Critical Reflection: Net Zero on Campus and the Need for Real Change

In hopes to build on the concepts raised in our Net Zero on Campus Guide, we share this reflection written by one of our colleagues. In the following post, Professor Richard Heller highlights a few key gaps in our recently published Guide. He describes how the Guide misses the high impact of international students, the large potential reductions in emissions from online education, and the need for accurate comprehensive standardized measures of emissions.

The Net Zero on Campus Guide is well intentioned and has many valuable suggestions. However, it allows universities to avoid real change or reform.

An international launch on April 20th of the guide and online toolkit had an international cast and the Guide is beautifully presented and very clear. The guiding principles are highly appropriate:

• Build institutional structure to support net zero commitments
• Address all emissions
• Target reaching net zero by or before 2050
• Demonstrate quick wins in decarbonization
• Assess long-term costs and benefits
• Monitor, evaluate and learn
• Use net zero to engage and build alliances

Although the Guide does talk about the need for interim and long-term targets and acknowledges that specific targets need to be set by individual universities, the actions underpinning these principles would be strengthened by a clear timetable by which sector-wide targets would be met. The Guide also avoids discussion of the need for deeper reform of the higher education sector.

There are three major missing items:

• First, there is no recognition of the fact that education is moving online and that the need for buildings and travel to them has to be reassessed. Estimates from the UK suggest that online education reduces the carbon footprint by more than 80%.
• Second, there is no mention of international students – a large proportion of university students in some countries are international and they have a heavy carbon footprint.
• Third, there is no requirement to make standardised and comprehensive GHG measurements, which could monitor change and allow comparisons across and within universities.

The Guide contains no mention of international students. There is also no mention of the need to measure their carbon footprint, or of the reductions that can come from moving to online education, let alone make real reform to deal with these issues.

There is no mention in the Guide of the need for a sector-wide standard assessment of emissions, so that comparisons can be made between universities. There is also no mention of assessing potential reductions that may result from change or reform, or the need to set innovations in the context of experiments with measurable outcomes.

The Guide does not make suggestions for reforms of the higher education sector as a whole that could have a large impact on emissions. In Reforming higher education to sustain planetary health, I have proposed a pivot to online learning through a 'distributed university.' Large centralised university campuses would be downsized and partly replaced by virtual or physical regional (or international) hubs. The sector has belatedly, through the experience of the COVID pandemic, come to appreciate the potential of online learning. However, the sector’s solution of a hybrid model allows for all buildings and travel to them (which together make a large contribution to the sector’s emissions) to remain.

International students create carbon emissions through travel, often with their families, and have a higher carbon footprint than had they stayed in their home countries. A recent study found a large reduction in carbon footprint by a small group of students mainly from Africa and India who studied online rather than going to the UK for their master’s degree. This was quite a complex research project, requiring identification of the cities from which the students would have travelled and the difference in per capita emissions of the countries involved. However, there were many assumptions – such as that the students only travelled once during their study time and their families did not accompany them - and a more complete assessment of the true impact of international students on carbon emissions is required. Many countries host large numbers of international students – around a third of all university students and one half of all master’s students in Australia are international – so this is a potentially very important contribution to the carbon emissions of the sector. What might be the impact of offering international students access to online education rather than bringing them to what is usually a higher emission country?

Without proper measurements of the carbon footprint of the university sector, it is difficult to consider what reform is really necessary or most likely to be effective. The Science-Based Targets initiative may be helpful if their guidance is widely adopted, among others. An estimate from the UK is that the higher education sector contributes 2.3% of the UK’s total carbon emissions, but it is unlikely that all emissions, such as the true impact of international students, have been included. When looking at estimates of the emissions of various sectors of the economy, many organisations and governments turn to reports from CDP. Education is listed under ‘other services’ and not usually reported separately.

The suggestions about major reform and international students will be difficult for universities to accept. Large campuses with impressive buildings confer status and have many apparent benefits. In countries such as Australia and the UK, the sector is dependent on the income from international students. However, my question is: Is the Guide designed to allow universities to make some change while protecting the status quo, or to achieve comprehensive reductions in carbon emissions and take a real leadership role for the rest of the community?

Future editions of the Guide should include the issues of online learning and international students and should include a recommendation for a university-wide assessment of the true carbon footprint. Activities of the sector and assessments of the impact of various change scenarios should be included in annual emission reports, leading to a published league table for monitoring and making comparisons between universities. In the interim, adding resources to the toolkit and sharing ideas through the community about these issues would be welcome.

Net Zero on Campus is a collaboration between SDSN, the Climateworks Centre, and Monash University, in partnership with Second Nature and the EAUC (Secretariat of the Race to Zero for Universities and Colleges).