Journey Visions - A Path towards Sustainability

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?

Project Pond (in Lund): [email protected]

Green Grip: [email protected]

Food Saving Vilnius: [email protected]

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. 🎙️

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.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe4U6NlQCIV3tsO9hmK1-XK7bSMS6KC3InsYFArWfiZwjTz0g/viewform?usp=sf_link

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.