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“…environmental sustainability is not just right, it is also the financially viable, business-minded thing to do.” Leith Sharp, Director of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative
“Our vision is that, within the next 10 years, the Higher Education sector will be recognised as a major contributor to society´s efforts to achieve sustainability — through the skills and knowledge that its graduates learn and put into practice, and through its own strategies and operations” Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), 2005
Today many institutions in the UK still do not manage their environmental impacts effectively or take the threat of climate change seriously. The cost of inaction by the majority of institutions over the last decade has contributed to Britain´s continued failure to meet the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability.
People & Planet, along with the members of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, believes that if we are to avert the disastrous impacts of climate change the UK needs to ensure that greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are irreversibly declining by 2015. However, the picture today is still one of rising GHG emissions, diminishing biodiversity, poor recycling rates, unsustainable building construction and consumption patterns, as well as traffic gridlock. Although the Higher Education (HE) sector is not alone in contributing to these problems, it is not yet significantly contributing to the solutions.
Some leading universities and colleges are starting to wake up to the realities of climate change and the benefits of better environmental performance. After a sustained campaign by People & Planet and the far-sighted initiatives of several institutions and individuals, there are signs that the HE sector is on the verge of going green. From the initial five institutions who pioneered a model for achieving good environmental performance in the last decade, the last two years have seen over 25 universities adopting the same institutional measures and setting themselves on a trajectory to high environmental performance. Universities that are not making such significant inroads on improving their environmental performance really are getting left behind.
Against a background of scientific consensus on the reality of human-induced climate change, fast-rising energy prices, strengthening environmental legislation and increased public awareness of sustainability issues, the case for going green has never been stronger. New evidence emerges daily proving the business case for corporate environmental responsibility and its benefits for recruitment and retention.
In the coming months and years student calls for environmentally sustainable learning institutions will only grow louder and harder to ignore. High environmental performance is achievable by all institutions in the sector.
Our initial research (2003) identified four key institutional factors which drive forward significant and sustained improvement in environmental performance in leading green universities such as Oxford Brookes, Sheffield Hallam, Sheffield, Hertfordshire and Leeds Metropolitan.
People & Planet is calling on all universities to adopt these four factors:
- The active, public support of senior university management — (in particular the vice-chancellor or principal) for a programme of environmental performance improvement..
- Full-time staff dedicated to environmental management — developing objectives, setting priorities, and significant, time-bound targets to fulfil them.
- A comprehensive review to investigate all the environmental impacts of the institution — so that current impacts are measured, potential improvements are identified and performance is monitored.
- A written, publicly available environmental policy — to provide a formal demonstration of intent regarding environmental performance improvement, and against which to compare practice.
It is clear from our research that if an institution does not, as a minimum, adopt all four of the vital factors described here, it is unlikely to have significant success in achieving high environmental performance.
People & Planet’s `Go Green’ campaign will continue to encourage Britain´s HE sector to transform its environmental performance. We aim to applaud genuine progress and expose inaction, and will sustain this effort until good environmental performance is the norm, not the exception, in the sector.
