Welcome to my first blog! I’m Harriet Cross, International Relations Officer and Worldwide Universities Network Coordinator. I’ve attended a couple of environment-related workshops in the last month so that’s what I’m going to focus on today.
One of the advantages of inter-disciplinary and multinational research is its ability to have an impact on real-world problems which can only be tackled by pooling knowledge, ideas and equipment. The University of York is working to tackle major environmental issues by bringing together over 100 faculty from 17 different departments and encouraging them to exchange ideas with counterparts in the UK and throughout the world.
On 6 October, York’s Environmental Sustainability Institute (YESI) and the Centre for Low Carbon Futures held a workshop entitled ‘Circular Economy – Innovative thinking for a sustainable future’. This brought together academic researchers from all over the UK with representatives of international corporations and Government departments to discuss how to respond to the twin challenges of increasingly limited global resources and rising demand for fossil fuel based products.
The participants agreed that the traditional linear approach to product and system design – make, use and dump – was no longer sustainable. Full cycle whole-system thinking presented an alternative option, and sustainability could give competitive advantage.
Ideas for real life solutions were exchanged, such as Business Schools being shop windows to the potential technology and business benefit of the circular economy; and the importance of better communication between the academic producers of information and the users of this information at the other end of the scale.
I hope that some of the collaborations discussed during this workshop might develop into international projects which will form part of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Adapting to Climate Change research group portfolio. There are already 21 of these WUN interdisciplinary research projects underway, with York already involved in Ocean acidification and Global water research. Watch this space for more information about York’s participation in WUN and my thoughts on how it adds value to our research and teaching objectives.
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