Pembroke takes part in Oxford's Green Action Week 2025

Earlier this term, Pembroke joined in with university-wide efforts to encourage sustainability practices among staff and students. Oxford’s 2025 ‘Green Action Week’ saw numerous events held across different colleges which promoted the actions we can take as a community to secure a greener future. Here at Pembroke we marked the week with three events organised by our Sustainability Manager, Rachael Dean, and members of Pembroke’s Green Impact team. 

We started the week with a ‘Sustainable Travel Breakfast’, inviting any members of the Pembroke community who travel sustainably in their daily life to come together early in the morning for a cup of tea or coffee and a pastry. Members of our Green Impact Team were around to chat and to share information about sustainability initiatives in College and how staff, students and academics can get involved.

The next day, students and members of staff combined efforts once again as they headed to the Pembroke Orchard, located at the College sportsground, to plant two additional pear trees and several white currant bushes and jostaberry bushes. Thanks to the TLC provided throughout the year from our groundsman and willing staff and students, the plants and trees planted last year have survived this cold winter and recent floods – an encouraging development for Pembroke’s biodiversity project.

Later in the week, third-year Economics and Management student Hanna Czaban gave an insightful and thought-provoking talk on meat consumption and related emissions at Oxford Colleges. Based on her independent research findings, Hanna’s talk, titled ‘Is Not Knowing Worse Than Not Doing? Emissions from Meat Consumption at Oxford Colleges and What Needs to Change’, focused on the importance of quantifying our emissions, and what action we can take to improve. Joining to hear Hanna present her findings were a number of fellow students, researchers from across the University, Hanna’s tutors, and members of staff – including some of our kitchen team and domestic bursars from multiple colleges. You can watch the talk here.

We hope that this Green Action Week offered members of our community a chance to find out more about our sustainability initiatives, to get involved in ways that interest them, and to think about how our actions, as individuals and as a community, can make a difference as we work together for a greener future.

Our sustainability efforts don’t stop at Green Action Week, of course: from our ongoing College decarbonisation project to our returnable cup scheme, you can find out more about sustainability at Pembroke here.