I joined Cambridge's loftily named Environment Sustainability Strategy Committee this academic year, and have attended a couple of meetings with the latest one being held today. While a lot of what goes on is intricately tied into the University's rather special governance structure and the complexity of the College system, there has been significant progress on making all of this more visible more widely.
Some highlights from the progress as I read through them:
Carbon & Energy progress reports on two different ways of measuring our energy usage: market or location-based. The location-based emissions reporting is quite straightforward as it involves calculating the kWh of electricity used multiplied by the local grid emissions, therefore representing the mean emission resulting from energy generation within the local Cambridge area.[1] The market-based approach calculates the emissions resulting from the energy supplier that we contract which spreads out the emissions calculation based on the contracts the energy supplier has. The market-based approach has many of the complexities that we've grappled with in 4C for avoided emissions, but is useful for net-zero reporting of GHG emissions. While this is best summarised as being "bloody complicated", it's good to see the University reporting both calculations and letting the readers decide which (or both) calculations to use.
And finally, the use of the term "natural gas" turns out to be a surprisingly bad idea. Names do matter when it comes to public communication.
Transport & Travel progress is fantastic to go through, as I worked on this with Ian Leslie absolutely ages ago with a Databox-based commuting calculator! However, it's a little disappointing to see that there hasn't been much of a systematic change in the modes of transport used, and also that "work-from-home" is excluded from the figures here as that's an obvious way to reduce the emissions associated with travelling. It's also interesting to see that business flying has bounced back hard since the pandemic despite strict business travel guidelines that require us to use trains when possible.
Waste and Circular economy progress appears to be largely flatlined in the last couple of years with not much substantive progress but this is also tied to the amount of building work going on in the University and isn't a relative metric (i.e. more building projects will result in more waste, but the University does need to do this building for its operations).
Biodiversity progress is closest to my heart, but also the hardest to assess despite the comprehensive Biodiversity Action Plan from last year (not because anyone's doing a bad job, but biodiversity is just a really complicated metric!). There's a University-wide biodiversity manager now and a really well described set of action points here.
My suggestion during the meeting (and one I'll turn into a project idea soon) is that we should put spatial polygons of the progress described up as a layer over the University map so people can overlay these data points and get a sense of what's going on (and where we don't have data). Andres Zuñiga-Gonzalez has been steadily working with the Estates department on a side project regarding this as well!
Water progress shows some of the difficulty of long-term reporting in this space, as a quick glance seems to reveal that we're getting worse in terms of water consumption. However, our monitoring mechanisms were improved in recent years with smart meters, and so we're just getting more accurate. However, the rise in AI for research has meant that the demand for GPUs is causing our cooling needs to spike as well, with a corresponding increase in water usage.
So, lots to digest in here, and something I'm still piecing together in the context of the Cambridge Green Blue idea! The overall message seems clear that we need to continue to push harder for progress towards our net-zero goals to be far higher up the University's strategic plan than it currently is. That doesn't necessarily just involve spending more money, but bringing the juggernaut of research innovation around here to bear, as well as shifting landuse for renewable energy while preserving biodiversity and water according to the biodiversity action plan.
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