The Green League

People & Planet’s Green League 2008 shows a remarkable improvement in environmental management and performance in the UK’s Higher Education Sector over the last year, spurred by the publication of the first ever Green League in 2007.

The sector has reached a critical ‘tipping point’. In a number of key areas more than half of the institutions in the Green League are achieving good environmental results. Implementing environmental management and translating this into results is beginning to become the norm in the sector, rather than the exception.

The most significant improvements are in the adoption of systemic environmental management policies and practices. However, there is still a long way to go to improve the actual impacts of the sector on the environment.

The improvements in the sector are a remarkable achievement, which in many cases is down to the hard work of committed staff and students over a long period of time. To convert these institutional improvements into truly sectoral change, this hard work needs to be complemented by government leadership and a national carbon reduction strategy for HE which supports a real culture of sustainability.

In the wider national context, the Climate Change Bill will commit the UK to year-on-year reductions in carbon emissions. The changes already taking place in HE create an opportunity to develop a model of sectoral carbon reduction for other sectors of the economy