Climate Change - The biggest threat
Municipality of Herning - Denmark
PROJECT TEAM & PARTNERS
Aarhus University - Institute of business and technology.
TIMESCALE - 1 week
DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
It is in the interest of the council of Herning to encourage citizens towards practices that minimise CO2 emissions, and industries to commit to carbon-neutral production.
In order to involve citizens in Herning more than 120 students gave their ideas on "How do you make a difference?" in relation to their innovation week. They could work with 4 subjects:
1) Marketing messages in the campaign
2) Evolving new carbon-neutral products
3) The idea we haven't thought about
4) The political decisions
More than 28 different projects competed on being the most innovative project. In reverse order, third place was a commercial for the web-site on Herning County:
Second place was the idea of a Trend Bag. By evolving a carbon-neutral bag which was trendier than a plastic bag it should be sexier to use your own bag instead of buying new products all the time.
The winning project "Save yourself" tackled the idea of educating pupils on climate change for County school. In this case, movies, radio spots and calendars with concrete advice on reducing CO2 were offered to the students. At the same time the students of Aarhus University would function as ambassadors, telling younger students how to make a difference in relation to climate change.
PROJECT TARGETS
The target of the innovation week was to engage young students in the debate about climate change. At the same time their ideas and creativity were important in finding out how to make a difference for individuals, companies or political systems. These targets were achieved by letting the student's meet the experts and reach a target audience not readily available even for adults.
CHALLENGES FACED
The sole product from the innovation week was the marketing spot on YouTube. The challenge of the project has been that the students only were committed to the project in relation to their innovation week. Following that, the students were asked to engage in realising their ideas during their spare time. At the beginning the parties that won first and second places were interested in realizing their ideas, but as soon as their normal studies began the interest and engagement decreased.
In order to maintain the momentum produced by the winning ideas, the municipality of Herning decided to take over their implementation for county schools. In that way the ideas will be realised in the following years.
CONTACT DETAILS
Dorte Langborg-Hansen, The city of Herning
E-mail address: ngodl@herning.dk
