JISC

University and colleges are under pressure from a number of directions to make significant reductions in their environmental footprints. The Carbon Reduction Commitment will apply to many universities, and will focus minds at those institutions on the need to reduce their energy consumption.

In England HEFCE’s carbon management strategy ties future capital funding to progress in meeting challenging carbon reduction targets. These targets encompass scope 1 and 2 emissions at present, but there are indications that they will be extended to scope 3 emissions in due course. In Scotland the Scottish Government has indicated its commitment to improving Scotland’s natural and built environment by including Greener Scotland as one of its five strategic objectives and ministers have acknowledged the key role universities and colleges have to play in achieving this goal. Similar attention is being paid to the carbon agenda in Wales and Northern Ireland.

Institutions also face reputational and social responsibility pressures, with students and staff increasingly keen to study or work at institutions that are doing their best to be good environmental citizens.

To meet the targets they have been set, institutions will have to make significant changes. They will need to re-think the way that they teach, the way that students access resources, the way that staff work, and where that happens, the nature of their estates and their buildings, the nature of research and the need or wisdom of running what are at present seen as essential infrastructure services.

One of the aims of this strand of the Greening ICT Programme is to start the process of bringing environmental issues out of their “green ghetto” and into the mainstream of what institutions and JISC do. The Ecoversity programme at Bradford University successfully embedded sustainable development across the entire range of institutional activity and shows what can be achieved through the advocacy of a few visionaries, the leadership of senior managers and the unlocking of the enthusiasm, commitment and intelligence of staff and students all working towards a clear goal.

It is clear that the universities and colleges of the future will need to be very different from what they are today. At present they are mostly fashioned in what might be termed the factory model that derives from the industrial revolution – places where individuals come and perform whatever task is allotted to them.

The assumption has been that students, teachers, researchers and administrators need to be in situ to learn, teach, research or run the institution and that spaces are needed that are dedicated to one of these tasks. In order to significantly reduce their impact on the environment, institutions are going to need to examine these assumptions and start to re-imagine and re-engineer the way that they conduct themselves, deliver teaching and learning opportunities, do research and utilise their buildings.

The sustainable campus of the future will need to be a leaner, more efficient organisation. It is possible to see a future where universities and colleges are “dematerialised” with a reduction of physical tangible assets, in particular buildings. As they move to new modes of delivery they may become more enablers of the processes of education and research, without having to necessarily supply the resources to deliver those processes in the way that they do now.

Key to unlocking these sorts of changes will be tools that enable the open, personalised, always and anywhere available access to what the institution has to offer. This will require learning and research environments that allow self-paced learning or cross continental collaboration, access management and authentication systems, online resources for learners and researchers, tools for administrators that liberate them from the necessity of being at their desks, flexible spaces that can find a myriad of uses throughout the day and year, intelligent buildings that warm up and cool down as needed. Above all, these changes will need institutional leadership and governance that provides the guiding hand for such changes.

JISC has been active in many of these areas for a number of years. It has worked on e-Learning environments, support for research, access management, online resources and running through all of these, the network infrastructure that makes it all possible. JISC has also worked with others on the design and use of effective learning spaces where the emphasis is on flexibility and multi purpose spaces.

Projects funded under this strand of activity include:

Project	Details
Coventry University STudents’ Optimisation and Management of Energy Resources (CUSTOMER) Coventry University	The CUSTOMER (Coventry University STudents’ Optimisation and Management of Energy Resources) Project aims to identify and implement ways of reducing the carbon footprint across a range of student accommodation types both by making savings in energy usage directly relating to IT and other energy using devices and by using IT to inform students of energy usage within their living accommodation. We will develop and trial a range of interventions that lead to a reduced carbon footprint in student accommodation and, in so doing, provide good practice guidance for the sector as a whole.
Greening Events II University of Bristol	There are two main strands of work proposed in the Greening Events II project: 1. An Academic Event Profiler tool to allow the University of Bristol (and other universities) to systemically profile their event and travel footprints (including financial costs, Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and other negative sustainability impacts) in order to provide a baseline on which to measure any subsequent reductions. 2. An Events Planning Toolkit to help event organisers think through what type of event they need to hold (physical, virtual or hybrid) and then to provide assistance in the form of guidelines and technology tools with each stage in the process to enable them to reduce the negative sustainability impacts of their event.
Re-engineering procurement; reducing CO2 and enabling sustainability (Proco2) De Montfort University	The aim of PROCO2 is to re-engineer procurement and re-imagine the University thereby reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Specifically we aim to develop an ICT based decision-making tool enabling De Montfort University (and thereafter other HEIs) to reduce emissions from Scope 3 emissions, notably procurement. The project will involve a review of the impact of Scope 3 emission, procurement best practice in the HEI sector, the design and construction and testing of an ICT tool to enable improved decision making around the environmental impact of suppliers, goods and services, and finally, to understand the organizational learning and change management issues surrounding such a change.
Sustainable Tools for the Environmental Appraisal of the Carbon Impacts of HE Teaching Models Using ICTs (SusTEACH) The Open University	he SusTEACH project will examine the transformative impact of ICTs on HE teaching models and assess their environmental and life-time impacts. Significant changes in the use of ICT have led to new methods in teaching, blending conventional and ICT-based educational models. The SusTEACH project responds to a scarcity of research on their environmental impacts. This project will establish a typology of HE teaching models using ICTs, assess their environmental impacts and extrapolate analyses to the institutional level. The project will develop an innovative environmental impact appraisal toolkit that can be used by HEI at early development stages to help reduce impacts when new courses and programmes are being designed and approved, and contribute towards achieving HEI sustainability targets.
Responsibility for Energy Costs RECSO) - Phases I & II University of Gloucestershire & Forum for the Future	RECSO Phase I carried out a initial study that explored the landscape of issues around the question of who is responsible for the costs of ICT energy with institutions. The Phase I report recommended that three financial mechanisms for controlling energy costs were further explored. These are: Devolved Budgeting/Shared Savings Whole life costing Sub-metering These mechanisms are now being explored in the Phase II of the RECSO project through work with institutions, workshops and creation of networks of interested parties.