Day review written by Jasper Dekoninck.

Today was biodiversity day, one I was very much looking forward to as it contained quite some cool events. In the morning I went to “Seeing the city a Plant at a Time” where I discovered the greenhouse of ETH and had some interesting conversations about agroecology and projects related to that. We also walked around the city a bit and ate some delicious schoggibrötli from ässbar.

Later I decided to join the IPCC lecture, where I was positively surprised by a very good speaker, Dr. Fisher, who explained his role in the IPCC, what the goals and processes behind this report are and how many people are working on it. Over 78000 comments on the document were processed and answered in the process of making the report! What I found most surprising was the heated discussions about even the smallest words are apparently very common while writing the summary for policy makers (imagine discussing three hours about whether it should be “will” or “is projected to be” in a sentence)!

The last event I joined was the one I was looking forward to the most: the Rector Discussion. Rectors presenting how important they found sustainability and having the opportunity to go into discussion with them about topics related to it, was really interesting. Obviously, the apéro afterwards was so good 🙂

After that, I had one last thing to do: listen to the new podcast episode of that day. The topic of this day was crop science, an amazing talk of over 40 minutes by Prof. Dr. Achim Walter were I learned a lot about the ideas about crops and how to create a more sustainable food system myself 🙂

Categories: Day Review