Discover how you can embed sustainability across a Higher Education organisation.

Dr Alex Ryan, Director and Founder of Learning Energy, returns to her old Lancaster University haunts to tell us about her work inside and outside universities on the ‘great big gobbling monster’ of sustainability. Alex helps people and organisations address sustainability challenges: work is not always easy.

We discuss the evolution of understanding and action in universities over the last 20 years; the importance of changes to culture and strategy; how to place the common good ahead of self-interest when making changes; and how the university sector mirrors other areas of society and the economy when it comes to attitudes and behaviours around sustainability.

We discover how a positive mindset change across an organisation can help overcome ‘change humps’; the essential role of universities in brokering systems change; and how to think differently around reporting and numbers.

Plus, Jan questions her own knowledge and skills, we discover Paul and Alex’s differing experiences of Lancaster University Library and its fines system, the Great Vowel Shift gets belated publicity, and we consider becoming the Pentland Centre for Love and Justice in Business.

Read the Advance HE Measuring What Matters report here: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/measuring-what-matters

Antibiotics have been around for hundreds of thousands of years – no, we didn’t know that either! They are harmful to bacteria, and without them we would have a world where life is much harder.

But in recent decades, overuse of antibiotics has led to the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This evolutionary response has been accelerated as humans have developed more and more antibiotics – leading to a biological arms race.

Dr Oskar Nyberg, from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Dr Patrik Henriksson, from Leiden University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, are part of a project looking into the effects of antibiotics in the food system on humans and the animals involved.

We take a deep dive into Thai shrimp farming (and contrast them with the shrimp living in Morecambe Bay), learn more about aquaculture, and ecotoxicology in the marine environment, consider how long it takes and what conditions are needed to raise a shrimp (they do not eat sausages), discover how you measure how much antibiotics are in a shrimp (something that many farmers do not know themselves), and discuss why the drugs are used and how you can avoid needing them in the first place.

Oskar and Patrik tell us more broadly about superbugs, the regulations and protections in place for using antibiotics in farming, and the differences between human and animal treatments.

Plus, Paul’s aversion to penicillin, Oskar’s history in the culinary industry, and why is Patrik in a German beer garden?

Discover more about the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Keystone project: https://seabos.org/anti-microbial-resistance-amr-keystone-project/

Episode Transcript

Culture is visibly lacking from the Sustainable Development Goals – but why? History, tourism, the arts, and even video games all have a part to play in the sustainability picture, so we need to consider the sector’s importance.

Dr Chiara Donelli, from the University of Venezia, is an expert in cultural sustainability and she is here to keep us informed. She explains why culture does not have a specific SDG assigned to it, how it fits into the big picture, and how it has been involved in sustainability activity for longer that you might think.

Taking Venice as a prime example, we look at sustainable business models for tourism, the problems of over-tourism – and how the industry can be just as destructive as other more obviously damaging sectors – and how a place can lose its very nature and identity through an excess of visitors.

We discuss Venice’s new tourist tax, conservation at Machu Pichu, population displacement in the Dolomites ahead of the Winter Olympics, Lake District honeypots, Morecambe jetties, and much more.

Find out why Paul is speaking Italian – while the Biennale leaves Jan flummoxed; why Venice at one point needed to stimulate tourism; the role of hippies in the sustainability movement; and the arts as advocacy for positive change.

Discover more about Chiara and her work here: https://www.unive.it/data/people/25748316

Episode Transcript