Positive Impacts
Universities and colleges have a critical role in creating a sustainable future through:
- education, which builds the society of tomorrow
- research, which develops and deploys solutions to the challenges which face us
- engagement and impact, which brings people and sectors together to create change.
Reducing negative impacts
Universities and colleges also have big environmental footprints and are working hard to address these.
Risks and Opportunities
Environmental and social challenges bring growing risks to institutions and the systems they operate in. At the same time, the journey to a sustainable future presents a range of opportunities for education institutions to play a leading and impactful role.
Our expert consultants can help you maximise your positive impacts for sustainability, reduce your environmental footprint, and respond effectively to the risks and opportunities around this fast-developing space.
SUMS Principal Consultant Dr Thomas Owen-Smith recently explored the benefits universities provide to society and individuals, and the costs of delivering them.
Universities create huge positive impacts, value and public goods through their role at the centre of knowledge production in the economy and society. But delivering these without negative impacts on our environment and finite resources remains elusive, and will be one of the fundamental challenges of the future. Approaches to understanding positive and negative impacts can help.
Benefits
Few other organisations can match the contributions that universities make through their education, research and ability to bring people together.
The UK HE sector and its regulatory sphere have sophisticated ways of reflecting some of this. Research impact is evaluated through the Research Excellence Framework for example, and the Knowledge Exchange Framework assesses the outcomes of a diverse set of activities through which universities engage with other sectors and the public.
Some institutions and mission groups have undertaken analyses of their economic impacts. But even these generally do not account for the value that accrues to society from the public goods created through universities’ educational activities; and the difference they make to human capital, social development, economic dynamism and strong institutions.
Nor do the regulators. In England, the value of university education is framed as essentially the monetary “premium” to individual graduates. Societal and non-monetary benefits (admittedly harder to measure) barely feature. It is perhaps little wonder that rankings are stepping in to fill this void.
Costs
Contemporary thinking about sustainable futures, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut” and others emphasise the dependencies between our economy, society and environment: over the long term, objectives in one sphere cannot be achieved without sufficient resilience in the others.
While universities’ social and economic benefits have been justly celebrated, the UK HE sector’s carbon emissions alone are comparable to a small country, and its full environmental footprint remains unmeasured.
Becoming environmentally sustainable will go beyond technical interventions. Improvements to infrastructure are essential, but to eliminate or even decisively reduce detrimental impacts on our climate and natural environment, quite fundamental changes to ways of doing business will be needed.
How we can help
Approaches that help organisations to think about such changes are developing fast, many of them outside the HE sector. They include:
- materiality assessment, which allows organisations to better understand their impacts through scanning key topics and engagement with their stakeholders
- impact and value models, which provide a codified framework for reflecting the impacts of organisations beyond their financials
- models for foresight and future modelling which appropriately reflect strategic sustainability risks, and shed light on how organisations’ own operations may exacerbate those
- approaches such as natural capital accounting and carbon pricing, which put a true value or cost on what were long treated as externalities.
Some of these are being spurred by regulation. Larger companies in the UK are now obliged to make disclosures in their statutory reporting around how they manage risks and opportunities related to climate. From 2025, large companies in the European Union will be expected to use a “double materiality” approach to report both sustainability impacts on their business and their own impacts on people and the environment.
Such approaches can be useful for universities too – supporting a confident narrative around the overall benefits they provide to society and individuals, a clearer view of the overall costs of achieving those benefits, and what needs to be done to address them.
We’re happy to discuss any of the topics and approaches explored here and what they could mean for you in more detail. Contact Tom Owen-Smith at t.owen-smith@sums.ac.uk for further information.
