York Living Labs: our biodiversity pilot

York Living Labs

The Environmental Sustainability Academy at York (ESAY) has established the York Living Labs to bring together our University community to work on sustainability problems on campus, and use the campus as a test-bed for sustainability solutions which have wider impact.

The Living Labs will be based around key focus areas such as biodiversity, food or travel.

An important part of this initiative are days or weeks of action which are intended to engage our whole community in sustainability issues. The Living Labs are intended to provide powerful learning opportunities for our students, and motivate and empower everyone on campus to drive changes towards sustainability.

Pilot outputs

A key output from the biodiversity pilot was a social media campaign (#KnowYorCampus) aimed at raising awareness of the fauna and flora on campus amongst our University community. This highly successful campaign, which ran between August and October 2022, involved sharing photos, videos and information on campus biodiversity on social media. The campaign was seen more than 250,000 times across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and generated more than 15,000 likes, comments and shares. 

Moving forwards, we are establishing a management committee to formalise the biodiversity focus area for the York Living Labs and are exploring options for new focus areas. 

Pilot feedback: "A positive experience"

Our consultants from Smeeden Foreman commented that:

“As a team we would certainly say the internship programme has been a positive experience, we found each intern very willing to learn and they remained interested in the project content throughout – fully engaging with the tasks set before them and demonstrating use of initiative and commitment when asked to work independently. 

It was thoroughly rewarding having the opportunity to train interns from different backgrounds with limited experience in field surveys and see their knowledge increase progressively right through to application out in the field without supervision. It certainly encouraged us to see our day-to-day work from a different perspective.”

Student interns also spoke of the value of their experience, with one intern commenting:

“I have gained a greater understanding of biodiversity and how it's assessed. I've improved my team working and communication skills. I've also gained a greater knowledge of working life and working in companies.”