Executive summary
Introduction and who this work is aimed at
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Executive Summary >> Part One >> Part Two >> Part Three >> Part Four >> Glossary >> References
This work maps the UK higher education sector’s lands for the first time.
It explores a set of strategic questions for individual institutions and the sector over four key themes:
Each of these stands as one part of this report.
The publication also includes a set of cross-UK datasets and maps which allow users to explore key data for individual institutions and for the UK HE sector.
Where possible, we have also sought examples of real-life cases showing how institutions across the sector are already approaching these questions, and referred to existing sector resources or wider research.
The audience for this work may be varied. We expect that anyone who is involved in running or making decisions around university estates may find our material interesting – including estates, sustainability, finance and risk professionals, strategic planners, and university leaders.
The report is also relevant for stakeholders working at HE sector level, as well as policymakers and researchers; and we hope that other readers inside and outside HE will find our work interesting as a coherent sector analysis bringing together disparate datasets for new visualisations and perspectives.
This analysis, being at a high level, cannot offer granular information about specific sites. What it can do is provide a starting point for thinking about how universities – and the sector – use their land.
In the current challenging context for the UK’s universities, this offers both a reminder of some critical dimensions for securing institutions’ future resilience; and an exciting view into the option space for doing things differently and real opportunities that this could bring.
As ever, if there are any points that spark your interest or that you would like to discuss in more detail, feel free to get in touch!
Dr Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant, SUMS Consulting
William Phillips, Insight Analyst, SUMS Consulting
December 2025
Mapping the UK HE sector’s lands
The way that we use land is a critical part of securing a sustainable future for the planet.
Land use is coming under increasing focus globally as a key driver of climate change and degradation of the nature[1]. It can also be a solution to reversing these[2].
In the UK, how we use our land is a national question that cuts across a range of issues including economic development, food security and a healthy environment for people and nature, amongst many others. As such, it has been the subject of policy focus and long-term planning around securing a healthy natural environment[3].
The UK’s higher education institutions constitute a major sector in the UK economy. Universities generated directly £43.9 billion in income in 2022/23, equating to around 1.7% of UK gross domestic product (GDP). In the same year, nearly 3 million students were studying at UK institutions, which also employed near 400,000 staff.
The HE sector also covers a lot of space. Our mapping of UK universities’ core estates alone covers a total area of 6,390.1 hectares (ha)[4]. While this only constitutes 0.026% of the UK’s land surface, it equates to a town the size of Guildford, Chesterfield or Stirling.
In this work, we have used public and open-source datasets and methods to map the UK higher education sector (specifically, institutions’ core estates) for the first time.
Overlaying the boundaries that we were able to delineate for 174 institutions[5] on top of geospatial datasets has allowed us to ask questions and explore perspectives about universities’ estates and how they use them which would not be possible without geospatial data.
By doing this, we aim to inspire new ways of thinking about universities’ lands and locations, the risks and opportunities they present, and how these fit into their wider strategic context.
At the time of writing, many of the UK’s universities are facing significant financial challenges, which understandably focus minds on the here and now.
While proximate concerns remain critical for many institutions, securing future resilience is also a long-term game. Risks around institutions’ exposure to climate and environmental hazards grow apace with the ongoing disruption of the earth’s climate and natural systems. These risks, despite having a slow onset, are material and will require ongoing management.
At the same time, the HE sector is looking for innovative approaches to rebalance its profile of income and costs. Again, the sector’s land assets warrant consideration.
Not only might they offer the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds on energy costs through harnessing the sun and wind on university sites, but they might also offer opportunities to play a role in the regional and local systems that will play an important role in the UK’s energy transition.
With institutions’ place and their role in regional development firmly on the agenda in key policy documents such as the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy[6] and the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper[7], conversations around universities’ position in regional ecosystems, partnerships and planning can be expected to remain and most likely grow in prominence.
Local and regional connectivity through infrastructure – and its associated opportunities for education, skills and jobs, as well as applied research, industry partnership and knowledge exchange – also offer means for institutions to nourish relationships with their local communities, with positive impacts on public opinion and consent around universities’ legitimacy and the public goods they bring to society.
By and large, universities cannot change their locations easily. In most cases, their identity and mission are bound up with their location, and the benefits and drawbacks of their site are part and parcel of that.
While sites do bring constraints, institutions also have options around how they use their land, which can support their own resilience and finances while making substantive contributions to environmental sustainability (including climate, nature and natural resources), placemaking, learning[8], healthy spaces and economic opportunities for their communities and wider regions.
This work offers insights on things that institutions can’t change (their location – largely through the risk lens) as well as things that – in many cases – they can (their approaches to land use and management – explored in the discussions on opportunities and value).
The scope of this work is on a national canvas. This entails that the analysis and conclusions generally cannot take into account all the specific factors around each site. Due to time and space constraints, it has also not been possible to cover in detail all of the questions and benefits that we touch on in this introduction.
The following section sets out which topics are covered in detail and which would provide valuable questions for further work.
But we hope the insights of this work can help individual institutions which may not yet have engaged with these questions to understand their initial option space, opening the track to more detailed investigation; and support the HE sector and policymakers to have more informed conversations about what these options may mean for decisions and guidance at the aggregate or whole-sector level.
There are so many ways in which universities’ land and place offer strategic value, some of which we have touched on in the introduction. We also mentioned the fact that institutions’ locations can bring specific risks.
While we would love to explore all of these questions in the full detail they deserve, the focus of this work has been guided by some initial questions and hypotheses which we aimed to answer using innovative approaches to data analysis.
So specifically, our work has been guided by:
- Availability of geospatial data to support our analysis
- Our initial hypotheses around which topics were most material for universities in terms of risks, opportunities and value
- Feasibility and time for analysis.
What we set out in the report is our findings around the following questions:
- How do universities use land on their core estates?
- What do risks related to land and location look like for individual institutions and at the aggregate or whole-sector level?
- What do opportunities related to land and location look like for individual institutions and at aggregate or whole-sector level?
- What kind of value does the natural capital of higher education’s lands hold?
We have explored these questions through a group of 12 datasets, through which we have mapped the UK HE estate. These datasets are set out below.
Questions that we have not been able to map in this work – largely due to unavailability of data and time/space constraints – include:
- Land use including farmland and other ancillary lands which lie outside institutions’ core estates; or in other words those parts of the “total site area” which are outside the “total grounds area” as defined in the HESA Estates Management Record, a (voluntary) sector-level dataset on HE estates.
- Other landholdings of autonomous or semi-autonomous entities such as colleges of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
- The (substantial) impacts on land use change related to UK universities’ supply chains, many of which are outside of the UK.
- Green infrastructure and urban nature-based solutions for buildings and other parts of universities’ built environment.
- Questions around improvement of the condition of existing ecosystems and land use (although we do consider opportunities around changes to land use).
- The role of land use in adaptation to climate change and climate-related risks (although we do explore in detail the risks themselves and the role of land use in climate change mitigation, and offer pointers towards planning for adaptation).
- The social value of universities’ land use for human health, wellbeing and culture.
- Questions of university infrastructure’s role in regional connectivity and economic ecosystems.
As mentioned, we hope that these questions can be explored in the detail they deserve through future work.
Through geospatial mapping of the datasets set out in the previous section, we explored our research questions for each theme with reference to individual institutions and the whole sector.
This section notes the topics covered in each part of the work together with the key takeaways, and what institutions and the higher education sector can do with these insights.
The online tool which we developed to accompany this report allows users to explore these topics for individual institutions and at sector level.
While our discussion is mostly at sector level, the detailed data in the online mapping tool and examples that we have compiled through sector research offer an institution-level view. We hope that these offer food for thought for institutions, the HE sector and policymakers around the current picture, as well as the broad parameters of the risk and opportunity landscapes.
Overall, this work aims to explore different approaches for action on intractable challenges and seed new ways of thinking which colleagues could take, explore and develop further. If information assembled here provides the initial spark for actions such as a feasibility study of a site’s suitability for wind generation, a detailed vulnerabilities assessment of flood risks under different climate scenarios, or an initial estimate of the value of an estate’s natural capital, we will be happy that we have done our job.
There is much further work to be done. The sector is still in early stages of understanding the risks it faces from climate and environmental change. And is even earlier in understanding the opportunities that land and nature offer for building resilience against these risks, mitigating climate change and nature loss, and supporting new income streams and economic development in a sustainable future economy.
We have mapped a total of 6,390.1 hectares (ha) of the UK HE sector’s estate, from 174 institutions.
Although this area does not include farmlands or other ancillary lands held by universities in their total site area (which roughly cover an additional 6,000 ha), it does equate to around 80% of the aggregate total grounds area reported in the Estates Management Record[12].
State of the sector’s land
Of this mapped area, 3,796.8 ha (nearly 60%) is built environment (buildings or artificial other surfaces), 1,893.6 ha (around 30%) is grass, 646.4 ha (around 10%) is covered by trees and 52.8 ha (a little less than 1%) is water and waterlogged land.
Risks
197.5 ha (or 3.2% of mapped lands) are at high or medium risk from flooding, of which 92.1 ha (or 1.4%) is built environment for which we assume the risk of damage to be highest; 4,102.1 ha (or 64.2%) are at high or medium risk of extreme heat stress, of which 2,898.6 ha (or 45.4%) is built environment.
These risks will be exacerbated by the changing climate, and may cause hundreds of millions of pounds of loss and damage to universities’ infrastructure each year (estimated at a potential £166.8m annually, based on moderate estimates for future loss and damage), as extreme weather becomes more frequent.
Such impacts would come together with disruption to critical business and the associated costs, risks to the safety of students and staff, and rising insurance costs with growing challenges around insurability in the most exposed cases.
Opportunities
Through their estates, universities have a range of opportunities available that could both make positive contributions to environmental sustainability and support their own resilience.
In this report, we focus on a few of these: the potential of university estates’ land for solar and wind energy generation, and afforestation[13]. The potential of these opportunities varies across the country according to latitude, topography, aspect and a range of local conditions and constraints.
17 institutions (covering around 10% of mapped land) are situated in locations which are highly suitable for wind energy (with a mean yearly wind power potential of 150 watts per square metre, w/m2 across their estate); while 16 institutions (covering 9% of mapped land) have sites with high solar potential (above 1050 kilowatt-hours per kilowatt-peak, kWh/kWp per year across their estate).
If 10% of universities’ built land was equipped with solar energy installations, this could generate an estimated 208,826 megawatt-hours (mWh)[14] per year. This would equate to around 2.9% of the sector’s total energy usage in 2022/23 (as reported by 135 institutions in the Estates Management Record); and based on current commercial unit rates for energy could achieve an annual saving of around £42 million on energy bills.
It would also abate in the region of 47,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) annually, representing around 3.3% of the sector’s reported scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2022/23.
If 10% of universities’ grassland was used for solar power generation, this could generate an estimated 189,360 mWh per year, achieving energy savings, financial savings and abatement of carbon emissions of a similar, slightly smaller magnitude than the estimates just above for built land.
If the same percentage was used for wind generation, this could generate an estimated 19,920 mWh per year – which would achieve energy-saving, financial and carbon abatement benefits of roughly 10% the size of those set out for solar opportunities.
These calculations are based on sector-wide averages of solar and wind potential; in reality, specifics vary substantially according to location.
If 10% of universities’ grasslands were put to forests, this could sequester an estimated 570.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year of greenhouse gases over a 40-year period. Although the potential carbon impacts would be smaller than those around renewable energy, this would increase the existing annual carbon sequestration of the university sector’s estate (3,161.5 tCO2e per year) by around 18% as well as making positive impacts on nature and biodiversity. Again, feasibility for afforestation is highly dependent on local conditions and constraints.
Value
We estimate the asset value of ecosystem services[15] provided by UK institutions’ lands at £248.5m. Of this, £147.4m (59.3%) is provided by built environment, £54.9m (22.1%) is provided by grass, £43.3m (17.5%) is provided by trees and £2.9m (1.2%) is provided by water.
Our calculations for the value of UK universities’ natural capital are based on a value transfer approach, which extrapolates generalised national-level data from the UK Natural Capital Accounts to a local area based on the assumed ecosystem services supplied by one unit of land (typically hectares).
While this approach was the only one feasible with the available data, it does not account well for the specifics of individual sites and their use; and it is likely that it underestimates the natural capital value of the lands examined in this work.
Recommendations to institutions:
- Higher education institutions can use this report and the mapping tool to explore their land use. This may serve as a starting point for more detailed site-specific investigations, informing approaches including risk, estates management, sustainability, capital and strategic planning. Sector resources to support this work are introduced through the report.
- Thinking around universities’ estates and land use should be embedded in their place and connections with their wider locality in holistic terms, including linkages to regional development, innovation, skills, health and wellbeing. To this end, stakeholders including government, strategic authorities, infrastructure providers and communities should be brought together as partners.
Recommendations to UK higher education sector-level organisations and stakeholders:
- Sector stakeholders can use this report and the mapping tool to explore land use at the aggregate level. This should inform sector-level conversations around risk and resilience, commitments towards achieving environmental sustainability, regional development as set out above, and evaluation of impacts, building on the agenda set out in Chapter 8 of Universities UK’s Blueprint for change from the UK’s universities[16].
- The sector should further explore approaches around universities’ access to financial support and investment for sustainability, resilience and adaptation. This could take forms such as exploring the scope for collective insurance models, or supporting capabilities for more institutions to access instruments such as green bonds, sustainability bonds and sustainability-linked bonds.
Recommendations to policymakers:
- Policymakers should set expectations for the higher education sector in the most critical questions around sustainability; for example, extending existing requirements for reporting on a strategic approach to managing climate-related risks and opportunities (as currently set out for private entities in the Companies (Strategic Report) (Climate-related Financial Disclosure) Regulations 2022[17]) to higher education institutions; and aligning reporting expectations of HEIs with those of the private sector around general UK Sustainability Reporting Standards[18] as they continue to develop.
- Policymakers should consider establishing an equivalent to the Salix Finance scheme[19] (which supports public institutions with decarbonisation) to support climate adaptation and resilience.
Find out more about SUMS Consulting
SUMS is a membership, not-for-profit organisation and registered charity, owned by our member universities.
Our sector-leading consultancy services for universities and the higher education sector cover many of the topics addressed in this report, including all areas of sustainability as well as risk, estates, local and regional partnership, strategy, planning and delivering change.
If you would like to discuss any of the topics explored in this report, hear more about impactful work we have done for institutions across the HE sector, or if you are looking for a partner to help you meet your organisation’s challenges and identify opportunities to thrive, please get in touch.
Potential steps include:
- Free of charge: A facilitated follow-up (a 60-minute virtual call with PVC/COO or their delegate) to explore specific questions as relevant to your institution and how you could respond, based on SUMS knowledge and insight.
- From membership days or our standard day-rate: A half-day or 1-day workshop directed at senior executives to explore the topics in more detail and develop a forward agenda. This can either be standalone or can build on earlier SUMS support, providing an opportunity for deeper discussion informed by additional data now available.
Our sustainability consulting services are delivered in partnership with EAUC, the sustainability champion for universities and colleges in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following people, who kindly lent their time to discuss topics explored in this report, share insights from their organisations or provide comments on the draft:
- Benjamin Michel
- Catherine Forbes
- Charlotte Bonner
- Christopher Merchant
- Dan Fernbank
- Donna Lyndsay
- Emily Stott
- Fiona Goodwin
- Jane Harrison-White
- Joe Bull
- Julie Tam
- Kirsti Norris
- Nick Hillman
- Pippa Wisbey
- Richard Peers
- Rich Stockdale
- Sasha Barnes
- Stephanie Harris
- Simon Crichton
The UK Natural Capital Team at the Office for National Statistics also kindly provided guidance around the UK Natural Capital Accounts data.
Notes and references
[1] See for example International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2019. Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
[2] United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). 2022. The Global Land Outlook, second edition; Roe, S. et al. 2019. Contribution of the land sector to a 1.5 °C world. Nature Climate Change 9, 817–828.
[3] See HM Government. 2018. A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment; Committee on Climate Change. 2019. Land use: Policies for a Net Zero UK.
[4] This does not cover the full extent of the HE estate due to limitations of the data available for this piece. The 2023 HESA Estates Management Record reports a total of 7,293 ha total grounds area for 135 reporting institutions and a larger total site area outside the non-core estate. Further discussion of this gap is included in Part One.
[5] The list of institutions was determined by those which had data available through Open Street Map, our main reference point. They represent a mix of more traditional institutions reporting to HESA as well as some alternative providers. This list does not constitute the whole sector (or all of its known lands). But we believe the coverage is sufficient to allow for grounded discussion of sector patterns. The full list of mapped institutions is provided in the mapping tool that accompanies this report.
[6] See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy.
[7] See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/post-16-education-and-skills-white-paper.
[8] See for example the Department for Education’s plans for National Education Nature Park: https://www.educationnaturepark.org.uk/.
[9] See https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/estates.
[10] This dataset only covers Great Britain, therefore our sector-level calculations around the proportion of land exposed to flood risk do not include Northern Ireland.
[11] WWF. https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/terrestrial-ecoregions-of-the-world.
[12] Definitions of “total grounds area” and “total site area” are provided in the HESA Estates Management Record.
[13] Other opportunities such as “urban” nature-based solutions in the built environment, improving the quality of existing land use, or nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation also have a role to play, but are not our focus here – largely due to time and space constraints.
[14] Technical measures used in the report are defined in the Glossary.
[15] Including renewable electricity provisioning, water provisioning, air pollution regulating, greenhouse gas regulating, noise regulating, and recreation (health benefits).
[16] See Universities UK. 2024. Opportunity, growth and partnership: A blueprint for change from the UK’s universities.
[17] See Companies (Strategic Report) (Climate-related Financial Disclosure) Regulations 2022. Available at the link: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/31/regulation/1/made.
[18] See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-sustainability-reporting-standards.
[19] See https://www.salixfinance.co.uk/.
