- Why campaign for your school or college to Go Green?
- Go Green Campaign Aim
- Step 1 - The Pledge
- Action ideas to get loads of petitions signed
- Step 2 - Go Green Goals
- Go Green Q&A
- Go Green campaigner tools
The Go Green campaign aims to transform the environmental impact of the education sector.
We need to put colleges and schools on a path to a low carbon future to stop climate chaos.
The need for action to stop climate chaos
Climate change is quite simply the biggest issue confronting the world today. Without urgent action climate change will devastate life on Earth. Hundreds of millions of people, particularly the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, are at severe risk of extreme weather, drought, flooding, starvation and disease. Climate change is already happening, and the effects will just get worse in our lifetimes if we don’t do anything about it.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We do have a choice and we know what needs to be done. Very simply, we need to reduce global emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. In the UK, to do our fair share, we need to reduce emissions by at least 80% by the middle of the century. This may sound like a lot, but broken down into much smaller yearly reductions, it should be a manageable goal.
Burning fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) produces gases including carbon dioxide (CO₂), which collects in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is one of the ‘greenhouse gases’. Such gases exist naturally in the atmosphere and act like a greenhouse, trapping warmth from the sun and keeping the planet warm enough for life to exist. But by increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels for heat, electricity and transport we’re trapping far too much heat in the system. This is creating extreme weather, melting the ice caps, and causing more floods and droughts.
How do schools and colleges affect climate change?
Think through your average day at school or college. Do you travel to your school or college by bus, car, train, or bike? Where does the energy and power that your school or college uses come from? Do the computers stay switched on overnight? What about the lights in the classrooms? How do the teachers get to the school or college?
When taken as a whole the education sector consumes a vast amount of energy. Schools in England are estimated to emit 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, nearly as much as the whole of Kenya. Add to that the carbon emitted by schools in Scotland and Wales, and FE colleges (unfortunately noone’s calculated this yet), and you get a pretty big number.
Altogether this means that the average school pupil emits just over a tonne of CO₂ per year while at school. To help you picture what that means, an average rhino weighs about a tonne as well. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, it’s estimated that we need to reduce our emissions from about 9 rhinos per person at the moment, to less than 2 rhinos per person per year. That means that if your school or college doesn’t reduce its emissions, more than half your personal carbon quota could be used up before you get to do anything other than go to classes.
Three reasons to launch the Go Green campaign
You can change things in your own school or college. To avoid dangerous climate change, everyone needs to do their bit, and where better to start than where you are now?
If your school or college goes green it will have a knock-on effect, influencing all the students who pass through its doors, both now and in the future.
Your campaign will be part of a national effort to transform the entire education sector. People & Planet groups at schools, colleges and universities are taking action to make education a model of carbon reduction for the rest of society.