Drivers and barriers to reporting on and implementing sustainability within UK Higher Education institutes

The following is an Executive Summary of my MBa Project I recently completed at Aston University. Please get in touch if you would like to know more about my findings.

Introduction

The idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR), business ethics and sustainability share many similarities and are frequently used interchangeably, in some cases assumed to mean same due to the similarities that they all have to each other. The term corporate social responsibility (CSR) is defined as when corporations voluntarily make an obligation to integral groups in society other than shareholders that goes beyond legal or union compliance (Jones, 1980). Today, this definition is extended to indicate that organisations are seeking acceptance from society of their legitimacy in return for this additional investment (Maon, Lindgreen and Swaen, 2009). On this basis, CSR can include environmental, political, social and ethical origins. Whereas business ethics is more specialised and focused on not doing wrong within our societal boundaries (Crane, Matten, Glozer and Spence, 2019, pp. 4). CSR is widely thought as something that the private sector initiate and is lacking at organisational level of Universities, except the possibility of having it within academic courses (Mehta, 2011).

The concept of sustainability or sustainable development has transformed significantly post World War II to become an ambiguous terminology that many organisations have come to use to indicate their ethical values and advertise how they go beyond profit to benefit society to their external stakeholders. In 1987, the Brutland Report (Brutland Commission, 1987, page 41) defined sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ However, for an organisation to invest in sustainable practices that does not have a benefit to their profitability goes against basic business strategy. There are concerns businesses are using sustainable development for short term internal benefits rather than supporting external community’s long term.

Sustainability has become focus in Universities internationally and especially within the UK. Higher Education institutions (HEIs) are dedicated to increasing the knowledge, skills and awareness of future professionals through education and research, which in doing so had led them to become pioneers in engaging with sustainable development (Lozano, 2018).?

The Adoption of the Paris Agreement (2015) was a global response to combat climate change. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) parties reached an agreement with the central aim to keep a global temperature rise this century of 2oC Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In 2019, the United Kingdom (UK) became the first global economy to set a target of bringing all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The Committee on Climate Change (2019) emphasised that meeting such targets was only achievable with known technologies, changes in people’s lives, and most importantly, stable and well-designed policies to reduce emissions.?

Project Objectives

The project goal will be addressed by the following objectives:

• Explore potential barriers that sustainability leaders face within identified HE organisations;
• To analyse any voluntary targets and objectives that an organisation would include within their sustainability strategies and investigate possible risks posed by those additional objectives; and
• Explore internal and external drivers for adopt sustainability targets (e.g., carbon reduction league tables, student expectations).

Methodology

A question framework was generated consisting of 46 questions in order to ascertain the current views within institutions of the themes analysed in the literature review. Interviews included questions based around the research aim of (1) understanding the pressures and drivers for reporting sustainability efforts; and (2) the barriers to integrating sustainability programmes into the institute. A standardised open-ended interview structure was chosen, where participants were asked the identical questions.

In total, ten sustainability leaders responded to the e-mail through the EAUC network to volunteer to be interviewed, each from different UK Universities. This helped having a random selection of HEI’s instead of asking well known colleagues at other Universities to support this research, which may have had to happen if a sufficient number of sustainable leaders had come forward. This represents 7.3% of the EAUC Higher Education membership. Universities were referred to as an alphabetic letter A - J to keep them anonymised.

Results and Discussion?

Quantitative data

The main data set, which documents factors that could be interpreted as either a barrier or benefit to implementing institutional change, was the number of leaders that comprise of the ‘sustainability’ team.?A larger team was perceived to be more helpful for management and project teams, with project teams being optimal with an average of seven members (Stewart, 2006). A larger team is also shown to have more chance of obtaining critical resources such as time, energy, money and expertise (Kozlowski and Bell, 2003). The average team membership of the ten respondents was 6.0 FTE staff or 3.9 if University D’s team is exclude due to its unusually high membership. This data implies that University D, with 25 sustainability leaders, sustainability efforts are significantly supported by the institute.

Defining Sustainability

Modern definitions of sustainability, also known as sustainable development, possess three elements – economic, social and environmental aspect, or the “triple bottom line” (Elkington, 1997). Weisser (2017) reviewed how U.S. Universities define the term sustainability, using the concept of the ‘three pillars of sustainability’ or ‘triple bottom line’. Smith and Sharicz (2011) argues that any organisation that lacks a definition of a “better place to aim” will create an organisation with ambiguous guiding principles and future business endeavours lacking cohesiveness.

Frece (2018) shows that there are gaps or flaws in many organisations’ definitions of corporate sustainability and the paper advises organisations should not solely use the Brundtland Commission definition of sustainable development, but rather a value-based institutionally-derived definition based on guiding principles and definitive activities.?For the seven Universities not having a published definition for sustainability or sustainable development, this could be an underlying barrier when looking to implement change within the organisation.

Organisational Structure

Two Universities where the ‘sustainability team’ was in a Dedicated Department showed that the senior manager within this team also sat on various other University committees or groups in order to integrate sustainability throughout the organisation. Whereas six of the other ‘sustainability teams’ that were estates team, did not have this privilege of being on other committees and relied on directors of estates to raise sustainability on other committee agendas.?With four respondents indicating that Estates colleagues were key staff who resisted change, it was unlikely that Director of Estates would fulfil this requirement fully. To improve this barrier to change, one recommendation is that sustainability teams should be moved out of Estates into their own dedicated department, but with senior leadership that sits on a number of other senior level committees throughout the institution.

The use of sustainability reports

Universities experience other outside pressures in formulating and reporting sustainability efforts; e.g., from their external stakeholders that they collaborate with (i.e., companies facilitating research activities) or simply the wider community that they endeavour to support as part of corporate responsibility. The expectations (perceived or real) of such beneficiaries may have an impact on a University’s reporting process as well as their sustainability targets.

Sassen, Dienes and Wedemeier (2018) analyses all Universities in the UK and found that only 17% (by July 2014) had a dedicated, publically available, report on sustainability. Out of the ten respondents surveyed by this study, 80% produced a dedicated annual report and had been doing so for many years. This does not support Sassen, Dienes and Wedemeier (2018) study of 17%. However, their study reviewed up to 2014, so is already six years out of date and had a larger data set to analysis.

Some of the reasons that respondents said a sustainability report is produced is to: educate stakeholders, benchmark progress, and showcase external engagement, all of which meets a majority of the four points above. However, none of the respondents in this study indicated that their University was not developing joint projects with other Universities that are sustainable experts. One barrier mentioned was there were internal departments within an institution or between institutions that were (for whatever reason) isolated and self-serving, creating a barrier to implement change.

One could interpret the results collected here to show that there are barriers between Universities stopping them from supporting each other in tackling the wider issue of climate change. This is supported by Lozano et. al., (2013) who argued Universities still remain traditional when implementing sustainable development within the community. Perhaps there is still too much focus on a HEIs own intellectual property through research preventing collaboration.

Key stakeholders

An institute’s complex change process itself has a great impact on how sustainability programmes are included in its business strategy. Hoover and Harder (2015) identifies nine themes, described as ‘human factors’ that lead to reoccurring barriers undermining institutional change. Hoover and Harder (2015) shows that sustainability initiatives typically required multi-level interactions within universities that lead to cultural, structural and behavioural contradictions. These contradictions could then lead to a number of debilitating issues such as lack of engagement, commitment, and clarity in roles and responsibilities.

Leal Filho et. al. (2019a) surveys of individuals from a broad range of academic and professional staff working within UK HEIs, asking them about the challenges of integrating sustainability into their institutes. One of the questions respondents had to answer was “In relation to your sustainability initiatives, please tick (1) who you think should be involved and (2) who is involved.” The results are shown in Figure 1 below, which show that sustainability efforts should involve the majority of all staff and ?students within a University (in particular the Vice Chancellor), but in reality involvement resided in a select few.

Figure 1. Sustainability Initiatives: Scope of Involvement (Leal Filho et. al.; 2019b)

However, the findings from the sustainability leaders interviewed here in this study do not support the study by Leal Filho et. al. (2019b). When respondents for this study were asked if key stakeholders were included in the decision making process when looking to implement sustainability initiatives, the 7 out of 10 stated the University had recently developed senior level stakeholder committees that included staff from a wide range of departments within the University.

All respondents emphasized that if a stakeholder was not on a particular committee, but were affected by a specific initiative, then that missing stakeholder should be part of the consultation process. This belief also included external organisations such as councils or charitable groups, if the impact was wider than the organisation. On this basis, results from the study here differ from those of Leal Filho et. al. (2019b) most likely due to the interviews in this study being conducted after local council and Students’ Unions committing to a ‘climate crises in 2019.

Barriers to integrating sustainability

Through a series of interviews and surveys of University staff in Australia, Evans, Whitehouse and Gooch (2012) found there to be six major themes impeding sustainability initiative; including the lack in funding/ finance to support initiatives and the lack of understanding environmental/ sustainability solutions. In reviewing different case studies of the barriers around integrating sustainability within global HEI, Leal Filho et. al. (2018) summarised that the key obstacles were in a lack of specific budgets, poor and erratic government funding, and lack of trained staff and knowledge.

Leal Filho et. al. (2019a) interviews senior leaders within HEIs to determine which actions are required to overcome sustainability leadership challenges. First, financial support and planning was an area that participants in Leal Filho et. al. (2019a) study identified as a challenge. Respondents suggested to overcome this challenge would require more financial support; steady funding commitments, and continuous investments in staff, students and the University community. Second, the lack in training in sustainability issues was also highlighted as a challenge. In order to overcome this, the respondents in Leal Filho et. al. (2019a) study stated they required: more rigorous professional credentials for sustainability officers.

Blackburn (2016) identifies the historic culture of a University as being a key barrier to creating and implementing sustainability programs. Research grants and bequests from alumni are key drivers for a University attention. Blackburn (2016) argues that academic fiefdoms prevent cross departmental teamwork in tackling multidisciplinary issues, such as sustainability.

The overall the main barriers to sustainability implementation that respondents gave in this study were (in no particular order):

1. Staff awareness and training staff about sustainability;
2. Sufficient funding for large investments;
3. Accurate Scope 3 emissions data; and
4. Low profit and cash flow of the HEIs.

Overall the main beneficial drivers in implementing such programmes were (in no particular order):

1. New students pressuring the institute to change
2. ?New senior staff supporting change; and
3. Government regulations.

From the results of this project, the lack in financial resources is still a significant barrier to implementing change. However, the results here do show two University (D and G) had recently had approval for funding to mitigate against climate change. Only Universities H and J indicated that a lack of staff resources was a barrier to implementing change, which supports published research by Farinha, Caeiro and Azeiteiro (2020), but this does not seem to be the case for all as University C indicated 3.2 new staff resources (FTE) had recently been approved, and University D had 25 sustainability leaders (FTE).?Government regulations were also seen as a benefit by all respondents, and not a barrier as suggested in Farinha, Caeiro and Azeiteiro (2020).

Barriers around net zero emission targets

The UK Government was the first major economy to pass a net zero emissions law with a target date of 2050 (UK Government, 2019). “Declare a Climate Emergency” (2020) states as of October 2020, 300 District, County Unitary and Metropolitan Councils, and eight Combined Authorities have declared a Climate Emergency and either have set a target or are aiming to set a target to reduce their carbon emissions in line with the Government’s target date or earlier.

The SOS UK started a Carbon Target Campaign grading all HE and Further Education (FE) organisations on the carbon reduction commitments. Table 1 summarises the data SOS-UK (2020) collected for 520 HE and FE institutes and their carbon reduction commitments. This table indicates that only 107 out of 520 HE or FE institutes are committed to reducing carbon with over 60% yet to have extended their initial HEFCE 2020/21 target to meet the UK Governments target of 2050.

While it is possibly too early for a number of organisations to commit to stricter targets, there is evidence of organizations trying to debate on which terminologies to adopt. Rogelj et. al. (2015) documented the confusion around concepts like carbon neutrality, climate neutrality, full decarbonisation, and net zero carbon or net zero GHG emissions. Their paper showed that terms such as carbon neutrality or full decarbonisation actually obscured the fact that zero emissions still were not achieved. Instead the term net zero, when referring to emission targets, is more concise than the term neutral.

Table1. Summary of HE and FE Carbon Reduction Commitments (SOS-UK, 2020)

5 out of 10 Universities have publically set a carbon neutral target for Scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2030 (except University E who has a separate 2035 target for Scope 3). This means these universities will look to offset emissions through natural carbon sinks and/or carbon credits. Whereas, University D has a net zero carbon reduction target, where they will look to strictly reduce all their emissions with any remaining hard-to-decarbonise emissions compensated by using certified greenhouse gas removal credits. However, respondents felt it was too early to look at carbon offsetting, indicating offsetting would be a last resort.

Offsetting

One opportunity for an institution to meet its carbon reduction targets is through carbon offsetting. First, a consistent definition of carbon offsetting is required.?Carbon offsetting is the action or process of compensating for carbon dioxide emissions arising from industrial or other human activity, by participating in programs designed to make equivalent reductions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

St-Laurent, Hagerman, and Hoberg (2017) analysed the barriers of forest carbon offsetting schemes in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Their analyses summarises the barriers that have limited firms supporting carbon offsetting to the following:

• Environmentally sound carbon offsetting systems also need to be cost effective;
• There needs to be stringent systems that ensures substantial and transparent mitigation and promotes co-benefits beyond climate change;
• There needs to be flexible systems with effective and easily accessible financing and marketing options; and
• There needs to be high, tangible benefits for the community that a carbon offsetting scheme is being invested in.

St-Laurent, Hagerman, and Hoberg (2017) concluded that without a transparent and accountable governance structure, the public would not support forest-offset programmes, especially if the buyer is in the (BC) public sector.

The results from this study support above findings as 9 out of 10 respondents mentioned that offsetting would be discussed by the institute when there is more information on credible offsetting schemes, and because offsetting would be the last resort when reducing emissions. In 2021, the EAUC launched this pilot project, stating they will provide a robust and credible list of offsetting projects to invest in confidence with collective purchasing power (EAUC, 2021).?Their initiative will use experts and knowledge from the private sector and aims to drive demand for permanent carbon capture and storage. There should be a further investigation into HEI’s view of carbon offsetting once this pilot project is complete and results made available to all in the HE sector.

Scope 3 emission reporting

As HE institutions start to look to reduce their carbon emissions, Scope 3 emissions requirements have become an issue. Scope 3 emissions restrictions can be significantly higher for any organisation than Scope 1 and 2 combined. As defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (https://ghgprotocol.org), Scope 3 emissions are "other indirect GHG emissions from the activities of an organisation occurring from sources they do not fully control". For HEI’s this includes emissions from procurement, international students commuting to the UK, staff and national student commuting, business travel, water and waste.

One issue facing institutions is the accuracy of estimating Scope 3 emissions. Csutora and Dobak (2019) states that providing a comprehensive accounting of a company’s Scope 3 emissions is a bigger challenge compared to reporting Scopes 1 and 2 and are usually under estimated. This conclusion is reinforced by Blanco, Caro and Corbett (2016) that looks at US firms that disclosed their Scope 3 emissions. They found that although there was an increase in firms reporting their Scope 3 emissions from 15% in 2005 to 39% in 2013, there was significant variation in their estimates, due to the complexity of individual organization’s supply chains.

Their findings are supported with 9 out of 10 respondents, from this study, saying the current (pre February 2021) method of calculating Scope 3 emissions, in particular procurement emissions was inaccurate. From February 2021 the Higher Education Procurement Agency (HEPA) launched a new Scope 3 emission tool for HEIs to calculate Scope 3 emissions with a higher accuracy (HEPA, 2021). It is hoped this tool will help organisations understand their Scope 3 emissions more, report on them with more confidence and look to reduce these emissions in line with their Scope 1 and 2 target.

Conclusions and areas of further investigation

The sustainability agenda has recently entered a state of emergency due to international agreements and UK Government targets being set to reduce the impact of climate change. A number of Universities have set aspirational targets before publishing action plans, and supported this move by increasing staff resources and creating budgets to support large scale projects to demonstrate their efforts to their external stakeholders and to be seen as a ‘Sustainable University’. Others are carefully drafting what targets to publish and still hold back in supporting colleagues looking to integrate sustainability throughout the institute. The lack in pace could be attributed to low cash flow, lack in technological solutions, the review of the University’s teaching strategy in light of Covid-19, or simply the thought that 2050 seems too far away to set an ambitious target that one cannot achieve. Funding is still a barrier, where HEIs decide not to invest significant amounts of money for a low return in carbon savings as it does not make business sense in doing so. ?

However, climate change is only one dimension of many that make up the term ‘sustainability’ or sustainable development, and sustainable leaders within HEIs have being trying to drive change for many years. The use of sustainable reporting has been a mechanism for sustainability leaders to educate colleagues and start critical discussions in the hope it brings support for improvements. However, even what may seem to be the simplest thing such as defining what sustainability means to an organisation is lacking in a number of the Universities surveyed. If the institution cannot understand what sustainability means to them, it’s difficult to see how they can implement change successfully.

Most of the HEI’s interviewed had programmes that were estates based, which in itself caused a number of barriers to implement sustainable development, especially to departments outside of Estates. If sustainability is not being discusses at senior level committees or during any decision making process for any institutional change, then sustainable leaders have an on-going battle to be heard. To take sustainability seriously, sustainability teams either need a directorate level lead whose core responsibility is sustainability, and that they sit on most senior level institutional committees. Alternatively, all decision makers must ask ‘how does this decision impact sustainable development or corporate responsibility’ which is how University D is implementing its programmes. Having a dedicated department leading sustainability efforts shows from two Universities interviewed create the most institutional wide support to change. However, due to the limited number in this data set, this conclusion would need to be further investigated.

Over the last fifteen years some key pressures have caused institutes to increase their support of sustainable development. Increases in utility costs, HEFCE seeking to align HE sector targets to funding, potentially bad reputation derived from poor rankings in the People and Planet Green League have all pushed institutes to integrate sustainability either operationally or through their processes. Moreover, in the last two years, the pressure of a climate emergency has been the most significant driver for change. Institutions have to change, not just to make them more attractive to future students and potential research funding, but because the socially responsible thing to do.

Research gathered here conflicts with historic literature suggested institutes did not consider key stakeholders in the sustainable development decision making process. Most institutes interviewed here were in the process of developing or had developed a senior level steering group of some description that included representation from all main departments of the institute. This mind-set has been pushed recently due to the climate crisis. However, one concern is will such groups only focus on ‘climate change’ and not the other dimensions of sustainability. University C responses show that, while they had approval for their team to double in size, the committee going forward will focus on ‘climate action’ and may not be looking at either social or economic aspects of sustainability.?

The research here also shows that there are still barriers to implement change around sustainable development. However, these barriers identified here differ slightly to what previous literature concluded. Lack in funding to invest in large scale projects is a universally shared barrier, along with lack of staff awareness, and lack in staff resources. Student pressure, newly employed (open-minded) senior staff, and improved Government regulations appeared as beneficial drivers of implementing sustainable development programmes.

Finally, HEI’s interviewed here were in the early stages of revising their climate actions plans through revised carbon reduction targets and drafting action plans to meet such reductions. However, this revision process raised new complications, especially around what actions need to be done to meet targets, how much these actions will cost and when they need to be completed. The inaccuracy of Scope 3 emission data, in particular those from procurement and student international travel are an issue to sustainability leaders as well as how to reduce these emissions once they are accurately measured. Further, meeting carbon targets will be highly unlikely without some sort of carbon capture, such as offsetting emissions programs. Accurate and robust carbon offsetting schemes are still not available, and are seen by many to be the last action to select when reducing carbon emissions. The HE sector has newly developed support in Scope 3 measurements and carbon offsetting that are still in development. It is recommended that future investigations are made to see if these are still concerns in a few years’ time.

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