By Makenna Hall, Asst. news editor
Susquehanna students and faculty members spent three weeks in April participating in the international Drawdown EcoChallenge. Those involved in the challenge are hoping to have a significant increase in participation for the upcoming EcoChallenge in the fall.
The EcoChallenge is typically a two-week long challenge that uses team competitions to emphasize actions that can be taken to reduce negative impacts on the environment. The Drawdown Project has a similar mission of bringing awareness to ways of improving the environment, but with a focus on climate solutions as well as the financial and social impacts.
The Drawdown EcoChallenge combines the process of the EcoChallenge with the mission of the Drawdown Project, to create a three-week long challenge fixed focus on solutions to global warming.
The challenge set up allows each participant within a team to design their own challenge by choosing the kind of actions they can commit to completing. The actions for the Drawdown EcoChallenge are divided into sections that include electricity generation, food, transportation, materials, buildings and cities, and land use.
Head of the earth and environmental sciences department Katherine Straub said, “One good thing is for people to go through and see all these different actions that you could take. When you look through these you realize how broad all the actions you can take really are as opposed just sort of the usual suspects.”
Straub also explained how the in the past, the challenge has usually been done in a more individual-like manner. One idea that is being considered was to set up a Susquehanna versus Bucknell University challenge, in order to counteract the more individualistic method and increase participation.
Sustainability Coordinator Derek Martin also thought the concept of a competitive challenge would bring in more involvement, but more so on campus by involving perspective classes, greek life, athletic teams, and academic and administrative offices and having some sort of big prize that the teams will want to fight for.
“It is really important that we move away from just talking about the bad things, because we’ve had enough of that,” Martin said, “I think most people know that is an issue. But now, let us talk about what are some of the fun, cool, innovative things that are happening, and how can we focus on how to fix it and be more proactive and positive about it.”