Green Capital: Student Capital – mobilising Bristol’s students for city sustainability

In 2015, Bristol was the UK’s first European Green Capital. During the year, HEFCE’s Catalyst Fund backed an initiative between the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England Bristol to promote student involvement in green activities.

In cities and communities across the world, students form a significant, but often neglected part of the population. Seen as transient, they are easy for cities to ignore. Yet in Bristol they form nearly 10% of the population, offering vision and energy to the city. In a unique collaboration between the two universities in Bristol, student unions, the Bristol City Council and a network of over 800 local organisations, Green Capital: Student Capital was designed to unleash the power of Bristol’s students.

Green Capital: Student Capital initiated, promoted and celebrated student engagement with sustainability across the city region. Much of the work comprised novel initiatives co-created by students with community groups and SMEs such as:

  • addressing the urgent problem of homelessness in the city
  • working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to help write new business plans, based on which some have secured future funding
  • helping produce new apps to widen awareness of parks and open spaces
  • creating business analyses based on which firms have relocated to Bristol.

Green Capital: Student Capital linked students with wildlife conservation groups, local businesses, local community groups, local schools and colleges, student societies, charities and NGOs, healthcare providers and many more local organisations. By creating a vibrant network with community groups, public bodies and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), the first year of the project saw students giving over 125,000 hours of their time to sustainability volunteering, placements, internships, and projects. That amounts to over 72 years’ worth of work and over £1.2 million of economic contribution to the city.

Over 7,000 students took part in the first year and hundreds of students have been awarded the Green Capital Change Maker award for their work. This award was specially created for the project and recognises students’ passion and commitment to making a difference in their city.

To ensure that work can continue, both universities have established a joint SkillsBridge platform, which links the community and students. This enables students to find ways to help in the community, and enables the community to find students who are keen to help.

Students themselves have been very positive about the impact upon them. They have learnt skills, gained practical experience and made new connections. It has enhanced the employability of participants and, through the application of their energy and knowledge to resolve sustainability challenges, it has created a community of student Change Makers who will carry forward the positive experiences into their future professional and private lives. It has contributed to change in Bristol and fostered new connections between residents and the universities. Equally importantly, the project has increased students’ sense of belonging, which contributes directly to their wellbeing. This has been particularly important to international students, who took part in disproportionately large numbers (41% of participants) and reported feeling that they belonged and had a much fuller understanding of Britain as they volunteered in communities across the city.

In November 2016, the project was awarded the UK and Ireland Green Gown for Student Engagement. In March 2017, the project won an International Green Gown award against competition from across the globe. The awards recognise exceptional sustainability initiatives in higher and further education institutions. The judges described the winning entry as a dynamic city-wide project with a direct impact on graduate employability.

 

Top 3 learnings

 

Working together is essential

The two universities and two unions worked closely together, but in a much broader sense all partners were involved in the process of student engagement, from the external organisations and local authorities to the students themselves.

Ongoing engagement is crucial to a successful legacy.

Bristol’s Green Capital 2015 year provided a fantastic opportunity to showcase the city’s sustainability credentials and to act as a catalyst for sustainability action. But we needed to create lasting change. Right from the outset, the project was designed with its legacy in mind – for Bristol and other cities.

Change is possible.

Green Capital: Student Capital is testament to the success of the European Green Capital 2015 year, to the merit of the HEFCE Catalyst Fund and to the value of the student higher education community as a real force for practical change in our cities.

Read more about the award-winning work of Green Capital: Student Capital

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This blog has been reproduced with kind permission from HEFCE.  You can view the original blog on the HEFCE site.

This blog has been written by Professor Chris Willmore, Professor of Sustainability and Law, University of Bristol; Professor Jim Longhurst, Assistant Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Environmental Science, University of the West of England, Bristol; and Dr William Clayton,
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of the West of England, Bristol.

Professor Chris Willmore
Professor Jim Longhurst

 

Dr William Clayton

Brexit: A climactic decision?

In the lead up to the Brexit vote, we are posting some blogs from our Cabot Institute members outlining their thoughts on Brexit and potential implications for environmental research, environmental law and the environment.  
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With barely a week to go to the Referendum, the Environment has singularly failed to make itself an issue in the BREXIT debate. Yet it is impossible to explore any aspect of environmental law in the UK without encountering European Law.  It is therefore no surprise that environmental lawyers and environmental groups have been queuing up to express concerns about the implications of BREXIT – Margherita Piericcini’s Cabot Institute blog on the impact on wildlife and habitats is an example.

So why has the environment not become a key issue?  I attended the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group’s event ‘A Climactic Decision: Brexit’s impact on the UK’s climate and environment’ at the Houses of Parliament earlier this month in the hope of finding out why.

Chaired by Mark Mardell, Mary Creagh MP Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee and Professor Michael Grubb (UCL) spoke for remaining. Roger Helmer MEP UKIP European Parliament Industry, Research and Energy Committee  and Lee Upcroft spoke for exit on the topic of Staying in the EU is the best way to protect the UK’s climate and environment.

The first problem that was manifest is that those strongly engaged in climate change and the environment more generally, are convinced of the role of the EU: in the opening vote at the debate all but one person in the audience were voting remain. Equally for those voting leave, climate change may not be a concern to them: Professor Michael Grubb speaking in the debate referred to the ‘twin horns’ of climate change and EU membership to argue that remaining in the EU and climate change action have much in common. Both require an acceptance of expert evidence, acceptance of uncertainty and a willingness to work collaboratively across cultures, surrendering some individual independence in the wider good.

The environment is the one place where BREXIT campaigners do not argue that most things from Brussels are awful. Put simply the environmental case for remaining is that just about all of the environmental law that benefits the UK stems from the EU.  Few countries or regional groupings in the world have the sort of comprehensive environmental laws the EU has, or has had them so long.

The BREXIT speakers in the debate sought to argue that the sorts of environmental action that the EU has adopted were ‘in the air globally’ and the UK would probably have done it anyway.  If that is so, the remain speakers countered, why has the UK ended up in the European Courts so often for not implementing EU environmental law ? All too often when the EU has agreed new laws to protect the environment the UK has had to be taken to the European Court of Justice to secure compliance – for example when the Bathing Waters Directive was adopted, the UK Initially registered fewer bathing beaches than Luxembourg (don’t dive for a map it is landlocked, but it registered each cove round its lakes). It took the European Court of Justice to sort that one, and bring the UK into compliance. The same with urban waste water (sewage) where it took the European Court to force the UK to stop discharging untreated sewage into the sea. And the list goes on. So this does not look as if  the UK ‘would have introduced all these environmental laws anyway’.

The second BREXIT argument was that as the UK leads the EU on climate change, it does not need the EU.  Climate change and pollution do not respect EU borders, so we need global action not regional action, Remain speakers countered by arguing that it is easier to convince 27 other states of our concerns, and then take joint action. Once the EU takes action it has a strong voice on the global stage. Outside the EU the UK would be but one voice in nearly 200 states, a much harder task to convince 200 than just 27. Michael Grubb put it bluntly – the UK has more influence to achieve action on climate change in than out.

A third argument was about free trade. Here the BREXIT speakers argued that the UK would be free to create whatever environmental rules it wanted on its own or in multilateral partnerships of its choice and to scrap those (unspecified) that count as unacceptable burdens.  But as an expert from the floor who had been involved in UK / USA trade negotiations explained, in his experience the UK alone makes little progress in getting decent terms from the USA, until the EU as a whole throws its weight behind the negotiations. When asked about the impact of World Trade Organisation obligations on this argument, BREXIT speakers claimed nobody had raised this with them before. Put simply, the nostalgic world of a UK free to create whatever rules it wants does not exist, in or out of the EU. The WTO Treaty obligations mean states cannot unilaterally impose what can be seen as trade barriers by setting national rules, without ending up in the WTO courts. Only regional treaty commitments protect environmental rules in restraint of free trade from the WTO court. The EU is the strongest example of that sort of trade treaty.

When it came to energy, the BREXIT argument was that EU membership had kept energy prices high,  particularly through VAT and the Combustion Plant Directive closing our coal fired power stations. Yet energy prices across the rest of the EU are 40% below the UK, because of their longstanding commitment to renewables, and Germany in particular continues to use coal by investing in compliant technology.  UK government decisions were identified as the problem. The harmonisation of the energy market will produce £500m a year energy cost savings to the UK by 2020 – quite apart from energy security and the capacity for us to export surplus energy.  The EU’s global muscle has led to reductions in the cost of renewables technical – solar power costs have fallen by 30% as a result for example.

So, after two hours of debate, the remain speakers felt the gains from the EU should be retained, the BREXIT debaters felt that all the good things that have come from the EU would have come anyway, and that there is a world outside of the EU in which the UK will be free to have whatever environmental protections it wants, in a nostalgic world of free nation states. The WTO will have something to say about that – or perhaps the UK will simply scrap so much of its environmental protections in pursuit of deregulation and free trade that we will not trouble the WTO.

You can download a summary of this discussion on the APPCCG website.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Chris Willmore, Senior Academic Fellow in Environmental Law at the University of Bristol.  Chris is also the University lead academic for Technology Enhanced Learning and currently leads the University Green Academy team which is developing education for sustainable development across the University curriculum.

Read other blogs in the Brexit series:

University of Bristol’s green heroes – Chris Willmore

In the run up to the Bristol Post’s Green Capital Awards, we thought we’d highlight some of our key Green Heroes and Green Leaders at the University of Bristol.  As part of a four part blog series this week, we will be highlighting some of the key figures behind the scenes and in front of the limelight who are the green movers and shakers of our university.  There are many more Green Heroes across the University that we would like to celebrate. To find out more about who they are and what they are doing, please visit our Sustainability Stories website.
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Chris Willmore is the University of Bristol’s Green Academy academic lead, Director of Undergraduate Studies and lead academic for Technology Enhanced Learning.

Growing up in increasingly over-developed London, Chris has since fostered a passion for saving open spaces and built environments. After an early career as a barrister practising environmental and planning law, Chris decided to move back into academia; “being a barrister you tend to get involved in problems when things have gone wrong. I wanted to help prevent problems” she explains.

The transition to academia lead Chris to a position in the university’s Law school. In this time, Chris has used her role to introduce a number of schemes to help educate and encourage students to be involved in green issues. This includes introducing an award-winning interdisciplinary course termed ‘Sustainable Development’. The motivation for the course was inspire students to expand their thoughts on how sustainability is an issue for all, as Chris explains:  “the whole aim was to offer students an opportunity to understand sustainable development as a holistic issue – and to see how different disciplines bring different things to the challenges”.

Her work isn’t confined to taught courses, over the last few years Chris has worked with the University’s students union to engage students in informal extra curricular activities such as the ‘switch off campaign’. In her words, this was key for “thinking about how students could change this city – after all they are 10% of the city’s population between the two universities”.

This work has drawn Chris away from pure law issues and into engaging the broader student population, through sustainable volunteering schemes. Chris is also part of a pioneering committee that aims to determine the best sustainable future for the university termed the ‘Green Academy team’.  Chris explains why this team, which was formed off the back of Higher Education Academy Initiative, has been such a success: “our low cost, networked approach has attracted a lot of interest as an alternative to top down resource intensive approaches”.

Her ambitions aren’t just for a ‘quick fix’ either – Chris has long term goals for her work with the student population; “Our biggest environmental impact as a university is the thousands of students who graduate each year with a lifetime of footprint ahead of them. We need to skill them to be able to make wise choices”.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Keri McNamara, a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

If you would like to nominate your Green Hero or Green Leader in the upcoming Bristol Post Green Capital Awards, please visit the official Green Capital Awards website.  Entries close on 18 September 2015.

To learn more about the University of Bristol’s activities during the Bristol 2015 European Green Capital year, please visit bristol.ac.uk/green-capital.