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The sea is vitally important to our health and wellbeing, yet human activities beneath the waves wreak appalling damage, each day, across the globe. As we enter the second half of the United Nations Ocean Decade, an international effort to restore humanity’s relationship with the sea, Dr Cathy Cole reflects on the value of our ocean and the challenge of engaging with a world that is hidden from view.

It pulls me, madly, with its salt scent, the rush and scrape of shingle, the teasing winds that whip my hair, and the shocking assault of cold against my skin. Swallowed whole and tossed like a toy boat, I feel its power, its will, and in the first seconds that take my breath away, I am infinitely small, refreshingly insignificant. The charge of daily life ebbs instantly into the muted rhythm of the swell and I am held. Carried with the incoming tide, we pass Castle Point and swim with determined strokes towards the northern headland, glinting rose-gold with the first morning light. Below the froth that separates air from water, I can’t see more than half a metre, and the sun’s weak rays vanish quickly into ink.

After the swim, as I drip onto the rounded stones, my imagination fires with the hidden worlds playing out beneath the slick surface. In the shallows, when the water is clear, I’ve seen spider crabs lunging over barnaclecrusted rocks, shoals of fleeting silver darts as bream twist through sugar kelp and bladder wrack, cushion stars and crimson beadlet anemones, all awaiting the turning tide. In deeper waters, barrel jellyfish, pulsing ghostly white, sometimes as big as me, disappear as quickly as they emerge. We share the bay with bottlenose dolphins, year-round residents, but more easily seen in the summer when they roll and play in the surf. Just once, I shared a quiet moment of awe with a grey seal as we watched the full-moon set into the hazy dawn horizon.

Studying the state of our seas

I am deeply privileged to witness these glimpses into our marine world, and to have studied the seas throughout my career. As a Master’s student in Southampton, I feasted my senses on everything from the mathematics of the tides to the chemistry of ocean carbon to the secret records of summers at sea etched into salmon scales. Staying for a PhD, and with a strengthening stomach for high latitude seas, I was invited to join a research expedition in the Arctic Ocean to map and measure the bubbles of methane gas venting from sediments offshore Svalbard. This was a stark awakening to the potentially catastrophic nature of our changing climate, as warming temperatures on the sea floor threatened to destabilise reservoirs of methane hydrates and trigger “runaway” climate change. I started to tune in deeply to the changes underway in the seas, as they sequestered enormous quantities of heat and carbon.

A little more than a decade on, and my two-year old daughter has taken to yelling “I love you seeeea” daily as we fly towards it, perched on my bike down Penglais Hill in Aberystwyth. It stretches away from us, a tantalising canvas of greys and blues, depending on the weather. My son, who is five, tells me excitedly that he can’t wait to see tropical coral reefs and snorkel with turtles when he’s older. My stomach lurches, sick with grief. He does not know that, all around the world, marine heatwaves are relentlessly expelling the symbiotic algae that reefs rely on for healthy growth, exposing the vulnerable skeleton. For the first time, we have breached a climate tipping point, and we are seeing this catastrophic loss before our eyes. I don’t think he will ever see a coral reef.

The ocean’s vital role

Nearly three quarters of our planet is covered by sea. Always moving, it is vital to our climate system, driving a global conveyer belt of currents that carry oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat. This constant churning supports all life on Earth and allows extraordinary diversity to thrive and flourish here. Where ocean currents bring nutrients to the surface, the startling blaze of phytoplankton that erupts can be seen from space. This is the base of the food chain, the source of half the oxygen we breathe, and as this organic frenzy dies off and sinks to the seabed it takes with it carbon that can be locked away in sediments. This natural process of ocean carbon removal – both biological and physical – keeps our world in balance, and has also allowed the sea to absorb more than a third of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Just as the ocean locks away carbon, it also locks away heat; the ocean has absorbed a staggering 93% of all the excess heat that has been trapped by greenhouse gases emitted as a result of human activities (like burning fossil fuels and deforesting our land). The ocean is a vital ally in our fight against climate change – but this does not come without a price. Warmer water fuels rising sea levels, intensified storms and strengthened marine heatwaves, all with serious consequences for human safety. At the same time, last year’s astonishing documentary Ocean by Sir David Attenborough starkly demonstrated the extent of other human pressures at sea, with factory fishing vessels, bottom trawlers and dredgers desecrating the seabed with incredulous extent across the entire globe, including almost all the world’s marine protected areas.

Restoring our deep relationship

The ferocity of global outrage is tragically tempered by the fact that all this is happening beyond our view. If we could see this industrial-scale destruction, we would not tolerate it. Recognising this, one of the 10 challenges underway within the current United Nations Ocean Decade is to ‘restore humanity’s relationship with the ocean’. An immense international effort is underway to do exactly this, and in the five years since it began there have been some very welcome changes. One of these is the ratification of the High Seas Treaty in 2025, the first ever international, legally-binding treaty to protect marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This is critical in the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework to protect 30% of the land and sea by 2030.

In Wales, we are excited by the launch of a major ocean literacy project, Y Môr a Ni (The Sea and Us), which is bringing communities, organisations and government partners together to nurture a deeper connection with our seas, to improve access to the coast and enhance public and political investment in a healthy marine environment. This is part of our teaching at CAT too. Our MSc in Sustainability and Behaviour Change empowers students with the skills to make tangible change in their lives beyond their studies – in their communities and workplaces – to inspire living as ecological citizens, respecting the natural world around us. Students develop expertise in strategic environmental communication, with the opportunity to pursue research into ocean literacy and engagement through their dissertation.

This is a call to us all to be proud “Ocean Citizens”, understanding our connection to the ocean and taking responsibility for healthy seas and coasts, both through our personal daily actions and through our participation in democratic society. We need to mobilise communities with knowledge and with a deep emotional connection to collectively ensure we are active witnesses to the environmental damage inflicted at sea, and to push for meaningful and urgent protection. We invite you to join this global community of passionate ocean advocates, offering wider reach and new powerful narratives to ensure a healthy future for our seas.

About the author

Cathy is a visiting lecturer at CAT’s Graduate School of the Environment, teaching ocean science, communication, and public and policy engagement across several modules. She has recently taken up a new role at Natural Resources Wales as a Specialist Advisor on Marine Water Quality and will be giving a public lecture at CAT on 9 March as part of the Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services module. You can sign up to attend at cat.org.uk/event/public-lecture/

Sarah Woods recently gave a lecture to our postgraduate students and members of the public exploring the power of stories – how they inform not only the way we communicate but how we think in our increasingly complex world. Here she invites us to think more deeply about the role of story in our own lives and as a transformational tool for society.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes says narrative ‘is present at all times, in all places, in all societies… there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories’.

We make sense of the world through story. We use it to model and navigate the diverse and contradictory information that forms our lives. Story helps us relate and connect to the world and to each other, handle complexity, maintain our identity, rehearse new ways of being, manage change, place ourselves in time, and move through it. Story can serve as a thermometer, taking the cultural temperature of a time or group. I would argue that story isn’t just something we read or listen to, it’s a way of thinking, a language we’re fluent in. Like any language, story isn’t good or bad in itself – that depends on the individual story and on the teller.

We’re living in complex times, faced with what are often called ‘wicked problems’ like the climate crisis and global poverty and inequality, which are systemic, resist linear solutions, and require us to think and act differently.

Story should be able to help us work our way through them, yet more often it feels like story has become a blunt tool for attack and defence. Actively noticing the stories we tell and are told, and exploring our relationship with them, can help.

Understanding stories

We tend to think of story as singular, as something we watch or read, but story comes from lots of different places in our lives, so that at any point there are a number of different narratives playing out and intersecting for us. However, because they’re so much part of the fabric of our lives, we’re often less aware of them – and their power – than we might be. Having a better understanding of them can enable us to make clearer choices, to unhook ourselves from dominant social, political, cultural and personal narratives. The first step we can take towards that is to identify the topography of story in and around us, which I think can be usefully divided in to five kinds of story (see box overleaf).

As the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says:

‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’

Behind his second question lie, I think, a series of questions that can help bring us towards an answer for the first, to bring us back into relationship with the stories we are swimming in.

• Who’s telling this story?
• Who do they want to listen to it?
• Why are they telling it?
• Does this story seek to divide or connect? And what or who does it want to divide or connect?
• Does it want to make enemies or friends? Of who?
• And what does this story want me to think or do, and why?

In taking this journey with story, we create space and the possibility for new stories and new kinds of story. As David Loy the American author and teacher reminds us: ‘It is not by transcending this world that we are transformed but by storying it in a new way.’

The topography of story

Stories we tell ourselves

We all carry with us an inner storyscape, stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, about who we are and what our experiences are like. What’s possible for us is shaped by the life story we create for ourselves and the conversations we have with our inner voices, yet we’re often unaware of both.

Stories we share

We share stories with our friends, family and communities (whether they’re actual or online). From these bubbled worlds, it can be hard to see the range of viewpoints and positions that might help us better understand the motivations and experiences of others and to find ways out of polarity.

Stories we are told

Dominant narratives come from all sorts of agencies, including political parties and corporations. They surround us and are usually normalised to the point that they become invisible, part of the expected fabric of our lives.

Stories we know

We all carry with us stories from our cultural upbringings: myths, legends, religious stories and folk tales, versions of the history of our country and the world. These often guide our moral and cultural framework and are foundational for the stories we tell next.

Stories to guide us

At different times in history we have told different stories about our future. For a generation, our future visions have been dominated by dystopias and catastrophes, which can make it harder for us to imagine the better world we need to journey into.

About the author

Sarah Woods is an award-winning writer and thinker. She was part of the early Zero Carbon Britain Hub at CAT and is now a regular guest lecturer on our postgraduate module Communicating Transformational Social Change. Sarah is a research associate at Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavik.

She is currently writing a podcast series and book called The Story Crisis: how story makes and changes the world. Her dramatisation of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Origin, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on August 24th.

CAT graduate Paul Martin shares his journey towards net-zero in his 1960s three-bedroom semi, showing that a modern low-impact lifestyle is possible for an average UK household.

In 2010, motivated by my visits and studies at CAT, I decided it was time to take steps to reduce my personal contribution to climate change. During my BSc, I recall seeing a case-study of a house in the UK powered by solar photovoltaic (PV) panels with surplus charging an electric vehicle (EV), and I thought, “I want to do that!”

Taking the first step

The first step was to understand my energy use. I did this by paying closer attention to my utility bills and taking meter readings for electricity, gas and water. I calculated the fuel consumption and annual mileage of my car. With the help of a carbon footprint calculator, I estimated the CO2 emissions attributed to my lifestyle (e.g. my diet and the things I was buying) and also to my share of UK infrastructure (services, roads, hospitals etc.). Using this information, I began to estimate my CO2 fingerprint – a detailed breakdown of my emissions across different categories (Fig.1) – and my total footprint (Fig.2), allowing me to track my progress towards net-zero over the years.

I purchased my house in 1995. I had a full set of data for 1998 before I’d made any changes to the property, so I chose this as the baseline year to measure improvements against. In 1998 my household’s footprint was 10.7 tons CO2e per year.

Lifestyle changes

I first began looking at the impact of my lifestyle choices, as these can be the quickest wins. Using the carbon footprint calculator, I came to a baseline figure of 1tCO2e per year.

To reduce these lifestyle emissions, I needed to make some changes. I changed my diet to vegetarian (later becoming vegan) and bought organic, fresh,
seasonal food from local farm shops where possible. I moved my finances to ethical banks, supported environmental charities (including CAT), and began living by the three Rs – reduce, re-use and recycle.

These choices reduced my annual lifestyle emissions by 50% or 0.5tCO2e per year. I generally found these changes simple to implement with little cost impact.

My household electricity use

Thinking about reducing my emissions at home, I began with my electricity use. Until 2012, all my household electricity was provided by the National Grid.

• In 2012 I installed a 1.8kWp (kilowatt peak) solar PV array on my south-east facing roof. I took advantage of the UK government’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme at the time (now replaced by the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG)).
• In 2018 I installed a 4kWh lead-acid electricity storage battery to increase the proportion of the solar power I was personally using from 25% to 75% and reduce the amount I was exporting to the grid (after the six-year expected lifespan, I replaced the battery with a 13.5kWh lithium-ion upgrade).
• In 2022 I added a 1kWp secondary solar array on the south-west facing roof of my garage. I added more renewable power generation from a share in the Graig Fatha Wind Turbine Project.

All these measures were self-funded. But the payback in energy cost savings and revenue from the FiT and turbine provided funds for more measures.

As a result of these changes, my annual household grid electricity energy consumption has reduced by 34%, and my house’s emissions have been cut by 0.8tCO2e per year.

Heating

In 1998 the heating for my house and water were provided by an inefficient 1970s gas-fired boiler and radiators. There was no loft or cavity wall insulation. I had 1980s double-glazed windows and patio doors and leaky
wooden external doors.

In 2005, before I began consciously taking efforts to reduce my carbon footprint, I made some home improvements. I replaced my front door and patio doors and bricked up a side door. I replaced a flat roof. I insulated the main loft with 150mm wool fibre. And I replaced the old boiler with a 90% efficient gas condensing boiler, new pipework and radiators.

Later, taking advantage of a Welsh Government grant, I improved the
building fabric heat loss and infiltration by installing cavity wall insulation, topping up the loft insulation to 300mm, and sealing up areas where air was escaping. I replaced the windows with A-rated, argon filled, low-emissivity double-glazed units, trapping heat and maximising passive solar gain.
Then in 2023 I replaced the 18-year-old gas boiler with a 5kW air-source heat pump, electrifying my space and water heating. To do this I made use of a £7,500 UK Government grant*. In the first year of operation, this provided a coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.01. Essentially, every unit of electrical input delivers four units of heat, an efficiency of 400%, compared with 90% for a new gas boiler.

These measures reduced my annual space and water heating energy consumption by 84%, and my emissions by 2.7tCO2e per year.

Travel

As a wheelchair user, all my personal travel is by car. At the end of 2011 I changed my petrol car to a mild hybrid, saving 1.4tCO2e per year. Three years later, I was able to upgrade again to a 100% battery electric vehicle, saving a further 0.5tCO2e per year.

In 2024, due to a greater proportion of grid electricity coming from renewable sources, particularly wind, my annual car travel emissions were reduced by 79% or 2.2tCO2e per year. This is despite my mileage increasing by 4,000 miles a year.

The electric vehicle can also be charged purely from solar in summer due to the addition of the secondary solar array – zero cost, zero emissions.

Water consumption

I’ve reduced my water consumption through water harvesting, installing low-flow gadgets on outlets, the use of a shower timer, taking showers over baths, and using a dishwasher rather than filling the sink. My annual water consumption has dropped by 80%, resulting in emissions reductions of 0.04tCO2e per year.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure we use, like services, roads, hospitals and so on, have CO2 emissions attributed to them. These are not personally controllable, so they have remained constant over the period.

The figure was derived from the carbon footprint calculator I used – 2.75tCO2e per year for each UK citizen.

To offset some of these emissions, I used natural sequestration through an annual donation to the Woodland Trust to plant 25m2 of woodland. I planted 14 native trees on-site, created two ponds, grew a green wall, and put an extensive sedum green roof on my flat-roof extension. I’m fortunate to have a large garden which allows me to do these things.

Overall impact

Due to the measures described above, by 2024 my total carbon emissions
had been reduced by 79% or 8.5tCO2e per year compared with the 1998
baseline, from 10.7tCO2e to 2.2tCO2e.

Furthermore, my personally controllable emissions, omitting infrastructure, produced a negative figure of -0.5tCO2 e in 2024. Fig. 2 shows the carbon emissions reduction over the period, comparing my total footprint, personally controllable emissions, and the UK per capita target.

About the Author

After studying a BSc Environmental Studies and Diploma in Environmental Policy then an MSc Sustainability in Energy Provision and Demand Management at CAT, Paul now writes articles and a blog at ecofuturist.net about achieving his net-zero carbon lifestyle. He is also a co-founder and director of EVA Cymru, Wales’s national representative body for electric vehicle owners and drivers.

Last month, we welcomed our latest cohort of postgraduate students to CAT as they embarked upon a transformative educational journey delving into sustainability and solutions. 

A unique approach to learning

CAT’s Graduate School of the Environment courses offer a big-picture integrated approach to sustainability, providing our students with the knowledge, practical skills and inspiration to take action on the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Our courses mix academic learning with practical workshops from academics who are experts in their fields and cover a wide range of sustainability-related topics, enabling CAT students to go on to make a real difference in a variety of career pathways, from researching solutions, advising on climate policy, sustainable architecture, and beyond.

During our taught modules, students join us for a week-long intensive teaching week, before continuing their coursework from home, with a distance learning option available for our MSc and MRes courses. This approach helps provide our students with the flexibility to fit their studies around work, their families and other commitments.

Sustainability in action

One of the results of having intensive teaching weeks is that there is always a special buzz around CAT when students are on-site, and this year’s first lot of teaching week, for both our MSc, MRes and M.Arch students, was especially electric.

For those students able to join on-site, they are not only treated to incredible views. They can also benefit from CAT’s more than 50 years of sustainability experience that has transformed the CAT site from a disused slate quarry into a living laboratory, showcasing sustainability in action, including:

• Experimental sustainably designed buildings – including rammed earth and straw bale buildings.
• Organically managed gardens that provide a useful teaching space and supply fresh fruit and vegetables to the CAT Cafe.
• Sustainably managed woodlands providing both timber and rich habitats for a diverse range of wildlife, including bats, foxes, badgers, dormice, pine martens and more.

MSc and MRes courses

Our MSc courses and our MRes Sustainability and Adaptation all begin with a shared module, Introduction to Sustainability and Adaptation.

By bringing together students from all our MSc and MRes courses, from Sustainability and Behaviour Change, to Green Building, the first week sees a real cross-fertilisation of ideas, as students with different skillsets and backgrounds discuss what they have been learning.

Over the teaching week, students were introduced to sustainability and transformational adaptation concepts and theories ranging from systems thinking, behaviour change and climate policy to ecosystems, to land use and the built environment.

Highlights of the week included:

• A workshop assessing the durability of timber buildings on-site at CAT.
• An activity assessing the negative impacts of invasive plants such as Rhododendron ponticum on native flora and fauna.
• A walk in the hills above CAT to collect and analyse wind data.
• An activity assessing the negative impacts of invasive plants such as Rhododendron ponticum on native flora and fauna.
• Guest lecturer Susan Steed gave a talk on transformation and economics.
• A workshop exploring food systems from production, processing, distribution and consumption.
• A film screening of Plan Z – with some of the filmmakers joining us online for a Q&A.
• CAT graduates returned for a panel where they shared their experiences of studying with us, along with some of the incredible things they are doing now. One graduate who returned was Ruth Chapman, now Executive Managing Director of Dulas Limited, a company that originally started at CAT, which works on renewable energy and life-saving vaccine solar fridges.
• Meeting and talking to our new students and making new connections!
   

M.Arch in Sustainable Architecture (ARB Part 2)

A course with sustainability at its core, alongside academic learning, our M.Arch in Sustainable Architecture course provides students with the chance to develop practical building skills, gain experience using a range of sustainable building materials, and learn from our five decades of experimenting with sustainable design.

If you ever visit CAT during an architecture teaching week, you are sure to see a host of students doing something interesting, and the first week for our 2025 cohort was no exception. Students could be seen across the site sketching, touring the many examples of innovative and experimental sustainable buildings at CAT, or in various spots discussing their lectures and other practical workshops.

Highlights during the week have included: 

• A site visit to Bangor, North Wales, where students familiarised themselves with the location ahead of their community engagement project, which will take place in the city.
• A tour of CAT’s green buildings.
• Sketching workshops with architect Chris Loyn surveying CAT’s natural environment and sustainable buildings.
• A ‘Banquet of Books’ workshop, where lecturer and architect Zoe Quick explored reading as a form of commoning, and the sociality, materiality, and political ecologies of ‘reading for resilience.’ 
• Lectures exploring sustainability in the built environment from CAT staff, including a lecture from our Zero Carbon Britain Innovation Lab team.

Interested in studying at CAT?       

Visit us either in person or online for one of our upcoming postgraduate Open Days. Our Open Days will give you the chance to hear from CAT staff, students and graduates about what it’s actually like to study at CAT, with plenty of chances for questions.

Join a CAT teaching week as a Short Course

We’ve opened up a few spaces on some of our upcoming teaching weeks, which is great if you want to delve into a specific sustainability-related topic or get a real taste of what it’s like to study a postgraduate course at CAT.

• 6 to 10 October 2025 – Buildings for People
• 6 to 10 October 2025 – Ecological Assessment
• 1 to 5 December 2025 – Cities and Communities
• 1 to 5 December 2025 – Food Systems and Sustainability
• 8 to 12 December 2025 – Low and Zero Carbon Buildings

Visit our short course page to see more upcoming courses.

 

Marketing and Communications Officer, Myfi Fenwick, interviews current residential Gardens volunteer Georgia Davies.

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It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of our dear friend Sally Carr, CAT’s Chair of Trustees.

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