My experience at the Sustainability Leadership Conference 2025

Join UCL Student Storyteller Bathsheba Lockwood Brook over three days with experts, researchers, and policymakers working in sustainability.

It was a balmy twenty-something degrees at UCL East on Monday 9 June, and I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was in the right place. As a humanities student, I’m more comfortable analysing eco-critical poetry than thinking up climate solutions, but I had arrived at the Sustainability Leadership Conference willing to change my mind.

Gaia, the giant globe hanging above the main atrium in the Marshgate campus, served as a prescient reminder of why we were there. Like it or not, the escalating climate crisis applies to all of us.

The conference had attracted students across different faculties and from multidisciplinary backgrounds, all hoping to tackle some of the biggest problems facing our shared planet. A joint initiative between the Students’ Union and Sustainable UCL, the 2025 programme offered a packed multi-day agenda, from sustainable policymaking to Hatha Yoga and plant pot painting.

Day 1 - Sustainability Insights

Events kicked off with a timely session discussing solutions for marine conservation, chaired by Liam Saddington, from the University of Cambridge. The aim of the panel was to be forward-looking, Liam emphasised, a challenge the speakers rose to with a deep dive into the future of our oceans.

“Pseudo-liberation” presents one of the biggest challenges in sustainability policies, warned Writer and Ecologist Jasmine Isa Qureshi, especially when large corporations are involved. All too often, conservation programmes are directly tied to economic output, resulting in a heavily biased agenda.

On a positive note, added Tom Ash, Senior Policy Officer for Wildlife and Countryside Link, climate pressures are significantly easier to manage at sea than on land, due to fewer stakeholders. What’s needed is effective collaboration on ocean governance, and care-based models for conservation to offer an alternative to the exploitative superstructures currently in place.

Even closer to home, the panel on Cities and Sustainability served up sobering food for thought. Living in London, it’s easy to take the frequent heatwaves as a good excuse for tinnies in the park. With temperatures in the capital rising, George Leigh, Senior Adviser for London Climate Resilience Review and the Environment Agency reminded us, it’s frightening to realise how few plans we have in place for dealing with the heat.

Nina Wallace, from Bioregional, emphasised intersectionality: our changing climate should be considered an intrinsic factor in social housing policies and tenants’ rights movements. Resilience against extreme weather conditions must be integrated into design and construction principles from the ground up, to ensure our cities are liveable not just now, but ten or fifteen years down the line.

“You build a home to provide shelter,” George added, “but if it floods, or blows over in the wind, or becomes too hot for your grandmother to live in, then it’s not doing its job.”

Investment in retrofitting, Nina suggested, could hold the solution, although it can be complicated to enact. “As with many of these things there needs to be more funding from central governments,” she said. “It shouldn’t be on the shoulders of people in the social or private renting sector to make the updates to their homes.”

As the day drew to a close, I headed to the Circular and Sustainable Fashion panel, to find out how the clothes we wear can be reshaped into a powerful force for sustainability.

Although I made the move some years ago to strictly second-hand shopping as far as my wardrobe is concerned, I’m definitely guilty of over-consumption and a focus on aesthetic rather than quality of materials. A good strategy for limiting this, suggested Natalie Binns, from Better Fashion Consultancy, is to put distance between yourself and a purchase. She doesn’t buy anything the first time she spots it, but instead allows for a cooling off period – if she still wants it after spying it for a second, or even third time, she’ll finally make the purchase.

Within the fashion industry, sustainability is often dismissed as unglamorous, but it’s a crucial consideration for future-thinking brands. To this end, Kaela Katz founded Fibrelab, collecting fashion and textile waste to turn into new products. Global retailers, she warned, are generating colossal amounts of waste that go straight to landfill: many materials – PVC, for example – still can’t be recycled.

For aspiring designers in the audience, it wasn’t all bad news: often sustainable materials can be more affordable for small businesses, proving that ecological and economical incentives don’t always have to be at odds.

Day 2 – Sustainability Skills

The focus of Day 2 was all about developing practical skills: I made a beeline for the session on climate journalism, a hands-on workshop run by Maeve Campbell, a freelance journalist and Producer at Channel 4 News.

“You don’t need to be a scientist to be able to talk about climate,” Maeve reassured us; in fact, “it’s a bit of a superpower if you don’t have that background.” If you don’t necessarily understand everything, she explained, you make it your mission to break down and translate information into an easily digestible format.

The biggest challenge, Maeve told us, is convincing your readers not to look away. It’s easy for climate journalism to come across as all doom-and-gloom; the trick is to look for stories that put people first, and offer a hopeful twist. In her own work, Maeve combines sharp-edged journalism with a solutions-focused approach, from digging into the potential of soil for carbon storage, to covering Club Sol, London’s first renewable rave.

I jumped at the chance to explore the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on the afternoon’s Nature Walk. Tom Bellamy, our guide, was a one-man encyclopaedia when it came to anything living, growing, crawling or flying within the park’s 560 acres.

As a UCL alumnus, graduating in 2014 with an MSc in Conservation, Tom was keen to share advice for current students looking to take their first steps in a conservation career. His path into his current role as the RSPB’s Biodiversity Manager for the Olympic Park was perhaps not the most predictable: he had a specific interest in fish before branching out. “I would encourage people to embrace their interests and not to be concerned if they’re not a generalist,” he told me, “Often having niche interests and knowledge can set you apart.”

In keeping with the day’s emphasis on practical skills, hands on experience, Tom stressed, is the best preparation. Clear communication, he reminded me, is essential in conservation work: “Being able to convey the benefits of managing areas in certain ways can shift attitudes towards appreciating and helping nature, which is something we desperately need.”

The importance of shifting attitudes was echoed in the final session I attended that day, Teaching sustainability to young people, with Nasreen Majid and Tessa Willy of the IOE. Building an appreciation in children of the biodiversity that surrounds them and inculcating sustainable practices, Nasreen said, is an investment for the long-term future: “I’m developing these skills for the rest of their life.”

“We’re a part of nature, not apart from it,” Tessa stressed. Sustainability education aims to empower young people to feel integrated with the natural world they inhabit, and to take action to protect it.

Day 3 - Taking the Lead

The focus on communication continued on day three, but Issey Gladston, founder of Sexy Climate Change, put the reigns directly in our hands with her workshop Sh*tposting for Climate. Humour, Issey told us, is one of our best tools in climate crisis communication, and a key method for engaging people with uncomfortable issues.

Issey’s meme-making session was a big hit: efforts ranged from satirising COP’s flirtation with big business, to celebrating pride month with a rainbow of oil spills.

The conference closed with an inspiring panel from current youth leaders shaping the sustainability movement, chaired by UCL’s own Anoushka Jain. “Climate change,” Anoushka admitted, “has got a bit of an image problem.” The people most impacted often don’t feel heard. It’s important that activists learn from marginalised communities, and work together to find solutions.

Collaboration across age groups should inform the future of climate action, said Svetlana Chigozie Onye, from SustyVibes: “Young people have that curiosity and innocence that allows us to dream, and that’s a very beautiful thing.” Meanwhile, our elders have the knowledge and experience necessary to ground those dreams in reality.

There is no action without community, the panellists agreed: a sustainable future must put the tools in the hands of the many, not the few.

What I learnt

My background in Medieval Literature, I had thought, was perhaps not the most useful foundation for a career in sustainability. I hadn’t bargained for quite how wrong I’d be proved.

I left the conference thinking on a deeper level about how to initiate climate conversations and promote sustainability in my daily life. The three days set aside for the conference allowed time for students to fully throw themselves into the programme, and to form hopefully lasting connections.

Sustainability work has the potential to pioneer real change, but only when everyone is brought on board.

Stay up to date:  

Stay up to date on upcoming events and opportunities or get involved:

Last updated 3 weeks ago
Back to top