Multiple Dates
Climate Literacy and Placing the Built Environment Within It
Event Information
About this Event
2020 is cited by climate scientists to be the critical year if we are to mitigate runaway catastrophic climate change: emissions must peak this year before radical rapid reductions and drawdown efforts or we shall not be capable of doing so.
But the Climate Crisis did not hit us out of the blue, it had been forewarned and forecast for decades, and there is a great deal of history and science to get to grips with to keep up with and fully understand ongoing developments - especially when it comes to the built environment, and contextualising ongoing climate breakdown can be difficult due to its scope.
Recurring feedback has been that a lot of people do not have the time to research all of this nor know where to go looking for it - so this workshop brings it together at Glasgow School of Art to provide a Climate Literacy to those working in the built environment, those educating its future, and those studying it.
This four hour session - including an hour break mid-way, shall:
1. Get you up to speed on the history of climate change goings-on to contextualise where we are today - making the urgency felt by so many more understandable.
2. Make the bare bones of the science behind the Climate Emergency necessary to understand it accessible.
3. Contextualise climate breakdown using extreme weather events and disasters within the past six months.
4. Place the built environment within that context, to stress its positive potential if business-as-usual is addressed and there is sufficient action - whilst also quantifying the magnitude of necessary responses.
5. Create spaces for discussion and identifying opportunities within attendees own work.
About the Workshop Leader
Scott McAulay is an architectural designer with specialisations in Ecological Materials and International Sustainable Development; a climate justice activist; and coordinator of the Anthropocene Architecture School - an alternative school of architecture founded in response to the initial non-response to the IPCC's Special Report on 1.5 Degrees and the lasting inertia holding back Emergency Responses. Whilst actively supporting the work of the Scottish Ecological Design Association, Scott also sits on the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland's Sustainability Working Group and the Sustainability Committee of the Glasgow Institute of Architects
Recent work includes the facilitation of the Crisis Studio - a space in which architecture students are supported by a multidisciplinary tutor team of sustainability specialists - that has supported 47 students so far (as of time of writing); running Climate Literacy workshops for architectural practices - having supported both Collective Architecture and Bennetts Associates; writing for numerous journals including both the RIAS Quarterly and RIBA Journal; presenting at 2019's RIAS National Convention to set a tone befitting of a climate emergency; and supporting Gaia Research as a research assistant on ongoing projects. Since the beginning of 2019, Scott has delivered 19 talks relating to the climate crisis and held 6 workshops across Scotland, and is set to run two workshops at the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design's Earth Summit conference in March 2020.