UNICEF's latest report, released in November, calls for urgent action on the threat to children posed by the climate crisis, saying that by 2050 the number of children affected by heatwaves will have increased eightfold compared to 2000. The University, committed to sustainability, has been organising different awareness-raising activities since its beginnings, such as the Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Sustainability, which celebrated its 16th edition on 21 November. 

Every year, the University's Cooperation and Sustainable Development Office, led by Dr Sílvia Albareda, invites all students at UIC Barcelona to participate in this Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Sustainability, which this year was entitled “Climate change: science, irreversibility and commitment”. Nearly 120 students from different faculties presented their research projects or intervention proposals to help mitigate this global problem. 

The winning papers of this edition are: Optimization of inventory management for a more efficient consumption of resources, carried out by the students of the Master's Degree in Business Management and Production Systems, Federico Lomi, Niccolò Prieto Rossi, Giulia Rotondi, Tomasso Bernhardt, Alice Costa and Carla Trallero de Urcola; Each sheet counts. Paper with past, classroom with future, by students Anna Coll, Martina Planas, Candela Cuyás, Juanjo Zorita, Cillian Magourti of the Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education and (Fasto-) Fashion and Sustainability: Educating Children’s Clothing Behaviour, by Morgan Schockert, Agustín Boga, Laura Vilar i Mariona Camp, also from the Degree in Primary Education.

After the students presented their proposals, Dr J. Fidel González Rouco, senior researcher at CSIC, gave a lecture where he shared some of his research with the teachers, researchers and students. The researcher focused his talk on explaining how we are addressing, from a scientific perspective, the problem of climate change, focusing mainly on the increase in temperature, "since climate change is a very complex and wide-ranging issue that affects many aspects”, he said. 

"There have been climate changes before us, but this time it is important for us because we are experiencing it first-hand and because we are responsible for it," the expert said, adding that this fact threatens our stability. “Half a degree is lot on a global scale. If we look at plant species, vertebrates, insects, crops, sea level, etc., with half a degree more all the problems are, in most cases, two and a half times worse, so half a degree on a global scale has a major influence,” explained the researcher.

Dr González Rouco added that the main difficulty is to agree on a socially fair way. “We are faced with ethical problems and, whatever you do, there will always be someone who will be harmed,” said the scientist, challenging students as future professionals and leaders of tomorrow who have a responsibility to improve society.

The event was opened by Dr Sílvia Albareda, who recalled the importance of this Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Sustainability at the University as a tool, not only to share proposals based on research and reflection, but also to help students develop skills in sustainability. “At the university, we do science, and we talk about specific figures on the problem of climate change, but we are also very aware of the current situation we are living in, especially after what happened in the wake of the Dana,” explained the director of the Cooperation and Sustainable Development Office.