This week the University of Sheffield launched its new Sustainability Strategy and Action Plan. The Strategy sets out ambitious commitments on climate change and emissions reduction, with target dates for carbon neutrality across all University activities. It is the Action Plan, though, which sets out the steps to be taken in the coming years to move towards these goals.
Dr Matt Watson, Senior Lecturer in the department, led a Task and Finish Group with other academics from across the University as well as professional services staff and students, which provided recommendations on driving University travel towards carbon neutrality. The University of Sheffield has an established record of changing staff and student commuting patterns, halving the proportion of staff commutes taken by car since the late 1990s. However, like most Universities, Sheffield has not taken any action on reducing emissions from the travel involved in work and study. The Task and Finish Group estimated total annual emissions from all the travel the University paid for in 2018-19 at more than double all the emissions from staff and student commuting that year.
Most of those emissions result from flying, and most emissions from flying result from long haul flights. Reducing air travel is not straightforward, as it is involved in all sorts of work done by the University. The group worked through the challenges and opportunities, resulting in recommendations on a range of subjects including: University executive level ownership of the agenda of changing travel; the reworking of policies and processes across the institution to reduce the need for travel; and ideas for helping with cultural change.
The way work at the University has adapted to the lack of travel during the pandemic has made it normal to replace all sorts of trips with different ways of working. It is inevitable that travel will increase again after the pandemic, but there are clear opportunities to stop it reaching the same levels and thereby reduce a key part of the University’s contributions to the climate crisis.
The group also made recommendations for continued progress in promoting active travel and reducing car commuting, and for decarbonising the University’s own fleet of vehicles. The actions that the University as committed to resulting from this can be checked on the Action Plan (labelled under Travel).
Commenting on Matt Watson's involvement in the Sustainability Action Plan, Professor Jenny Pickerill, head of the Department of Geography, said: "Environmental sustainability is central to geography as a discipline, and particularly to this department. We are proud to research, teach and put into practice the knowledge and skills necessary to help propel us towards a more sustainable future.”