Sustainability and Diversity

The virtual and in-person SOLAS Summer School will make significant efforts to promote sustainability and diversity in science. We aim to integrate these important topics more permanently in the school's mission in the long-term.

Sustainability

Evidence of carbon footprint savings, as well as other advantages, of virtual meetings is building (UNCarbon Calculator). Therefore, the virtual version of the Summer School in 2022 is an environmentally friendly way to ensure connectivity and capacity building for the next generation of Earth system scientists.

The in-person Summer School in 2023 will not use any plastic or one-time use materials for catering and will attempt to serve mostly vegetarian and locally sourced food. We will perform a full greenhouse gas offset using the German company Atmosfair. In addition, the School will be powered by solar energy generated on site at the OCSM. The OCSM is a regular net contributor of solar generated power to electrical grid in Mindelo. More about the OSCM sustainability concept here.

Diversity

Both the virtual and in-person version of the SOLAS Summer School will attempt a new session intending to explore diversity challenges in science and ways to overcome them. We hope to use this to kick-off a SOLAS mentoring program, which would pair interested early career scientists with more advanced SOLAS researchers for an appointed period of time for direct mentoring (with an eye on promoting underrepresented groups in SOLAS science).