NUCAN (NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY CLIMATE ACTION NETWORK)

Co-founding and being involved with a student led climate action group

In February 2021 I attended an online conference with TRADA during which Scott McAulay spoke about climate literacy. Scott ran through some facts and figures regarding the climate crisis and the impact that the built environment has on it. He then spoke about ACAN (Architects’ Climate Action Network) and the fact that up and down the country there were several student-led groups starting to form.

After the event, my friend and coursemate Jaya got speaking about how we could start our own group. Therefore, we spoke to some of our other friends and peers and put together an email to some of the staff in the school and arranged a meeting to speak about forming NUCAN. We decided that we first needed to know what the group was and what our goals were and how to reach them.

After many drafts, we finalised our manifesto (which can be found on the QR Code below) and began the process of becoming a society with the students’ union. Since then we have hosted several events over the course of 2 and a half years including our recent lecture series “Sustainability in Practice”. The series saw guests from a range of disciplines and backgrounds within the built environment sector, each with a different project or case study which they spoke about for us. This was extremely useful for our studies and allowed us to pose questions about buildings or construction techniques to experts in the field.