sustainable Aalto. In our project proposal we mentioned Aalto University’s goal to be the most sustainable campus in Finland by 2020 and how our project would assist our university to achieve that goal through quantifying sustainability of food production and consumption on campus.
The project is still in the ideation phase and we are visiting different events, startup meetings and hackathons to get new ideas on what we can do to make our project a success. Our intervention has to have a measurable effect on the campus and will therefore need to be a realized project during the year to come.
IARU stands for ‘International Alliance of Research Universities’ and this forum is focused around the words “Think Global; act local”. On the 4th of December we will leave Helsinki for Paris where the forum will start off with a one day workshop co-hosted by Sorbonne Universités and arranged by Yale University. As you may notice if you are a big tree hugger, the workshop will take place during the same week as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP21 in other words).
After the workshop the real work will begin and during the following year we will have to report monthly on our work and give feedback on other teams’ work and also receive feedback from them; “with the aim of keeping students in contact and active for the cause of addressing climate change”. We are really thrilled to be part of this project, Anna will have it as a PET project and Caroline and Ekaterina will place it under the course ‘CS project’ and our mentor is Mikko Jalas.
To be able to get a bigger insight in the campus world and have the chance to get through with our project easier we are all running as candidates in the AYY (Aalto’s student union) election of a new board this week within the coalition group Greener Aalto.
We hope you are as excited as we are and if you have any questions or great ideas you can always contact us (our names with a dot between and @aalto.fi).
To be continued!
Anna, Caroline, Ekaterina