How to succeed as a green leader

How does a higher education institution drive sustainable change? We all want to be greener, cut emissions and foster environmentally friendly outlooks, but making this sort of change happen across an organisation can be tough as you need to integrate and coordinate activity across academic schools and professional service departments.

And we’re in a position to know. Our institution, the University of Bedfordshire, trailed the pack in 2009, coming 124th in the People & Planet University League, which measures the sustainability and climate awareness of universities. But in 15 years, we turned things around completely, and placed first for 2024-25. 

We believe our experience offers valuable lessons for other institutions looking to become more sustainable.

Invest in small, coordinated projects

Lesson number one is you don’t need large single investments. We didn’t have a big decarbonisation grant. It’s important to have estates investment managed carefully over years, and to invest in smaller projects in a coordinated way to deliver significant impacts. In this era of straitened university funding, you’re unlikely to land a large grant, anyway. 

Instead, what will make a difference is buy-in from senior leadership, a few highly focused long-term initiatives, a 24/7 approach to efficient management of facilities, and a good communications strategy. Institutions could also consider a few (and we mean a few) strategic hires.

Get input from across the university and community

Second, the institutional sustainability strategy needs input from a broad, inclusive cross-section of the university and local community. Our sustainability steering group included two members of the senior management team who were both motivated to see change through. We also included estates staff as well as academic staff, trade unions, our head of communications and an external member from the local council to ensure we were aware of public sector sustainability best practice. 

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Assembling the right team at the top and ensuring it meets regularly and has passion for the plan can result in a wider cascading effect where your staff start to take the initiative with their own sustainable ventures. This is what you want: you don’t need every idea to originate at the top, but you need the enthusiasm and drive from the senior team to percolate through your organisation. 

We saw a change in the way academics thought about travel and conferences as a result of our top team spearheading sustainability, even though no one on the steering group specifically pushed this change. Our Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment recently ran a major conference in Luton, for example, with attendees from all over the world (including East Asia) but hosted it almost entirely virtually to cut emissions. Only 80 delegates attended in person (mostly from the UK), but 3,000 people attended online. 

Find sustainability champions

Lesson three: permanent champions among staff and faculty can help push sustainability policy. Even with the best will in the world, the senior leadership can’t focus on it all the time. We appointed a new staff member to manage our sustainability and energy activities, draw together all the strands of the sustainability strategy and report to the steering group. In addition, our head of teaching evaluation and enhancement has led on engaging students with our environmental goals; the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are now embedded in our curricula and employability activities.

At estate and facility management level, small decisions can add up to substantial reductions across the whole university campus. Most universities should be able to get the data about energy and water usage from meter readings and dashboards, but having the data is one thing and acting on it is another. Week-by-week and day-by-day attention has an impact; incrementally, we got better at identifying waste and inefficiency. 

To make this kind of change happen, you need constant monitoring of energy, waste and water and a succession of small incremental actions that can produce significant improvements. These include buying the right lighting controls, light fittings and pipe insulation. We also invested in rainwater harvesting for flushing toilets. These weekly actions built up over time and led to a 63 per cent reduction in our carbon emissions over a decade. 

Spread the message

Communications also needs to be at the core of everything you do. Our head of communications was fully involved and sat on the sustainability steering group. The communications strategy aimed to cut carbon emissions and increase recycling rates by 12 per cent across all campuses. We kicked off the campaign with an exhibition featuring There’s Gonna Be a Storm, a tornado sculpture our arts and design students made out of plastic bottles to highlight the effects of climate change and pollution. 

Our key tactics included promoting our academic experts in sustainability in the media, running sustainability-themed activities for staff and students and generating excitement around our green achievements. We saw a big improvement in our recycling rates and water consumption, and our energy bills went down. 

Overall, we achieved what we did with vigorous direction from the top, by relying on a few champions, by close attention to efficiency in our estate management and by proactive communications. We think the approach is highly imitable.

We’re now thinking of the future and how we manage our estates over the next few decades. In a time of increasing financial pressure, everyone in the UK higher education sector should be thinking hard about this. Do you need all your buildings? Can you partner with external organisations to creatively share space and make economies on energy usage? What creative ways can you devise to cut energy use that do not need access to new funds and grants to set up? Good answers to these questions will set apart the next generation of green champions in the sector from the rest.

Andrew Church is pro vice-chancellor (research and innovation) and chair of the sustainability steering group, and Toby Maloy is director of estates and facilities, both at the University of Bedfordshire.