The Walker Academy, the capacity building arm of the Walker Institute, based at the University of Reading, holds a brilliant week-long training course every year named Climate Resilience Evidence Synthesis Training (CREST). The course helps PhD students from all disciplines to understand the role of academic research within wider society. I’m a third year PhD student studying ocean and sea ice interaction, and I wanted to do the course because I’m interested in understanding how to better communicate scientific research, and the process of how research is used to inform policy. The other students who participated were mainly from the Science of the Environment: Natural and Anthropogenic pRocesses, Impacts and Opportunities (SCENARIO) Doctoral Training Programme or Maths of Planet Earth Doctoral Training Programme (MPECDT), studying a broad range of subjects from Agriculture to Mathematics. The first of these is run by the University of Reading and the University of Surrey, and the second by the University of Reading and Imperial College, London.
Takeaways
It was an amazing workshop with a lovely and supportive team running it who built a real atmosphere. I took away a lot from the experience and I think the other students did too. It really helped us to think about our own research and our key stakeholders, and how reaching out to them is really important.
Course Highlights
Everyone agreed that the interactive play was a highly engaging & unusual format, and one not yet encountered in my PhD journey! It allowed some of us to step right into the shoes of someone whose point of view you had potentially never stopped to consider before, like a government official or a media reporter.
Something else that really stayed with me was a talk given by the National Coordinator at Climate Action Network Uganda, Miriam Talwisa. She shared loads of creative ideas about how to empower climate action in small or low-income communities. These included the concept of community champions, media cafes, community dialogues, and alternative policy documentation such as citizens manifestos or visual documentaries. This helped me to think about my own local community and how such tools could be implemented to enforce climate action at the grassroots level.
Contact: l.greig@pgr.reading.ac.uk