Responding to staff and student pressure, many UK universities have agreed to pursue an accelerated decarbonisation timetable, well ahead of the UK government’s overall 2050 target for net zero. Some argue that these university-level targets – which in some cases are less than six years away – are too ambitious to be achieved and university administrators should never have agreed to them. That’s wrong. Responding to staff and student expectations is something that universities should do more of, not less.
University of the Arts London (UAL), where I work as director of the Social Purpose Lab, set net-zero targets in 2019, seeking to achieve net-zero energy use on campus by 2030 (known as Scopes 1 and 2 in the jargon) and for all emissions we cause by 2040 (Scope 3).
Having made these commitments, we are having to face up to uncomfortable questions about what it will take to achieve such stretching goals. To hit our Scope 1 and 2 goals requires us to do considerable work on a multi-site campus with multiple buildings of variable heritage – a challenge shared by most universities. It is increasingly apparent that, when we made the initial commitment, we didn’t know enough about what it would take to achieve this goal.
What is the right way to respond?
As my colleague Polly Mackenzie and I argued in a recent essay for the UPP Foundation, “a university is a community, not a corporation”. A university draws its identity and purpose from the people who study and research within it rather than from the interests of distant shareholders or the vision of a chief executive. Confronting complexity and enabling productive debate is something universities naturally excel at. If a university community collectively decides on a target, it should collectively form agreement around the key choices involved in achieving it.
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To do so elevates the task from a purely operational one – how to replace old gas boilers and seal up leaky buildings – to one that confronts the intricate dilemmas that will be a feature of the decarbonisation agenda everywhere. If we are in a climate emergency, as many universities have declared, then many will argue that we should act with the urgent and extensive measures that such a situation calls for. Does that mean campuses should close for a time to allow refits, as they did in the Covid emergency? Should money be diverted from improving the student experience or pursuing impactful research towards upgrading lightbulbs and buying carbon offsets?
These trade-offs cannot be resolved by estates departments alone. Universities should face down the difficult decisions using their defining asset: the diverse and independent thinkers who form a university community.
That requires difficult discussions. Disagreement is inevitable, and not all of it will be productive. In some ways, we are well set up for this at UAL. As a university that promotes and celebrates the value of creativity, imaginative problem-solving comes naturally to many in our community. And many of our disciplines have tools to aid this thinking, such as the participatory decision-making approaches that are an important feature of modern design practice.
One of our tasks in the Social Purpose Lab is to help our community through these discussions. A perfect consensus will almost certainly be out of reach. A decision will still need to be made, and we have formal governance structures that enable that. But we believe the conversations that we expect to facilitate over the coming months and years will deepen our staff and students’ appreciation of the difficult decisions we face. Staying true to our own values while continuing to operate in a relentlessly carbon-intensive economy is a challenge we all need to overcome together.
My own hope is that the process of conducting such discussions, as well as the decisions that eventually get made, enable universities to model the wider debate that society needs to have as the climate crisis worsens over the coming decades. Universities’ pursuit of early targets will enable all the tricky trade-offs and difficult compromises that a just transition requires to play out in microcosm on campus. This will be a dress rehearsal for the same debates that are going to take place in the broader political arena, as entire societies attempt decarbonisation in the coming decades.
It is universities’ duty to show the way.
Nigel Ball is director of the Social Purpose Lab at the University of the Arts London.
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