A multi-disciplinary project involving colleagues across Strathclyde University as well as Glasgow City Council is underway and will be presented at COP26.
The project follows collaboration on a feasibility study looking at a community-led development project for upgrading a neglected parklands site, through which links have been initiated with communities in the north-east of Glasgow and their partners.
Working with Glasgow City Council’s Connecting Nature team, the university has been scoping opportunities for joint community engagement around sustainability issues in advance of COP26.
Dr Donagh Horgan, Research Associate in the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation (WEO), explained, “Every Tree Tells a Story has been developed with local authority partners based on an existing concept popular around the world.
“The project is simple and invites using community participation to map trees and record their stories around Glasgow. We are launching the project initially with local schools in the North East of Glasgow with the help of the actor Tam Burn.”
The university-wide project will focus primarily on encouraging citizens to share stories about the city’s trees on social media – using dedicated hashtags and responding to crafted prompts. Dr Ingeborg Birnie has worked to co-design a schools’ toolkit, which will be launched to coincide with the Youth COP.
An agile interdisciplinary team is working on the development of legacy tools to support community mapping and citizen science – including ways for community groups to conduct exercises in storytelling and mapping. A light-touch website will be launched to communicate the idea, with guides for social media. Colleagues are invited to participate in the project and bring forward any ideas that can add additional value to the exercise. The project can be contacted by emailing everytree@strath.ac.uk