The GW4 Alliance is pleased to announce Carla Denyer, the co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, will be delivering the keynote address at the GW4 Climate Alliance’s Living Labs workshop on the 28th of January. Carla has been a Bristol City Councillor since 2015 and pioneered the first Climate Emergency declaration in Europe, with over 74% of the UK’s councils following in Bristol’s example to committing to go carbon neutral by 2030.
The GW4 Living Labs workshops aim to engage local authorities, community organisations, industry, and university students, researchers and non-academic staff in delivering a Net Zero transformation. This final workshop looks at emissions from supply chains and travel (Scope 3 emissions).
With Carla’s background in engineering in the renewable energy industry, she is well placed to help inspire attendees at this workshop: ‘Scope 3 and the road to Net Zero.’ For many organisations, scope 3 emissions account for the highest proportion of total emissions and are the hardest to reduce but also represent our greatest opportunity to cut emissions locally and regionally.
The GW4 universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter are themselves striving to become more sustainable net zero organisations and have all declared a climate emergency. By sharing their research and academic expertise with external stakeholders and the wider community the ambition is to co-create, explore and test solutions to these complex challenges and help the transition to a greener future for our region.
Carla’s talk will centre on the “Vision for our net zero region”, preparing for our future where we will reap the health, economic, and environmental benefits of reducing scope 3 emissions in Southwest England and South Wales.
In 2020, Carla was named in the sustainability category by the Women's Engineering Society as one of the UK's top fifty women in engineering, with the commendation focusing on her climate emergency motion.
Dr Joanna Jenkinson MBE, GW4 Alliance Director, said: “Carla’s proven track record as a relentless campaigner, combined with the breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and skills present at the workshop, and the strength of our universities’ commitment to a sustainable and just transition to Net Zero will help transform the Living Lab work undertaken into a platform for decisive action.
“Climate change solutions require dramatic shifts in organisations, not just communities. Our GW4 universities are creating ‘living labs for Net Zero transformation’ to address our own sustainability responsibilities as well as helping to provide exemplary practice to other organisations striving to achieve national and international Net Zero targets.”
Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales said: "We are in a Climate Emergency - and when you're in an emergency you have to think and act differently. So I am really looking forward to getting together with a room full of smart and driven people from universities, councils, community organisations and industry to plan how all our organisations can work towards net zero emissions in everything we do."
This workshop is hosted by the GW4 Climate Alliance – an interdisciplinary research consortium of the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter working to develop transformative systems responses to the climate crisis. The workshop has three core aims: to identify priorities for emission reduction; create opportunities to co-design, test, and implement solutions; and identify collaboration opportunities for projects emerging from the workshop.
The overall goal of the GW4 Living Labs is to promote sustainable, interdisciplinary solutions with the help of local authorities, companies, community organisations and universities.
