Calling for change

The student voice on climate change has been strong and consistent – and UCL Union has helped co-ordinate a raft of events in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit.

Craig Griffiths, UCL Union’s Environment and Ethics Officer, explains how students are striving to make UCL a more environmentally friendly university – and challenging the institution to match their efforts.

Newspaper headines about the environment

“As most students at UCL belong to a generation which will undoubtedly experience at first hand the devastating consequences of runaway climate change – if global leaders fail us at Copenhagen in December and in 2010 – the student voice needs to be heard in the run-up to the historic summit. Given the excellent interdisciplinary work of the UCL Environment Institute, many students at UCL directly study courses dealing with issues surrounding climate change, but there are many more student activists at UCL.

For the last week UCL students have been running a Copenhagen Climate Week, with events planned to raise awareness about the summit and to bring home the urgency of the situation. Copenhagen was chosen to become a campaign week by a cross-campus vote of UCL students last academic year and students have already voted for another ‘Go Green Week’ to take place in the first week of February – no doubt the results of the Copenhagen summit will be high on the agenda.

Environmental campaigns at UCL owe a great amount to the UCL Union People & Planet Society, which meets weekly and has for four years campaigned on ethical and environmental issues, both local and international. For example, we hold events discussing the Copenhagen treaty but also concentrate on campaigning to make UCL a greener institution, and the society was central to UCL setting up a Sustainability Steering Committee.

UCL Union has become a more environmentally sustainable institution of late, but we still have some way to go. Students have constantly backed environmental policy at Union Council meetings or at Annual General Meetings covering issues from recycling and energy efficiency to a ban on union-funded domestic aviation and pushing UCL to employ an Environmental Director. The latest initiative to involve more students in environmental campaigning is the Environment & Ethics Forum.

Many UCL students will be among those marching through the streets of London on 5 December to take part in THE WAVE, which will be the largest climate change demonstration ever seen in the UK. Our voice will be added to thousands of others to demand a binding carbon emissions reduction treaty at Copenhagen; one that will set in place a fair and just transfer to a low-carbon economy, recognising the responsibility of richer nations to contribute more to this effort.

Not everyone can make it to Copenhagen but several UCL students will be making the trip (by train or coach, of course!); some to lobby delegates in the conference hall, others to take part in international civil society events, or to demonstrate and take direct action.

Although there has been rather a lot of depressing news on Copenhagen of late, it remains a historic opportunity to galvanise a process which must speedily de-carbonise the world economy; the scientific consensus is that we have until 2015 for emissions to peak. Students from all over the world will be watching events in Copenhagen very closely indeed; we refuse to accept yet more failed solutions which will imperil the future of our generation and the planet as a whole.”

Image: Newspaper headlines about the environment