The First International Climate Action Week/Global Climate Change Week Workshop (GCCW) was held on December 4-5, 2014 at the University of Wollongong. The workshop was opened by the UOW Chancellor, Jillian Broadbent, and was a great success. Twenty-two people participated, including academics from seven Australian universities and a number of activists. The major innovations include:
(1) We changed the name of the week from ‘International Climate Action Week’ to ‘Global Climate Change Week’ (GCCW), mainly in order to accommodate concerns that some academics may be uneasy about taking part in an event with the words ‘Climate Action’ in its title. We also added a tagline to the new name: ‘ideas – engagement – action’.
(2) We developed the following vision and mission statements:
Vision Statement
Climate change needs urgent attention. Our vision is for academics to play a key role to catalyse ideas and engage with the community to facilitate action on climate change.
Mission Statement
By sharing ideas within and across disciplines and engaging more effectively with students, policy-makers, and the wider community we can help to generate urgently needed action on climate change.
(3) Many new ideas for GCCW activities emerged, far too many to summarise briefly, but here is a selection:
- GCCW could encourage universities to become climate ideas hubs; lead institutions in recognising and responding to climate change, in researching and communicating about climate change, and in debating how to respond to climate change both within and beyond the university
- Universities, their governance bodies, and other academic bodies (e.g. institutes, professional associations) could support GCCW by publicly endorsing it and encouraging their members to communicate the key challenges arising from climate change
- Within the university academics could organise conferences and workshops on climate change; integrate climate content into their courses; research and develop new ways of teaching and communicating about climate change; find out more about what other disciplines have to say about climate change; and enable their students to engage with students from other disciplines on climate change
- Beyond the university academics could give public talks on climate change (e.g. to community groups or in schools); write opinion pieces on climate change; run arts or culture events with climate change as the theme; conduct various online activities (discussion groups, forums, social media, online Q&A sessions, podcasts, blogs); and organise a ‘dinner with a climate scientist’ (and perhaps a climate economist, a climate philosopher, and so on.
(4) We started to put together a number of groups that will help to take GCCW forward. These include (with their founding members):
- A Coordinating Committee (Keith Horton (UOW), Helen McGregor (ANU/UOW), George Takacs (UOW), Haydn Washington (UNSW))
- A Media and Communications Working Group (Chadi Aoun (UTS), Jaden Harris (OzGreen), Helen Hasan (UOW), Sarah Perkins (UNSW))
- A Recruitment and Engagement Working Group (Haydn Washington (UNSW), Helen McGregor (ANU/UOW), Akemi Chatfield (UOW))
- A Funding Working Group (Katrina Skellern (Macquarie), George Takacs (UOW), Samuel Wilson (Swinburne), Noel Castree (University of Manchester/UOW))
- GCCW Champions (who will organise GCCW at their own institutes and/or universities) (Noel Castree (University of Manchester), Haydn Washington and Stephen Healy (Institute of Environmental Studies at UNSW), Ben Spies-Butcher (Macquarie)
- A Reference Group (John Connor (Climate Institute), Alan Pears (RMIT), Jen Halldorsson (Sydney Fellowshio Program), Colin Butler (UC), Matthew Kearns (UNSW))