The Climate Change Project Week starts at Wittenborg this week, coinciding with the Glasgow COP26

01.11.2021

The 'theme of the week' is the responsibility and economics of climate change, and not only at Wittenborg!

Wittenborg’s Project Week ‘Climate Change Summit Simulation’ kicks off this week, with over 150 students in Apeldoorn, Amsterdam & Munich spending three days immersing themselves in the issues of climate change, as well as looking at the very urgent need for countries around the world to work together, to agree on measures that might lead to a reduction in the speed of global warming.

Director Peter Birdsall, who is involved in this project week, together with many other faculty members, on Saturday ‘left his mark’ on the two paintings specially created to raise awareness of climate change, displayed at the studio in Zwolle of Dutch painter Dennie Boxem (http://dennieboxem.com/)

The poignant artworks draw attention to the fact that the world climate change summit, COP26, that has started this week in Glasgow (UK) and is seen by many as the last opportunity for the world to take meaningful measures to keep global temperature rises under 2 degrees celsius.

A simulation with a real life example

The project week will see students divided into 7 economic regions, sometimes also key countries, defined as 'developed' or 'developing' , with many of the 100 nationalities at Wittenborg being represented.

Within their groups, students will negotiate their positions on actions to be taken on climate change, and at the same time try and forge alignment with other countries and regions. The aim is that each region produces a policy document that can be presented to the summit at the end of the project week, and that the project is finalised by reaching an overall agreement – or not.

At the same time, students will also be learning about the causes of climate change, the possible solutions, the economic effects as well as about 'climate change negotiations'.
Parallel to WUAS students completing their project week, leaders of the world's most affected countries will be joining the COP26 summit in Glasgow together with (some) of the world's leaders from the most important greenhouse gas emitters to see if they can negotiate solutions that will help us all combat this enormous threat.

The last time that this project week was held was in 2018.

Climate Change – a theme

Wittenborg University of Applied Sciences has made 'climate change' the theme running throughout its operations during the 2021-2022 academic year, and recently took part in an initiative called the Climate Lesson programme, held in Apeldoorn on October 12th. WUAS was a signatory of the resulting document, 'URGENT CALL FROM APELDOORN - THE NETHERLANDS - TO UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CONFERENCE, COP26 – GLASGOW'

URGENT CALL FROM APELDOORN.1.2.ENG.pdf

The Climate Lesson programme can be seen here (in Dutch).