Climate Team Open Day

In this workshop, we want to explore the potential of creating a Repair Community at UAntwerp. No background knowledge needed, only your interest in repairing matters! We’ll brainstorm about what are needs such a community might focus on, what are feasible ways of organising ourselves, and what are initial steps to get started. Through dialogue and collaborative mapping, we’ll treat both a preliminary mission for how a Repair Community could bring together interested students, staff, and citizens to boost repair skills, reduce material use, and create societal impact, as well as very practical ways to organize such a community, skill-sharing needs & approaches, and the types of items we might focus on repairing.  

​In this session, we will explore the UAntwerp potential of the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework or LEAF, as a structual approach to further boost already built up research efficiency & sustainability in our 'wet labs' for research and education. This London-based Framework offers bronze, silver or gold certification, after a proces of in-house peer auditing and showcases the intention of the university to ever promote & support conscious laboratory practices in an energy en resource intensive environment. We hope for a high participation from UAntwerp's extensive laboratory community, as we’d like to hear perspectives from researchers, technicians, and lab managers across scientific disciplines and from the different faculties. 

In this session, Prof. Dr. Luc Van Liedekerke will provide you with the most relevant and up to date insights into the field of sustainable asset management, from the implications of the European Green Deal and its impact on institutional investment strategies, up to the latest revision of the UAntwerp framework for sustainable portfolio management. Drawing from his expertise in developing the Towards Sustainability label, Prof. Van Liedekerke will offer a practical overview of the challenges, decision-making process, and concrete steps taken by the university to align its financial assets with broader sustainability goals. Moreover, there’ll be ample opportunity to ask questions! 

While business travel is declining worldwide (Transport & Environment, 2025), recent figures show that our UAntwerp flight kilometers continue to increase. This conflicts with our ambition as a university to strive towards operating within planetary boundaries. In this interactive session, we'll first share key findings from the UAntwerp-wide survey on international academic travel conducted this spring, to a discussion on the potential policy recommendations we could propose from the climate team on this topic. The goal is to collectively explore what type of policy can support UAntwerp staff adequately in balancing its international tasks with environmental responsibility, taking into account diverse needs and perspectives of the university community.