Students:Day 2
Today was perhaps the most demanding day of the field trip, as it required sitting through a number of presentations inside a room at the University of Graz on what was an extraordinarily hot day. Our bus driver dropped us off at the university in good time and we met up with our Austrian hosts, Marlene Mader and Mario Diethart, before the scheduled start of 9.30. Marlene gave us a
quick overview of the week's events before both she and Mario took us on a tour of the University of Graz campus, pointing out the various sustainability aspects the university has introduced or is pursuing. We were lucky that the university year hadn't started yet and so had the campus mostly to ourselves. We then settled back into our classroom and listened to Marlene's first presentation on the university itself, including its history and structure. This was followed by a quick introduction to the creation and function of the Graz-Styria Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development and its acheivements since its formation in 2006. Andrew Barton then described the process to establish an RCE in the Usti region in the Czech Republic as the first RCE anywhere in the former communist bloc outside Russia. The final presentation of the morning was delivered by Christian Kozina on his PhD project to make the University of Graz completely carbon neutral in terms of heating, electricity, mobility, nutrition and procurement, and the offset programme that the university will implement for the areas where reduction of carbon emissions to zero is not possible (nutrition and procurement).
After lunch, Mario discussed the manifold sustainability process at the University of Graz and the many different areas in which it aspires to sustainable development, including efforts to create a greater interdisciplinary environment between the faculties and to embed the concept of sustainability across the many curricula. Marlene then explained the national Austrian and regional Styrian approach to sustainable development and the contribution Austria made to the Rio+20 conference. Andrew wrapped up the day's presentations by describing the Czech Republic's contribution to Rio+20 by way of comparison. All presentations are accessible on the main wiki page. Finally, the students were required to engage in a 'world cafe' by dividing into three groups and then discussing three issues in turn relating to sustainability problems/barriers and opportunitities/solutions. The three groups represented the Czech perspectives of universities, cities or regions, and national government. Three students acted as rapporteurs and presented the results of each group afterwards. To wrap up the day's events, Marlene and Mario took us on a short tour of the historic centre of the city of Graz, including the Schlossberg.
More images: Day Two Photos