What's the Green Office?
What is a Green Office?
L'ULiège supports the transition towards environmentally and socially sustainable trajectories. From many players of sustainability and transition are working hard to get things moving. Among them, thehe Green Office is a sustainable development platform run by and for the ULiège community. It informs, connects and supports the development of concrete projects. The Green Office is characterized by a strong link between awareness and action, its dynamism and active networking.
To each member of the ULiège community who wishes to put his or her talent, creativity and a little/many time at the service of actions and projects to improve the sustainability of our university.
You want to join us, but don't know how to get involved? Find out here: How to get involved with the ULiège Green Office?
The purpose of the Green Office is to massively mobilize students and staff of the university to accelerate the installation of a culture of sustainability on all our campuses. It responds to the urgency of making a strong transition in our activities to face the systemic crisis.
Through the development of this new culture, two major leverage effects are sought:
- each member of the university becomes a citizen of sustainability and
- each current profession at the university and each future profession of our students becomes a professional mission for sustainability.
At its creation in 2020, 5 missions were assigned to the Green Office :
- To inform and raise awareness of the ULiège community on sustainable development and its issues, including theUnited Nations 2030 Global Agenda with its 17 sustainable development goals,
- Promote and disseminate good practices within the university,
- Create a community committed to sustainable development,
- Setting up field projects with experts (teachers and researchers in particular),
- Working with sustainable development networks and other Belgian and European Green Offices.
To fulfill its missions, the ULiège Green Office has set a series of objectives, including
- To create a central place for students who wish to get involved in sustainable development at the university.
- To provide training on sustainable development, theUnited Nations 2030 Global Agenda and its challenges at our university.
- Facilitate the realization of ideas and initiatives to realize sustainable development projects with the collaboration of our experts.
- Strengthen the capacity of students who wish to get involved in sustainable development by giving them the opportunity to learn about project management and to exchange with students from other Green Offices.
- Valuing the work of students by highlighting to the ULiège community their contribution to the evolution of sustainability at their university.
The Green Office's activities are diverse but all have the same objective: to educate and support the ULiège community towards a more sustainable lifestyle.
The Green Office team is largely made up of motivated students from various faculties. These students are involved in the GO as greeners (volunteers) or jobbers (paid).
They carry out various awareness-raising and action activities on the University's campuses. These activities currently focus on the following themes:
- Sustainable food with l'équipe Court-Circuit
- Waste reduction with l'équipe Zéro Déchet
- Access to water for all with the Water4All team
- Digital responsibility with the GSM2Life team
- Protecting biodiversity with the Biodiversity team
The teams organize events on campus, such as a collection of old mobile phones and batteries, a garage sale, a local breakfast, themed weeks (such as Semaine Durable 2023), training courses and workshops. They also create awareness-raising tools (find them in the resources menu) to better understand the issues involved in each of these themes and to support community members in their day-to-day actions.
Find out more about each team's achievements via the links!
Would you like to join us?
Contact us by e-mail at greenoffice@uliege.be
The Green Office offers a program of individual challenges to help you reduce your impact on the environment and climate by adopting new, more sustainable habits.
All these actions are available on a collaborative mobile application that brings together motivated members from different campuses!
Co-construction is a dynamic that the Green Office likes to develop. It aims to create new tools, challenges and activities in collaboration with members of the ULiège community (students and staff), but also with organizations outside ULiège.
Here are a few examples
- Awareness-raising projects, campus development and challenges in favor of biodiversity and our well-being with students from theAnthropocene Biodiversity course(Prof. Sylvie Gobert)
- Creation of a decision tree on eco-responsible fish consumption with Oceanography students
- Creation of an Instagram story on the latest IPCC report with Climatology students (Prof. Sébastien Doutreloup)
- Production of video capsules on the causes, consequences and solutions to climate change in collaboration with Geography and Journalism students (Prof. Sébastien Doutreloup and Anicée Dupont)
If you have ideas and would like to put them into practice with the Green Office, or if you would like to build a sustainability project with your students as part of a course, please contact us!
The commitment program developed at ULiège has received numerous awards and support since its creation in 2020. Following this recognition, other establishments wanted to replicate the program on their own campuses. That's when the replication project was born.
The replication project responds to the needs of sustainability coordinators (who are few in number and overworked), who find it difficult to create didactic content and organize activities. What's more, students are looking for support in taking action to protect the environment and the climate.
The aim is therefore to share all the tools and experiences developed at ULiège with other institutions wishing to do so, in order to create a global community of campuses committed to sustainability.
15 partners in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation are already part of the adventure! Together, we organize twin challenge campaigns: activities on the same theme, at the same time, but on different campuses. This increases the impact of the activities and creates a buzz around the events.
A collaborative digital platform will soon be launched to bring together all partners and their communities around sustainable challenges and activities.
Find out more about the project here
Are you part of a higher education establishment and interested in this project? Contact us at greenoffice@uliege.be, and we'll be delighted to introduce you to the project and consider you as a member of the consortium of partners!
The Green Office is committed to respecting the diversity of ideas and the path of each individual towards a life that is more respectful of humans and the planet. The team focuses on efficient time management for the realization of concrete projects with immediate visible and substantive positive impacts on the evolution of our campus culture.
The main values shared by the team on a daily basis are:
Caring, Creativity, Respect for the contributions of each person, Collective improvement, Hope, Sharing for the Common Good
The reference framework chosen for sustainable development is the United Nations 2030 Global Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This is a compass for transforming human activities on a global scale with a view to safeguarding the biosphere and Humanity.
The recommendations made in the awareness-raising brochures and the proposals for action (challenges) are based on reports from international scientific platforms such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), as well as on the opinions of experts from the University of Liège.
Coordinator: Cécile Van de Weerdt - greenoffice@uliege.be
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