Activate the University for Climate Change

The university community in Europe is made up of 18.8 million students and 1.49 million teachers (not including staff numbers). Introducing a change in the way of perceiving and resolving problems relating to Climate Change, from the perspective of action rather than theory, seemed key to us. Interest in Climate Change has grown. It is usually dealt with from an academic point of view, but not focused on daily activities, which is where real work can be done on the perception of the crisis and changing habits. In fact, more and more universities are creating specific offices to deal transversally with aspects related to the environment and education for sustainable development. The participating GAP organizations, that form part of an international network, had not worked with HEIs. We believed that we could contribute our experience to the development of a programme that would address the integration of Climate Change aspects using a bottom-up approach. And that it would be transversal, involving different types of universities. For that reason we selected five universities with different characteristics and sizes, in order to validate the methodological framework and the resources generated by the programme.

Promote changes in the behaviour of individuals and in the management of the university through the generation of methodological tools and a series of basic, replicable and adaptable material resources. Test them on several university campuses to validate them and develop recommendations from the participating universities to address this environmental challenge. Generate new work dynamics in the organizations of the GAP network by working with university communities, a new segment. This segment was made up of: students, teachers and staff. The experience to date had been focused on other educational institutions, private companies and public administrations. Addressing youth in the university was considered to be an added value for the GAP organizations. The validation of the tools designed and implemented to change the habits of members of the university community towards new consumption models that have less impact on Climate Change. Impacting on local society by promoting the role of the university community in influencing local and regional entities to adjust their behaviours in the areas such as mobility, food or waste management relating to Climate Change.

The ATTUNE programme proposed 3 areas of activities: 1) Creation of a methodological framework, tools and materials to help individuals change their daily habits on campus, in relation to their impact on Climate Change. Along these lines, a digital platform was created, which offered a programme to improve the skills of the university community in relation to Climate Change 2) Validation of these resources in the participating universities during 1 academic year. This involved the creation of strategies, activities and communication materials, instructions and recommendations for developing the project on any university campus and also obtaining concrete results from the implementation of these tools. 3) Disseminate the project through multiple communication activities. The use of the communication networks of the universities has been essential in the success of disseminating the programme. Finally, we would like to add that the communication carried out, especially in the Dissemination Event (DE) and Informative Training Sessions (ITS), as well as participation in other events to which the ATTUNE partners had been invited to, have been very important to be able to transfer the project to other universities in Europe and beyond.

All the materials can be consulted on the project website, both in its public part (https://www.attuneproject.eu/resources/) and in its private part (https://www.attuneproject.eu/activate/) and ALL have been collected in the following folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1VOBo3rdoh7FLqlTk_HAZHRzfBi5Gbi7R - Reports from each of the universities detailing their areas of interest and the actions that the university community had undertaken. - Platform operating in 5 countries. In this project it's available in 7 languages. The structure and software of the platform allows the incorporation of other languages. - Manuals & questionnaires for each university (in local language & English). They contained lists of existing resources in the local area available to the university community that assist in reducing the impact on Climate Change. - 1 User's Manual in English, with contents relating to the administration and operation of the digital platform. - 1 report per country with the most significant aspects of the campaign. - 1 User's Manual for the implementation of the programme. - 1 website and 3 social media accounts. - 1 campaign in each country together with the evaluation of the results obtained.