Sustainable research must be put into practice
As researchers and employees, we should act sustainably so that our recommendations to others about sustainable practices are not merely hot air.
The focus on sustainability in international society began in the late 1960s with the advent of the environmental consequences of the second industrial development and the green revolution. The question of how to raise millions of people out of poverty without harming the environment was already in 1972 the theme for the UN’s conference on ”Human Environment”.
This theme has been highlighted repeatedly within the UN, lately in 2015, where the UN formulated the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
In light of the obvious climate crisis it looks as though this message now has more impact among both laymen and politicians.
In connection with the ongoing efforts to formulate strategies, AU’s senior management would like to see that AU is more targeted on finding solutions to the SDGs. As a consequence of this, there has been a debate about whether we should carry out ”sustainable research”, i.e. if our future research efforts should have a smaller climate and environmental footprint – or if we should we sit in our ivory tower and state how citizens, farmers and the industry should change their behaviour in order to solve the climate crisis?
We should of course not do the latter, and therefore AU’s senior management took the initiative to hold the workshop ”How do we create a more sustainable AU?” where ideas regarding the four themes ”Transport and purchases”, ”Dealing with food and waste”, ”Green campus” and ”Other ideas” were discussed.
I will indiscriminately mention some of the proposals: Fewer flights, purchase of electric cars, waste sorting at AU, fewer meat dishes in the cantine, AU cantines with the Too Good to Go system, replacement of lawns with insect-friendly vegetation, establishment of staff/student vegetable gardens, obligatory courses on sustainability, and green accounting.
I hope that together we can focus on making our research in sustainable agriculture more sustainable in the future by carrying out some of these fantastic ideas so we do not end up with even more hot air.
In AGRO we have written into our self-evaluation that sustainable behaviour should be part of our vision. You can read this in the article "The first stage of the evaluation of AGRO is complete", where there is a link to the self-evaluation report. In connection with our own sustainable behaviour, pages 25-26 are particularly relevant - and I encourage you to discuss them in the sections.