Tag Archives: goals

COP25: A Short Review and On-Site Experiences

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Image Credit: Julia Ramsauer, CC BY 2.0

Last Sunday, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid came to an end. It was a summit that marked the end of a year in which climate change has transformed into a climate emergency and in which society has woken up to the urgency of the situation. Taking into account the pressure from global demonstrations of groups like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, and the fact that even scientists have further challenged world leaders on the urgent need to act by striking in September, hopes for the outcomes of this year’s climate summit were big. For a couple of days, I was in Madrid to participate in the part of the COP25 that was open to the public and to march with thousands of others in the biggest demonstration ever held in Spain.

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Studying Sustainability in Norway  

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Image Credit: Alexey Topolyanksiy, Public Domain, Image Cropped

The Norwegian Aquaculture Review Council is an academic collective comprised of NTNU students Danielle Hallé, Myranda O’Shea, Bastian Poppe, Emmanual Eicholz and Peter Anthony Frank.

I think it’s fair to say that most of Norway looks like the postcards. If you can peel your eyes away from the views, you’ll notice the aquaculture sea cages along the fjords, sheep grazing in the outfield, the seemingly endless network of trails, wind parks off in the distance, or a happy forger with a bucket full of mushrooms. The natural landscape offers myriad, well-utilized benefits, which makes for an interesting location for studying sustainable development and our coexistence with nature. The course The Sustainable Management of Ecosystem Services at NTNU offered an opportunity to do just that.

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Are ecolabels greenwashing your farmed salmon?

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Salmon aquaculture nets near Hitra, Norway. (Image credit: Peter Anthony Frank, NTNU, CC BY 2.0)

The Norwegian Aquaculture Review Council is an academic collective comprised of NTNU students Danielle Hallé, Myranda O’Shea, Bastian Poppe, Emmanual Eicholz and Peter Anthony Frank.

With so much attention on climate change and biodiversity in the media today, it is hard not to be skeptical as to whether companies are taking advantage of these paradigms for their own profit by “greenwashing” their products. Greenwashing is the common term for the practice whereby an organization presents information that gives them an air of environmental responsibility but makes no real contribution to reducing the impacts of threats like climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity.

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Prue Addison: Integrating Sustainability Into Business

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 Prue Addison, who spoke at the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference, is attempting to bring conservation science to ‘the dark side’  – the world of business (Image Credit: Synchronicity Earth, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)

With the environmental movement having expanded so quickly over recent decades, it makes sense that many large corporations have started to incorporate sustainability and the environment into their business plans. But what are these business actions actually achieving? And who bridges the gap between the corporate world and the field of ecology?

At the recent Norwegian Ecological Society Conference, Tanja Petersen and I sat down with Doctor Prue Addison from the University of Oxford. Prue works with multinational corporations to aid them in integrating biodiversity considerations into their business operations. We asked her about the difference between business and academia, how she’s managed to transition between the two, and advice for others looking to make the same leap.

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