Larissa Barabasch from Vienna is a Climate-KIC Master Label student label at the University of Copenhagen. As an economics and business student, her curiosity led her to question the model of growth and use it to address soil diversity and waste management. After changing her studies from economics to climate change, together with other participants from the Madrid-Valencia Journey she is currently working on a modular school program for 10-14 year old school kids. The modular system of different courses, panel discussions, events and other diverse activities, allows for direct climate change incorporation into the school curriculum without being a huge burden for the teachers. Find out how this hybrid program will allow school kids to connect with topics of climate change and the problems from and around it.
Larissa’s favorite sustainability tools are two podcasts:
How I Built This Podcast (related to innovation, entrepreneurship and sustainability concepts): https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this?t=1616496446696
Outrage + Optimism (related to hard facts, hope and optimism): https://outrageandoptimism.libsyn.com/
Tune in for a very interesting conversation on the relevance of personal choices and impact on the environment. Our guests, food and winter lover Raquel Sabater Cánovas fom Madrid and Aleksandra Milovanović from Serbia who loves design, sports and music, participated in the Climate KIC Journey 2020.
Raquel completed her studies in industrial and chemical engineering and is focusing on processes, in particular how to do more with less. Her project focuses on the carbon footprint awareness as people established the “I cannot do anything” mentality, which is contradictory to recent findings. Aleksandra is currently pursuing her PHD in process and product design in chemical engineering in Eindhoven. Her projects also focused on the carbon footprint related to waste management. She shares stories on how people are not aware of waste production, in particular with relation to the fashion industry.
Find out more how they want to create change, which stakeholder partnerships are relevant for their projects and why schools and children are crucial target groups.
Today’s episode builds on the inspiration of Paloma Velón García-Velasco and Mara Haverkort that translates into the engagement of people, doing little things for a better planet and finding solutions to complex problems, step by step.
Tune in and enjoy the stories of “Sea-Lover” Paloma (Madrid) and “Enthusiast” Mara (The Netherlands). While Paloma shares her vivid interest for a better world, she became inspired to take local action with the support of NGOs and the local authorities by organizing a Clean-Up-Day-Campaign. Mara is working on circularity startups and innovation and her individual action plan aims to create recommendations related to interventions on how such startups can overcome barriers to access financial support.
In Episode 41 we meet Simona Jastremskaite who participated in the 2020 Dublona Journey.
Simona's climate journey began in China. While teaching, she became sensitised to the incapacity of expanding urban areas to build resilience against rapid climate change. This has led her to her Master's studies in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science at the University of Lund, where she is specializing in the connection between conventional farming and eutrophication.
Eutrophication is caused by an excessive use of fertilizers in conventional farming, which pollutes waterways. As a result, algae populations explode as they feast on the nutrient-rich particles in the water. This has devastating consequences for marine life.
In this episode, Simona discusses her thesis research with the Lithuanian Ministry of Environment into this topic, as well as her other projects tackling food waste in both Vilnius and Lund.
Interested in finding out more about her projects?
Get in touch through the links below!
Project Pond (in Lund): projectpond.lund@gmail.com
Green Grip: sjastremskaite@gmail.com
Food Saving Vilnius: sjastremskaite@gmail.com
Urban Gardening in Bulgaria: https://www.naturalistichno.org/naturalistichno-2/
Today we return to the Climate-KIC Journey as we learn about group dynamics, GEMO in project management (GE-wha? tune in to find out), and a new concept for ensuring carbon transparency.
Mikaela Pettersson (in Lund, Sweden) and Isabel Nieto Tous (in Majorca, Spain) from the Bologna-Trento-Zurich Journey had an innovative idea of a platform that they call Octopus. Octopus's aim is to highlight companies entitled to the EU Eco Label that are truly transparent about their emissions and that develop environmentally friendly products.
Mikkaela and Isabel have been inspired by the following tools:
An Inconvenient Truth: Al Gore (movie): https://www.algore.com/library/an-inconvenient-truth-dvd
Sustainababble (podcast): http://www.sustainababble.fish/
The Climate Casino (book): https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/climate-casino-an-overview-of-global-warming.html
In a highly informative episode, we meet Hamburg native and Leipzig resident Isabelle Leipzig and learn how the long path towards sustainability was influenced by a layering of experiences.
From swimming in a lake above a flooded coal mine to sailing past plastic bottles on the fringes of the rainforest in Peru, Isabelle has seen the destructive reach of human development, as well as the beautiful potential of allowing Nature to recover.
She is currently studying for a Master's in Sustainable Development at the University of Leipzig, and is fascinated by how culture guides our behaviour and influences how we interact with our environment.
A highly enjoyable episode, check it out!
At Your Service is a project that stems from the #Climate-KIC Journey this past summer. Its aim was to focus on how #ecosystemservices can be be integrated into urban #envrionment, with the goal of reconnecting people to nature by greening the city.
In so doing, it aims to tackle issues facing the climate challenges facing the city, such as urban heat island effect and increased risk of flooding through #naturebasedsolutions. Besides, they work on a community-based concept where the community shall be a co-owner of the project. For this project, At Your Service uses an app and chooses the city of Rome to begin with.
In this episode, we meet the team which includes Nora Helal (Amsterdam), Darrelle Colleran (Dublin), Clara Baumhauer (Zurich), and Giordano Margaglio (Rome), whose backgrounds range from ecology and evolutionary biology to disaster risk management and climate change.
We also talk about the group formation, the different roles in the team, their visions, and experiences in the topics of sustainable development and the climate change.
Hungry for more? Check out the following documentaries and podcasts for some climate #inspiration:
- Racing Extinction (2015): A documentary that follows undercover activists trying to stave off a man-made mass extinction (Netflix).
- Planet Earth : #DavidAttenborough's timeless classic.
- Mothers of Invention: Climate change is a man-made problem with a #feminist solution! Join former Irish President Mary Robinson and comedian Maeve Higgins in this uplifting series! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mothers-of-invention/id1412807581
In episode 37, we're joined by sustainability and communications consultants Laura López Cuadros and Clara Fischer, who discuss their vision for creating an impact that goes beyond growing a business. 🎙️
While attending the 2020 CYBELT #Climate-KIC Journey, they were struck by the fact that professionals today often lack the skills to advocate for sustainable change within the companies where they work - despite increasing environmental awareness. 🌱
Having read the #SustainabilityHandbook by Goran Broman, Laura, Clara, and their teammates used their Journey project to create a #toolkit that empowers individuals to take action and work towards transformational change.🌍
They are now applying this toolkit in their professional lives - Laura at (Ma) Learning Lab for Sustainable Transformation Lab, which co-founded last year, in Munich and Clara at SpinLab - The HHL Accelerator in Leipzig.
Osayamen J. Imarhiagbe is part of the Baltic Beauty Journey. He studies Applied Geosciences at RWTH in Aachen in Germany and has a MSc in Geology from the University of Benin. Specialised in mineral exploitation, he is eager to make mining more sustainable. Osayamen grew up in Nigeria, where he has experienced the impacts of heavy rainfall first hand. Gullies, which are the most advanced state of erosion, formed because no good draining systems are constructed and in place. Chunks of land, public facilities and housing get washed away with landslides.
Osayame talks about his internship at a Nigerian petroleum company, where he had the opportunity to visit places and facilites of oil drilling. From this stems his interest and passion to tackle the problem of environmental degradation. He aims to get young people engaged in government to start addressing waste and land use management, and to implement policies across sectors.
His individual project for the Journey stems from his group project, in which they address transparency in politics, especially with regard to environmental management and the climate change crisis, to address the gap between politics and citizens. His individual topic further looks into how to incorporate the interests of young people in politics.
Tune in to this highly insightful episode and gear how his teacher inspired him to promote environmental culture and awareness in Nigeria. Osayame has an idea of how to transform and reuse the spaces that were once used for mining, don't miss out on it!
The survey he talks about at the end is to check the level of knowledge and familiarity of environmental policies and political involvement amongst young people and their willingness to participate in the climate policy process and ensure transparency. The link is below and it still active.
How can we demystify climate policy?
In Episode 35, we meet Emma Heilig, who discusses the challenges of making climate policy accessible, the ClimaTalk platform she co-founded, and her Journey team's plan to advocate for Doughnut Cities across Europe. Emma became involved in the sustainability scene through animal rights and her opposition to animal agriculture, and at Cambridge University, she became involved in various societies promoting more sustainable, plant-based menus on campus.
While studying her Land Economy undergraduate degree, which combines aspects of law, economics and environment, she became aware of how difficult it can be to understand climate policy when you're not involved in the area. As a result, she co-founded ClimaTalk to provide an accessible platform to explain the history, theories, agreements, and other issues of climate policy. During the TransAlpine Journey last year, her team was inspired by Amsterdam's policy commitments to become the first Doughnut City, and thought all European cities should do the same.
Find out what happens next!
In this episode we will get to know the Dublona Journey participants Maria Cantore, who tunes in from Argentina, and Hajar Bencheikh, who calls Casablanca and Lyon her home. While Hajar currently works in consultancy for clients in the energy sector in Paris, Maria leads an organization in Argentina and is politically active for climate action. Together they wanted to create a channel to connect people to feel empowered. Their project, which unfortunately will not continue, aimed to challenge their community and to visually convert the volume of participants into the impact they reached through this collective action. The long-term goal was to trigger behaviours and changes in society. Hopefully Hajar and Maria will take on this project again, and make the instagram account happen. Tune in to discover how sea level rise, a direct effect of global warming, has shifted Hajar's mindset and what ideas the two have for being active in climate action.
Maria recommends the podcast Outrage and Optimism by former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christina Figueres (2010-2016): https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/outrage-and-optimism/id1459416461
The two books are worth a look at:
- The Dharma Bums: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dharma_Bums
- The Consolations of the Forest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolations_of_the_Forest
In Episode 33, we meet the team of On Cloud Wine, Eline van Remortel, Soham Datta, and Jose Carlos Lozano Garcia who met each other on the 2020 VinhoVin Lisbon-Paris Climate-KIC Journey.
On Cloud Wine is a platform designed to promote greater sustainablity in the wine industry, by connecting small wine producers to universities and the tourism industry. They noticed that small historical wine areas are currently disconnected from economic growth, already suffering from depopulation, and are at high risk of climate change.
By connecting wine producers to universities to co-create sustainable techniques, On Cloud Wine hopes to create new economic opportunities and draw in tourism. So far, they have won an EIT PGM Grant, made it to the finals of the Circular Economy Challenge 2020, and conducted various workshops with the Climate-KIC network and the Swedish Institute Network for Future Global Leaders.
They are certainly ones to watch!
Hana Begovic and Emma Bertipaglia (from the Bologna-Trento-Zurich Journey) are all about nature, earth jurisprudence, biodiversity, human rights and last but not least climate justice. Forests and green areas are disappearing globally, urban development is expanding and in these times, little priority is given to preserve nature and protect biodiversity, especially in (semi-) urban spaces.
This is where Urban Flora comes into play. The group project aims to tackle the detachment from nature in cities, which impacts physical and mental health. Urban Flora is an educational initiative designed to overcome the urban-nature divide in the next generation, focusing on nature education for school children. Tune in to discover which medium they plan to use to do so and how they are cooperating with the municipality of Malmö in Sweden.
Hana is the Swedish organiser of Earth Advocacy Youth, a movement focused on earth jurisprudence, and she is also an expert member of the UN Harmony with Nature and Knowledge Network. Emma is a recent MA graduate of Trinity College Dublin where she focused on development practices, which blends science and social science for enhanced sustainable development.
Check out the work of Earth Advocacy Youth and the UN Harmony with Nature programme:
Earth Advocacy Youth (YEA) is an international action group of creative, daring, and skilled young professionals working to identify and implement bold ecocentric practices in policy/law and education addressing biodiversity, climate governance and transition. https://www.earthadvocacy-youth.org/
Learn more about the right of nature law, policy and education: http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/dialogues/
In Episode 31, we are joined by alumni from the Dublona 2020 Climate-KIC Journey, Andrea Rey and Eszter Krisan, as they discuss their interests and experiences in the field of climate action, as well as the personal projects they have been able to begin as a result of the summer school. Living in Budapest, Eszter’s climate passions lie in urban systems and how they adapt to climate change. This interest inspired her Climate-KIC project Green Grip, which seeks to add green (leafy) panels to the sides of post-Soviet buildings to make them more liveable for local residents. Meanwhile, Andrea’s climate journey was inspired while growing up in Peru. Surrounded by “natural treasures,” she was shocked by how badly they were being managed. After a BA in Geography and Environmental Studies, she decided to pursue her passions at Wageningen University, where she is currently studying an MA specialising in Ecological and Agroecoligcal Systems. This is a fun episode, which highlights the value cross-sectoral collaboration, humility and open communication bring to climate action. Have a listen!
After featuring many participants of the Journey, it's time to talk to hosts again. Together with Lars Reyes-Gjølme and Laura Riuttanen from the Northern Light Journey we dig into the world of visions and projects that address climate action and sustainability in Europe. His Bachelor in Theatre brings out the creative side of Lars, whose interest have moved on from "land to sea" as he frames it. With a Masters in Entrepreneurship and Business Development he continues to work with NTNU (Norwegian University of Sciene and Technology) and Climate KIC (Accelerator) to support and lead innovation projects for sustainable development. Laura, who has a PhD in meteorology is pointing out that weather affects everyone on this planet. Physics and cloud formation are her key interest and therefore, she really understands the changes in the climatic system.
In the episode, we feature several European projects such as CityXChange for sustainable urban development as well as (maybe the first!!!) church in the world with a carbon neutral strategy. We also hear about ocean pollution. Tune in to get to know some more!
EU project with NTNU, Trondheim and other European partners to co-create the future we want tolive in: https://cityxchange.eu/
The start-up Lars mentioned: https://www.ducky.eco/
The speech (pictures/video) that made Lars afraid of pollution as a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B0np_o1VBg
Carbon Brief: https://www.carbonbrief.org/
Global Carbon Project: https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/ (nice visualizations!)
The carbon neutral church 2030: https://evl.fi/documents/1327140/25840624/Ilmastoteksti_engl_2019.pdf/3ff35917-6bd7-6e86-2754-cb5885cf8ea8?t=1591868102539 and https://evl.fi/current-issues/news/2019/church-council-approves-church-climate-strategy
Ex-Journey participant, faciliator, coach and academic Anouk Talen is interested in how we creata a society by bridging the divide between nature and humans, and between humans and other humans. She is working in the Dutch National Youth Council to confront this issue. Her biggest take-away from the Journey was to get to know know her path. Listen to find out what she discovered about herself and what made her become more confident as a climate agent.
She highly recommends the edX online course Leading From The Emergent Future by the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT), transforming business, society and self through sensing, presencing and crystallizing. Find out more about the course here: https://www.edx.org/course/ulab-leading-from-the-emerging-future
Tamara Pavlović is an international relations graduate in Budapest. She joined the Limassol-Timisoara-Belgrade Journey, to gain career inspiration, and experience in the field of sustainability.
While living in Budapest she noticed that while shopping becoming more popular, and the number of second hand clothes shop increasing, there are still few places to donate them. As a personal project, she wants to lobby for action on this topic.
One of the central questions she asks is: how can we promote sustainability in a normalised kind of way? Rather than being an added-extra, she is seeking ways to discuss environmental issues so they are hyped, trendy and part of the everyday.
Today we talk with Kaushik Selva Dhanush Ravi. He studies Integrated Building Systems at ETH Zürich and explains to us what this Master programme and new study area is all about. Kaushik envisions a construction sector, which is sustainable and with a larger municipality engagement (top down) to reinforce the use of recycled materials and increase the circularity of materials. Did you know that the embedded energy of the construction is very low and more sustainable when using sand as a construction material?
Together with other participants of the Transalpine Journey, Kaushik founded Urban Click. As it develops, Urban Click aims to create an online platform to enhance the use of recycled materials in the construction sector. The goal is to include many different sized stakeholders, to bring transparency into the secondary material use through data exchange and collaboration. and in the long-term, to use technology to systemize constructions of recyclable and reusable buildings. Watch their introduction here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoctjHBNSBg
Tune in and listen about the building sector in the sustainability context and hear how Kaushik wants to bring technological advancements from Europe back to his country of origin: India.
Kaushik also tells us about inspriational kings in India that have used echo communication. Check it out here:
https://www.remotelands.com/travelogues/golconda-the-eerie-acoustics-of-a-hyderabad-fort/
Rasa Tumaseviciute from the Bologna-Trento-Zurich Journey is currently doing a PhD on organic waste and circular bioeconomy in Lithuania. By implementing circular economy in waste management and conducting contemporary research she aims to create bio-plastic that is cost-competitive and compostable.
In this short episode, we haved asked Rasa for advice on how to best start in the field of climate action and sustainability. After telling us about how she got inspired herself, she highlights the importance of empathy, taking small steps and finding like-minded people. Give yourself time, she says. "Grab a reusable bag, bottle, or go to the merchant and say I want to get better quality". Can you guess what Rasa is about to tackle to change next?
If you want to know more about how our ecoweb works, systems and deeper design thinking, check out the recommendations that Rasa gave us: The book Biomimicry by Janine M. Benyus (https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/)
Rasa herself got inspired by a talk about the climate crists by Al Gore. He has given many TED talks, you can check them out on Youtube. Here are some links:
- The case for optimism on climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVfgkFaswn4&t=1208s
- New thinking on the climate crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUO8bdrXghs
- Averting the climate crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r593zLtZxAU
- Al Gore's FULL climate change discussion at WEF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb4z4hRZO2I
