After seven amazing years running Afallen with three brilliant colleagues, I am stepping back into the world of academia. It’s with real pleasure that I’m starting my new job today as Head of Climate Action at Cardiff Met University. The university has rightly been recognised for its pioneering work on carbon reduction and sustainability. It clearly also has huge ambitions that go beyond meeting required targets on carbon reduction that extend into demonstrating practical solutions for the benefit of the whole sector.

Higher education has a powerful role to play, not just in reducing the emissions of the education sector, but also in showing leadership at the scale of large estates, and providing learning opportunities for thousands of tomorrow’s leaders. I hope to be able to play a role in helping shape that side of things too – particularly relevant given CMet’s acknowledged expertise in training the teachers of tomorrow.

Improvements in how we account for and manage our carbon impact can’t be made solely through technical means. Climate change is an engineering and scientific challenge; but it is also a human one, which requires thought about narrative, values and social justice. I intend bringing my experiences with NICW to CMet, and to help implement many of the approaches that we have recommended at NICW, particularly in our most recent report on community engagement and climate adaptation (worth a read if you haven’t yet!)

Ahead of starting at CMet I’d like to thank my new colleagues, in advance, for your patience and support while I get to grips with the new role. I am also asking for the same in anticipation of the mistakes I’ll make along the way, but unapologetically, as in “I know I will be going to make mistakes but that’s ok”. As I keep telling my children, without making mistakes, we cannot learn. The idea is to learn from our mistakes and then amend or discard what hasn’t worked, doubling down on things that seem to be doing well. The urgency of the climate and nature emergencies requires that we move rapidly from ‘business as usual’ towards new ways of doing things, which suggests change in pretty much every area of society, and sooner rather than later.

But urgency has to be balanced with agency. I’m a believer in people knowing their own areas of work; that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the level of impact (subsidiarity). In NICW’s work with communities we have seen that there is far too little trust and understanding of communities by statutory bodies. In bringing that understanding to my work at Cardiff Met, I’d like my actions to empower staff and students with the ability to make tangible differences to their own lives and local environments.

Cardiff Met has shown purpose and ambition in their journey towards a zero carbon institution that helps others reach their full potential; I’m delighted to be able to become a part of that story, building towards a Wales that enables thriving communities within a flourishing natural environment.