What the Sustainability Team have been up to in Climate Week

It’s been a busy week here in the Sustainability Team- even the weekends have been jam packed. Last Saturday started with a workshop in SW London on over-grafting fruit trees led by the London Orchard project who supported us in setting up our orchard.

There is now a unique fruit tree in Carshalton that should bear a whole variety of apples and pears.  N.B. Did you know you can graft an apple tree to a hawhorn?

Then Sunday was back out into the fresh air with about 120 other local people of all ages clearing plastic and other rubbish from the muddy banks of the Thames on the Isle of Dogs with Thames 21.

Thames 21 organise fantastic family friendly volunteering events along the waterways in Greater London to improve them for people and wildlife. Check out their events calendar for one near you. They have the wellies and gloves so all you need to bring is enthusiasm!

On Monday and Tuesday the team were out and about on the Avery Hill and Medway campus with our external ISO14001 auditor and he was happy with what he saw  and gave us verbal confirmation of accreditation so we’re eagerly awaiting the certificate- but it’s just the beginning of our ISO14001 journey.

So filled with relief after much hard work achieving ISO14001 Kat took a break by celebrating Climate Week at an inspiring evening workshop run by LEAD who are an international non-profit organisation focused on achieving sustainability through leadership.   The session was facilitated by Edward and Juliane from LEAD and participants moved around the room discussing their thoughts and experiences in relation to the following key dimensions of successful leadership and influencing skills in the context of climate change:

• Advocacy and Learning
• Congruence – i.e. walking the talk
• Listening and Observing
• Vision and Values
• Confidence and Persistence
• Learning and change i.e. learning from situations and applying that to create change
• Self-Awareness
• Thinking and Acting Differently
• Networking
• The Unknown- here you could discuss whatever you felt was missing – e.g. passion and enthusiasm

It was a great opportunity to meet others outside of the University sector and to reinspire you. It would be great for our Sustainability Champions to participate in a similar session to be able to share their thoughts and experiences in acting as leaders for sustainability.

So whilst John was at Avery Hill sharing the plans for the community food garden and getting feedback from some enthusiastic staff and students Kat popped over to Medway to attend the Climate Week lecture and discussion by Jeremy Haggar,  Head of the Agriculture, Health and Environment Department from the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) at the University of Greenwich. It was entitled ‘Climate Change: a threat to coffee small-holders and our morning cup of coffee?’ and you can browse through the slides here. The audience were treated to three different types of coffee- originating from Brazil, Guatemala and Kenya and Jeremy explained what the potential consequences of the changes in climate were for each of these regions as well as some adaptation methods.

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