COP28: For the Counting on a Sustainable Future theme, Dr Becky Thomas, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences and Daniel Steel, Senior Gardener in Estates discuss ‘Engaging students, staff, and the local community in biodiversity on our campus’
The climate and biodiversity crises can be overwhelming issues for people to understand in a time when many are disconnected from nature. Staff across Royal Holloway are working hard to engage our students, but it can be difficult to get people to change behaviours and take positive action.
David Attenborough famously said ‘no one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced’ so how are we working to get more people to experience our local biodiversity as a way to engage them in these issues?
Our campus presents a unique opportunity both in its incredibly diverse grounds and footfall of intelligent minds enjoying our green spaces. Royal Holloway has abundant woodlands, meadows and watercourses in varying conditions that allow us to show students both restorative projects and general maintenance. Through several volunteering activities, we provide the chance to get out and complete conservation works to get first had experience. Getting hands on experience is vital to understanding the fragility of environments and how important it is to protect them, this year we have been working with students to maintain the water courses and prepare areas for future planting.
Many of our students will graduate with a good understanding of both the causes and solutions for the biodiversity and climate crises, but less so on how to survey wild species and identify them. Even when programmes do teach this, we are often limited in time, so only touch on some taxonomic groups. A new relationship has been growing recently with Surrey Wildlife Trust (SWT) and together we are organising a series of training events to try to help build species identification skills and so our connection with nature and our local biodiversity. Surrey is blessed with an assortment of local recording groups; from butterfly to bird focused groups, trained amateur recorders are out identifying species, helping scientists to track species declines, population increases and the invasive of new species. These expert local recorders will be coming onto campus in 2024 to run some exciting sessions teaching people how to identify key species on campus. Alongside our SWT colleagues we’ll be hosting these training sessions which will be open to anyone (staff, students and the local community) creating a group of trained recorders to help us keep track of our biodiversity on campus. All this exciting training will culminate in a BioBlitz event on campus in June. Over the course of one day, we’ll be identifying as many species as we can with our trained recorders working alongside the local recording groups.
Looking to our younger generation, in March 2023 we ran our first Youth Action for Nature event with SWT on campus. With a series of talks and workshops designed to empower young people to be advocates for nature, ninety 16-25 years olds got busy learning how to create wildflower patches, adding to our existing meadow habitat on campus, how to advocate for nature using social media and how to create small garden ponds. Next year we are planning to make this event even bigger, reaching even more local young people.
Our aim is to build a community of interested parties working to improve and understand biodiversity on campus. If you would like to discuss or join in with any of these activities, please contact Becky Thomas (rebecca.thomas@rhul.ac.uk) and Daniel Steel (daniel.steel@rhul.ac.uk).
