University environmental forum – if you attend one environmental event this month, make this one it!

It is in the thompson training suite in the guild at 5pm on tuesday feb 2nd.
This is your chance as a student or a staff member to question, suggest and influence the university on environmental issues.

Come along and take part in an open meeting for all staff and students with the universities sustainability and environmental Advisor - Dr Shields, the Guilds Vice president of democracy and Resources -Tom Guise and myself the Ethical and Environmental officer.

Dr Shields will outline at the start of the meeting the universities position, what it is trying to do with regards to minimizing it impacts and problems. Afterwards we will be talking about what we could do and what our responses to these issues could be as a community.

I think it very important that we make use of this opportunity to start a real community response based, with students staff and the university all involved, to ecological issues at the university.

Please do come along with ideas and suggestions,

Here are some items that I think outline ways that we could progressively develop as a university, please have a read if you have other links please do post them in comments below.

http://www.ecocampus.co.uk/ - “EcoCampus is an Environmental Management System (EMS) and award scheme for the higher education sector. The scheme allows universities to be recognised for addressing key issues of environmental sustainability.
The aims of the EcoCampus Scheme are to encourage, reward and provide tools to assist institutions in moving towards environmental sustainability through good operational and management practices.”

http://peopleandplanet.org/dl/goinggreener/actionguide.pdf
“This means students (and staff) can create their own vision of a low-carbon, future-proof university. It’s a truly community-level response to tackling climate change and has to be conceived and led from the bottom up.”

http://www.transitionedinburghuni.org.uk/ - “Transition Edinburgh University (TEU) is a staff-student initiative that aims to develop and implement localised practical projects to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions in response to the dual challenge of peak oil and climate change.”