Universities and their students should be aware of their important role in addressing the problems around them and therefore should play an active role in transferring their knowledge by generating efficient solutions for society. This IP project has presented a specific problem to a multidisciplinary international group of students, giving them the opportunity to play an active role in finding a solution. In this case, the project has contributed to the evaluation of the forest biomass as a source of renewable energy in the rural areas and the assessment of this as a possible solution for the lack of economic opportunities in these areas.
The MAIN OBJECTIVE has been to familiarize the students with the use of the forest biomass for energy to promote new sustainable economic opportunities in rural areas. Also, to do so from a global point of view, that is, bringing together different disciplines and several actors related to this issue.
The SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES of the project have included:
- Implicate the university students in having an active role and proposing solutions to the real, current and local problems
- Involve students in tackling an actual challenge related to their specific discipline knowledge
- Promote student collaboration in different engineering fields (agriculture/energy/industry/environmental) to obtain an integral solution to a certain problem
- Stimulate a global point of view together with an engineering solution by taking into account several dimensions: social, economic, environmental, etc
- Bring students to the reality of the rural areas and the energy dependence
- Improve the student language skills and their mobility
- Create a base for future cooperation among the participants (universities, enterprises, local administration): bilateral agreements between universities, student internships in enterprises, student final year projects, identification of future European calls for a joint proposal, ideas for specific training courses, etc.