Sustainability and Diversity

The 2021 edition of the SOLAS Summer School will make significant efforts to promote sustainability and diversity in science. We aim to integrate these important topics more permanently in the school's mission in the long-term.

Sustainability

The summer school will not use any plastic or one-time use materials for catering and will attempt to serve mostly vegetarian and locally sourced food. We will perform a full greenhouse gas offset using the German company Atmosfair (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/). In addition, the school will be powered by solar energy generated on site at the OCSM. The OCSM is a regular net contributor of solar generated power to electrical grid in Mindelo.

Diversity

This year we will attempt a new session intending to explore diversity challenges in science and ways to overcome them. We hope to use this to kick-off a SOLAS mentoring program, which would pair interested early career scientists with more advanced SOLAS researchers for an appointed period of time for direct mentoring (with an eye on promoting underrepresented groups in SOLAS science).