This morning's blog comes from Steve Martin ...
The University and College Union (UCU) along with support from the National Union of Students held a one day conference last week (May 13th) at the University of Manchester, to look at the role that education can play in the delivery of a low carbon economy. This was a timely event given that on Friday April 21st, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in New York. Education, research and finance all form part of this agreement, hence the tertiary sectors of education should have a significant role to play in the delivery of a low carbon future. But did the Manchester event illuminate how this might take place in any credible and rigorous way?
The UCU set out a number of key questions which they believe the sector must address if it is going to make a decisive contribution to the transition to a new economy. These were:
- What do we mean by carbon literacy and are institutions doing enough for their staff, students and their local communities?
- How is the sector performing on climate research and how should it shape government and industrial policy?
- What role for institutions engaging with fossil fuel companies to shift their trajectory to a more sustainable footing?
- What are the policy priorities to ensure that the sector is aligned with the vision of a zero carbon economy?
All good questions, but the speakers from FE and HE; researchers and student representatives failed on many counts to address them. The biggest failure is the huge disconnect between the massive capital building programme the sector has put in place over the past decade and the concept of a low carbon economy. Whatever the best building standards are, like BREEM Excellence, the embodied carbon and the carbon emissions from all of these buildings will have significantly enhanced the sector's combined carbon footprint. And, I came away rather unclear whether we had any real idea of what “carbon literacy" means, conceptually, and in practice too.
The NUS want more disinvestment from fossil fuels by the sector (especially, stranded assets like coal and gas), but as we learned from a delegate from the University of Edinburgh, the issue becomes where to put the fossil fuel rich investment assets of universities – some of which are considerable, comprising many hundreds of millions of pounds – when there a few low carbon, high quality businesses in the world in which to invest. Not so easy then to meet the UN Principles of Sustainable Investment until there is a credible set of benchmark data on a company’s resource efficiency? It seems to me this is where university researchers and businesses might collaborate on some worthwhile research.
The Vice Chancellor of Aston University spoke eloquently about their approach to “scaling up" their climate change curriculum offer to their undergraduates. All 2,800 second year students are invited to attend a series of events at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham for 5 days, all of which are designed to inform, challenge and catalyse the students to take action on climate change. Last year only 1,400 attended, and by day 3 most of them failed to turn up. Maybe, they were conserving carbon? So, from attendance being a mere “requirement” in previous years, for this year the 5 days will now be part of a credit award for the student’s final degree classification, so that should sort that out! Or will it? We will see, but the VC is convinced this is the right approach to scaling up, and of course it by-passes all of those conservative academic silos too. This year’s event, which I hope to attend (without Credits), will also involve students from Birmingham City University. Brave and resilient leadership: but sad that there is so little of it to be seen elsewhere in the sector.
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Stephen Martin is an Honorary Professor at the University of Worcester, and a Visiting Professor in Learning for Sustainability at the University of the West of England. He is President of Change Agents UK, a WWF Fellow, and policy advisor to the UK National Commission for UNESCO. He can be contacted at: esmartin@talktalk.net
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