We are working on are (i) a list of project ideas for each discipline; (ii) a list of group projects.  For the time being we have a simple OneNote document to collect ideas.  Below are some additional suggestions which might be helpful:

Ask colleagues if they have any ideas, every time we think we have identified a discipline that would not be able to do anything related to climate change, e.g. optometry, we have been corrected. 

Start with the basics – what is the impact of the environment being warmer, people spending more time in doors, etc? 

Don't be shy about replicating work that has been done before, or tackling problems that have been addressed before.  That’s a great place to start, a chance to confirm if something works as claimed (a useful finding in itself), and a chance to get to grips with an approach.

Your work might support the 1 in 5 project more directly, e.g. by building databases, curating projects etc, providing legal advice etc. See the Onenote document for “Cross-discipline / Meta” projects.

Here are some places you may find inspiration.

Obviously there are journals like Nature Climate Change, and the NUS created this useful document with ideas about climate change for each academic discipline. The Jonathan Sime award website might be helpful.  The award is given to projects on people-environment relationships and the list of winners back to 2012 provides some very nice examples for those that work within the same area.

The University of Manchester’s Living lab has some great examples of students working with outside organisations.

For now we have set up a OneNote document to collect and share ideas. Please feel free to add yours.

Yes, many people will have done so. Possibly you are too constrained and unable to change anything for this coming year. In which case you can join us in a later round. But otherwise, many project are pretty fluid so you could consider asking your students if they are interested in switching. Or maybe you could add an environment angle to one of the already planned projects?

Not unless you want it to. When we started thinking about this we had 3 red lines: i) no additional workload for staff; ii) no threatening of staff interests, e.g. trying to persuade people to change careers; iii) no additional cost. We all supervise final year work anyhow. Most of us supervise some work, driven by the interests of the students, that is away from our central area of expertise, this is no different. Many of us scramble around for ideas for projects, so this could even save you time once we get together a list of ideas.

We assume you must be thinking about the suggestion we could collate the results of projects. We are not there yet, but if thats a concern:

1. If you have an idea contained in a report or other materials that you think is particularly valuable, and you want to hold on to it, then don’t post it!  There will never be an obligation to do so.  Go and talk to your Tech Transfer / Commercial division instead.

2. If you do want to share the report/materials then you can protect them with Creative Commons licences (the licences you probably use when you publish REF returnable work: About CC Licenses - Creative Commons) Use a licence that requires attribution or prohibits commercial exploitation.  Also consider copyright, patents, GNU/Berkeley licences: Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation etc.

3. As a lower level of protection you can also place the work on a preprint server, pre-register the experiment, etc.

4. At this point, a system for collating the output of student projects is only an idea.  If you have strong opinions on how it should work then join the conversation about the implementation of the idea (contact@1in5project.info and see the Onenote document section “_Replacement System”: 1in5 project ideas - Microsoft OneNote Online (live.com)).

If there is a repository of project reports, dissertations etc then it is likely this will reduce plagiarism not increase it.  Rather than being distributed, a significant fraction of documents would be in one place and so it would be very easy for Turnitin etc to add the repository to the list of documents it scans.

The answer to that is, what have you got to lose by joining in?  It’s not a big ask, it can cost you almost nothing to engage (see above). We are all supervising students anyway and one of the things planned are lists of potential projects in each discipline so you might even be able to take an idea off the shelf.  To be a little cynical, if nothing else, engaging may help you fill in a box in your annual performance review, and/or it might save you having to think of quite so many projects every year. 

It seems inevitable this is true for some people. But in your case, are you sure (see point 1 above)?  And if it is true for you, might you pair up a project with some other work that is directly related to environment change?  E.g. contribute some legal work, a piece of music, a web interface of something for a larger environment change related project?

Participation in the 1 in 5 Project is voluntary. If you think issues like poverty or mental health are more important, you still may want to participate because:

1. many of these big issues are inter-related. For example, see here and here and here

2. if we can get this environment initiative running then it can serve as a model for other initiatives.

Remember, it’s not our aim to control what you do - you should do what you think is useful or important. If it is relevant to environment change then please join us. We appreciate that there are many inter-related problems, for example, poverty and soil erosion.

That’s great, that fits here. You can run projects, or coordinate group projects to look at mitigation strategies, to look at how political action can be effective etc.

That’s no reason not to join in. If you want to run projects, or collaborate in broader group projects, on work to show climate change is not a problem, please be our guests. We are proposing a framework for doing any work related to environment change, we are not proscribing an agenda.

We have consulted students at every stage of development of the 1in5 Project.  We continue to increase our engagement with them and their representatives.  But we can't push responsibility for starting this off onto the undergraduates.  We need to step up, and show that staff can, and are prepared to do this. 

We haven’t spoken to a student yet who doesn’t think it is a good idea. Moreover it seems clear that levels of engagement of younger people with climate change organisations and activities are increasing rapidly, e.g., extinction rebellion (and its youth movement) as well as Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate (Fridays for Future). With this in mind we believe students will be ready and willing to take on climate-relevant projects if they are available.  But we hope to collect some hard evidence on this.  There are people among our group that are already planning to conduct projects on this question this year so we will update this FAQ with some data as soon as we can.

No. It has been suggested to us that this should be run top down, that we should ask VCs to sign up their own universities and then mandate staff participation. We don't believe that is the best way forward. This needs to be driven bottom up. Once we have established an interest amongst staff then it would be logical to ask VCs to support the efforts in whatever ways they can, but we think it needs to go that way round.

Of course! We are starting with the UK because that is where the idea originated. Its also the system we know. Just about every undergrad in the UK does an advanced piece of work and its obvious to us how this works. But outside the UK things can be different. We don't know how this might translate to an Indonesian university or a college in the US. We'd like to set an example in the UK and then let people outside adapt the idea to suit their system. If you want to make a start on that then please go ahead. And if you can, please do feedback to us how it can work in your country as that will allow us to understand how things could work outside the UK system (contact@1in5project.info).

We are starting with undergrads as that seems logical to us, but our hope has always been to extend beyond there. Clearly there is no reason why this process can’t be extended to Masters/other non-Bachelor’s degree level projects. If you want to start with those groups of students please do, and feedback to us what adaptations, if any, were necessary. (contact@1in5project.info)

Yes – absolutely! Theatres, galleries, corner shops, schools, charities, engineers, civil servants, tech companies and many others could all help out.

Do you want some students to work with you? Perhaps they could conduct an environmental audit, or refine a relevant technique, etc?

Could you run a competition for a show, a piece of writing?

Could you sponsor awards for best pieces of work?

Could you help with resources?

Could you lend us some expertise, advice or influence?

We hope to set up a facility to support communication with those outside academia but we don't have one yet (in the meantime, email contact@1in5project.info). You could also sign up for the email list so we can keep you informed of developments. And if you have any good ideas you want to share, then please get in touch.

In short the same people that would own a non-environmental change related idea today. If someone gives us general guidance then we will share it here. In the meantime if you are concerned you probably need to talk to your IP/Research engagement people.

Potentially, but (i) universities have a vast amount of experience dealing with these issues whenever they deal with outside partners, so there should be a wealth of help out there; (ii) one useful piece of work would be on a series of generic contracts that could be applied, so if anyone would like to step forward to develop such contracts, then please do so!

This and similar questions have been raised a number of times.  We know there are pockets of scepticism about how well ideas inside universities make it to the outside world.  Hopefully your university is one of the ones that is really good on this front.  But if its not, that’s not a reason to not engage.  There are many ways for projects to have an impact.  Second, we would hope that as things develop, examples of good practice will begin to spread between universities.

Yes, of course. Everyone is welcome. If it’s already apparent to you what you can do then please go ahead. If you can imagine how a student project might help you look at education strategies, research green alternatives or whatever, then we hope to soon have a place you can advertise you work and attract people to work with you. In the meantime you could just pick up the phone and call an academic who might be able to help. Once we get organised there will potentially be many additional things to do, for example, work out issues around intellectual property and related concerns for technology transfer etc.

If you send them to suggestions@1in5project.info we will collate them and try to incorporate them

If you want to do more than supervise climate relevant projects and spread the word, if you want to help with the organisation, or you could provide some advice or resources, please email help@1in5project.info

If you email help@1in5project.info then we will try our best to answer it.

The project isn’t really being led by anyone, its just an idea with a few academics doing the jobs of setting up the website etc. 

There was a conscious decision at the beginning not to drag academics doing climate change work on board at the outset.  There were two reason for that, first those academics have already got tremendous demands on their time,  Second, they can already make a contribution, the 1in5project was set up for the rest of us who don’t currently work on environment change.  We started with the question “What can the rest of us do?” and therefore the rest of us are the obvious people to shape that answer.

All that said, we have consulted along the way and we are now seeking to bring the “professionals” on board so we can learn from them and coordinate with them.