AUDE, the Association for University Directors of Estates, has launched a HE Sector Sustainability Evaluating Methodology – known colloquially as the Green Scorecard.
AUDE says that the intention of the scorecard is to "improve and promote sustainability, reflecting and demonstrating progress and improvement". The aim is that it will be ...
- Relevant to and focussing on sustainability in terms of the remit of estates and facilities
- Independent and apolitical
- Credible within and outside the sector
- Based on robust data that is simple to collate
- Useful as a tool for Estates Functions to prioritise efforts and benchmark against others
The scorecard set out eight sustainability categories:
- Energy & Emissions
- Transport
- Water
- Waste
- Adaptation
- Procurement
- Biodiversity & Landscape, and
- Overall
I've read the report setting all this out and could find no mention of learning. There is one mention of education as a procurement indicator: "Sustainable construction - education and environment" – although it's hard to see what this means. This deliberate omission is justified in this statement:
"It is the intention is for this methodology to only cover aspects controlled by the Estates function, with the intention that EAUC are to produce a complementary methodology. The scope of the methodoloy was explored in the consultation workshops. During the workshops, aspects such as the social impacts (including the living wage) and student engagement, although considered important, were rejected from being including in the scorecard as [they] were out of the scope of issues that could be influenced by Estates and would be more suited to the wider university policy issues."
Here we have AUDE's thinking set out clearly: those who work in Estates cannot have any influence on what happens in the rest of the university, especially on its core functions of teaching and research.
How, after the very many years of working on sustainability in higher education, has it come to this?
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