What is Save the Planet Week, and what’s Unifrog doing about its carbon footprint?

From 7 to 11 November we’re running Save the Planet Week: a set of webinars, a lesson pack, and a student competition, to empower young people to learn what actions they can take themselves about climate change. Here’s how you can get involved.
 

WHAT IS SAVE THE PLANET WEEK?

Save the Planet Week is: 

• A series of webinars
• A new pack of teaching resources
• A Unifrog-wide student competition, all to do with students taking action to fight climate change

This year Save the Planet Week takes place from 7-11 November, coinciding with the global UN conference COP27 and the UK’s first Green Careers Week.

The goal of Save the Planet Week is to empower students to take action about climate change, and to find out what education, training, and careers they could pursue to do with sustainability.
 

WHAT CAN STUDENTS GET OUT OF IT?

Students can sign up to free webinars to do with action they can take themselves to fight climate change, and to do with the careers they could pursue in the sustainability sector. 

They can also design a green project they can run themselves, and enter it into our competition.

Student webinars

• Exploring green careers – featuring Tour Radar’s Head of Sustainability, who’ll talk about how they got into their role – Monday 7 November, 16:30 UK time
   
• The climate crisis: an in-depth look – university academics and activists discuss the short- and long-term effects of global warming, how to deal with climate anxiety, and how you can make a difference – Monday 7 November, 17:30 UK time
   
• Veganism and the future of the food industry – featuring a guest speaker from the team behind Veganuary in the UK, Content strategist Stuart Giddens will be talking making better choices about food, and running a social change project – Tuesday 8 November, 16:30 UK time
   
• How to live more sustainably and reduce your carbon footprint – Unifrog’s Sustainability Champions and Switch it Green will share their green tips, from changing how you buy clothes to how you bank – Wednesday 9 November, 16:30 UK time
   
• Understand animal and plant conservation – featuring the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s Senior Programme Advisor for Asian big cats, this webinar will explore how you can get involved with supporting conservationists in protecting endangered species – Wednesday 9 November, 17:30 UK time

Share our webinars with your students here (this will take you to the Teacher side of the platform, where you’ll find the ‘Share’ button at the top right. Hit this to choose which students to share the series with). 
 

Student competition

Students can enter into our Unifrog-wide competition their designs for their own green project. They can create this project via following the lesson pack (details below), or by working completely independently. 

To enter independently, students just need to download this worksheet, complete it/create their carbon footprint reduction plan, and submit it to competitions@unifrog.org by 2 December 2022. 

WHAT CAN TEACHERS GET OUT OF IT?

For teachers, careers advisers, and counselors, there is a new ‘Save the Planet’ lesson pack on Unifrog, which culminates in the opportunity for students to enter a Unifrog-wide competition.

• Available either as three 45-minute lessons (ideal for ‘drop-down days’ or afternoon sessions), and five 15-minute lessons (ideal for form time)
   
• Students develop time management, teamwork, and problem solving skills 
   
• Through the linked lessons, students design their own carbon footprint reduction project, which they can enter into our Unifrog-wide competition.

For the competition, the prizes are:

• £100/$150 to two winning projects to help expand the scale of their plans, plus 25 trees planted in the winners’ names
• 25 trees planted in the name of three runner-up schools
• A certificate from Unifrog for the best project plan in your school

Download the Save the Planet lesson pack here.

Webinars

We’re also hosting one webinar for teachers and counselors:

• Green careers for the future – this webinar will look at the growing green sector, the different careers available, and how to support students to get into them – Tuesday 8 November, 15:30 UK time
   

HOW WE AT UNIFROG MINIMISE OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT

Outside of Save the Planet Week, we are always thinking about how Unifrog can be more sustainable. 

Unifrog’s team includes two Sustainability Champions, Ellie and Nat, whose role is to look for ways for us to live and work more sustainably. Here (under Sustainability) you can watch them talking about Unifrog’s sustainability policy, what’s coming next (like our B Corporation status!), and our work with Mossy Earth.
 

Trying to work green

In February 2022, we offset all of our transport emissions since Unifrog’s inception: that’s 405 tonnes of carbon sequestered through investing in climate projects. You can see our impact on Ecologi.

We now keep track of how many tonnes of carbon our work activities release into the atmosphere each year, and we review how we can reduce this number for the next year – for example, by doing more virtual meetings.

Unifrog’s employees get a paid volunteering day each year, giving them the chance to get involved in projects that matter to them. Last year the London team headed to the London Wetlands Centre to support their conservation projects, like rewilding woodland areas to encourage wildlife growth.

Ellie and Nat encourage us all to participate in global initiatives, like Plastic Free July and Veganuary, and we now have a company eco film club! 

Some other things we’ve put in place over the years: Unifrog’s main office is in a sustainable building (rated 'excellent' by BREEAM – a sustainable assessment method), and uses 100% renewable energy from EDF. We offer a cycle-to-work scheme, a green pension scheme, and we now only host team meals at vegetarian restaurants.

We’ve recently completed our application to be certified as a B Corporation (we’re waiting in the queue!). We’re looking forward to joining over 5,000 businesses and leaders across the world who are committed to working more sustainably. 
 

Funding climate action

As part of our sustainability work, we fund projects created by Mossy Earth, a team that works to restore nature and fight climate change.

Last year we supported their cave clean-up project. In this project, Mossy Earth’s team removed waste dumped in a European underground cave network and, as a result, worked to protect species unique to this location, like the Croatian baby dragon.

This year, our team has voted to support Mossy Earth’s kelp forest restoration trial in Portugal. Kelp forests support ocean biodiversity, but recent decline calls for restoration using techniques like ‘green gravel’ – growing kelp attached to pebbles before ‘planting’ these in the ocean.