Get involved
We want as many of our students as possible to be a part of the wider conversation about sustainability at Edinburgh Napier. We all have a part to play in reducing the environmental impact of our University community and encourage you to get involved in events, projects and societies.How to play your part
There are plenty of ways you can get involved in helping Edinburgh Napier achieve its sustainability commitments, including joining the Edinburgh Napier Sustainable Society or join in through the students' association, ENSA.
If you have any questions about the work we're doing or would like more information, please email environment@napier.ac.uk and we'll do our best to help.
Hedgehog Friendly Campus Project
As part of our efforts to promote biodiversity, students have been working on a project to make our Edinburgh Napier campuses a safer, more friendly environment for hedgehogs to live in.
The Hedgehog Friendly Campus project is a UK-wide initiative which aims to turn university campuses into places where hedgehogs can thrive. Taking part in Hedgehog Friendly Campus means that staff and students play an active role in helping hedgehogs to get back to healthy numbers.
In October 2020, students and staff from Edinburgh Napier came together to hold the University's first Hedgehog Friendly Campus meeting to agree steps towards earning bronze-level accreditation. Our aim is to raise awareness and help encourage others to take action to help improve their local environment for hedgehogs.
Some of the activities and events organised so far include:
- A hedgehog-themed bake-off
- Bonfire night awareness campaign
We achieved the Hedgehog Friendly Campus Bronze Award in February 2021.
Find out more about the group and how to joinLions' Gate Gardens
The Lions' Gate is an in-development urban, interactive, permaculture project based at Merchiston Campus. It encompasses a garden, allotment and outdoor laboratory as well as a relaxation space.
The Lions' Gate offers student and community volunteer opportunities to develop permaculture, food growing and outdoor spaces to enhance wellbeing.
Obviously there are gardens with various design features going into the gardens and the model that we use for the gardens is permaculture, which is a sustainable design framework. And really what we're wanting to do is engage with students and staff as much as possible and it's really all about creating green sustainable spaces on campus.
Universities are a great locus for grasping the nettle of climate change and issues around health and well-being and the lions gate really is just a facility to allow research for those things to happen on campus.
Both of the spaces of the Lions’ Gate, when we started working on them about 18 months ago, they were dead spaces there was literally no life in them at all. There's wildlife on the other side of the university and there's wildlife over here too but there was nothing in here, so really what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the planting - this is all just wildflowers mostly here at the moment. Getting the insects and the bees into the space and then the birds come into the space and the spaces become self-sustaining.
These raised beds are available for use by staff and students. At the moment we're just growing veg and we're just all learning and trying to teach people about growing and stuff like that. We've been very, very successful actually, in a lot of things we've grown but we're offering people the space to experiment - trial and error and all that at the moment. But you - student or staff - can have one of these beds to grow stuff, if that's something that would interest you.
Students can get involved in numerous ways - they can volunteer and we've got that all set up all ready to go and we've got about 70 or 80 volunteers already on our database. So they can volunteer and come along when it suits them. Mainly we work on the project on a Monday and a Thursday and from about 10am to 2pm on both of those days.
So really, you can email us at gardens@napier.ac.uk and just say that you're interested in getting involved and, as it's volunteering, it's very much a case of what your passion is what you enjoy doing - that's what you can come into the space and do, so whatever your skills are, you know you can utilise the space to kind of further your own aims as well.