The University of Oxford

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

NEW WAYS OF WORKING SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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INTERVIEW: UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

NEW WAYS OF WORKING Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Harriet Waters, Head of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oxford, about net zero 2035, increasing biodiversity, and the future of sustainability after COVID-19.

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IMAGE CREDIT - MIHNEA DUMITRASCU RADCLIFFE CAMERA SURROUNDED BY STARS

By Beth Cope

The University of Oxford is one of the oldest universities in the world, with evidence of education taking place in the city since 1098. The University developed its first environmental policy 20 years ago and created the role of Head of Environmental Sustainability in 2009. From there, the university adopted a carbon management policy, setting aside £14 million to spend on carbon reduction projects and adopting its first carbon targets in 2011.

NET ZERO 2035 “When I first came into the post in 2013, I was given the challenge of expanding the team and accelerating the rate at which we’re lowering our carbon emissions”, says Harriet Waters, Head of Environmental Sustainability at The University of Oxford. “Using the work that we’ve already done, we can work out what we can actually achieve in the future and what savings would it allow. We’ve modelled how we might reduce carbon across the university estates with various projects. These include improving the fabric of our buildings, deep retrofits of our older buildings, a move to different fuels, increasing the use of renewables, as well as reducing our plug load by buying more efficient equipment”.

Based on these projections, Oxford University Council recently approved a new Environmental Sustainability Strategy with dual targets of net zero carbon and biodiversity net gain by 2035. “We’ve taken all of our data from previous projects and used it to model forward,” says Ms. Waters. “We’re confident that we will be able to achieve net zero carbon by 2035. As it’s net zero carbon, we’ll be offsetting at some point. In our proposal, we suggested we start offsetting in 2030, after focusing our efforts on reducing our emissions. There’s a great deal of SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MAGAZINE

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INTERVIEW: UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

discussion as to whether or not we should be investing in carbon capture and storage or using biological offsets.”

INCREASING BIODIVERSITY Like carbon reductions, enhancing biodiversity falls into different areas of complexity.

“Due to our planning conditions, it’s a common legal requirement to achieve biodiversity net gain on development projects,” says Ms. Waters. “However, we’re also committing to achieve a positive impact on biodiversity through our supply chain. This will require a real focus on our supply chain to understand our impacts on biodiversity internationally, and there is no doubt that it will require some offsetting in due time. There is much less data available on biodiversity impacts of goods and services, but it’s something that we hope to share with the rest of the world so that we can help other organisations make as bold a commitment. It’s simply not good enough to just focus on carbon.”

The University of Oxford has an ongoing campaign called True Planet, which focuses on championing research, innovation, and engagement in environmental sustainability research. “It brings together all of the different strands of environmental research that’s going on across the university,” says Ms. Waters. “There is a lot of cutting edge research work happening across the University. True Planet aims to make this valuable knowledge accessible to colleagues, policymakers, and the wider public.”

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COVID AND INNOVATION Since the COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion in home-working, the Environmental Sustainability team has been tracking the environmental impact on the university’s day-to-day operations. “We’ve made some observations since the first lockdown,” explains Ms. Waters. “We took an intensive look at some of our data. We’ve seen that the university has decreased its paper use by more than 90%, for example. We’ve also reduced our carbon emissions from flights, and minimized commuting which resulted in air quality improving vastly within Oxford during lockdown.”

The university has developed a framework for professional service staff to work both in-person and remotely, called

“WE’RE CONFIDENT THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO ACHIEVE NET ZERO CARBON BY 2035. AS IT’S NET ZERO CARBON, WE’LL BE OFFSETTING AT SOME POINT.”

New Ways of Working. “It’s a long-term, consultative project that enables the whole university community to discuss how they would like to work in the future, whether that is from the office, home, or a hybrid,” says Ms. Waters. “Within all the discussions for this project, we are highlighting the opportunities for sustainability improvements in these new ways of working.”

One possible future for the university involves far less commuting. “This will have an impact on emissions in general but also the air quality within Oxford in particular,” explains Ms. Waters. “We also want to keep up the habit of working digitally and minimizing our paper consumption, making sure that when people are back in the office, they review their sustainability impacts.

Times of change are a good opportunity to adopt more sustainable practices. The pandemic is something you’d never wish for, but we’ve learned that this is evidence that people can work from home, and that maybe we don’t need to travel as much as we were, we don’t need to use as much paper, and there are benefits from the changes

we’ve made. Rather than snapping back to the way life was prior to the pandemic, we should be learning from that. Within our new sustainability strategy, we’ve got a section called ‘Learnings from the Pandemic’ which enables the study of these changes and adoption of better practices for the future.” c

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