Interview - EAUC (FWD

EDUCATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS

[Credit: Fiona Goodwin, Director of Operations and Planning at the Environmental Association for Universities and College (EAUC)]

The EAUC is pleased to support Sustainable Business Magazine’s ‘Educational Sustainability Leaders’ series, recognizing the achievements of our members as they lead the way in bringing sustainability to the management and curriculums of universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

It’s our goal at EAUC to make sustainability good business – not an add on, or a ‘nice to have’, but an essential element that every university in college needs to place at the heart of their strategies. We support universities and colleges on their sustainability journey, providing resources, case studies of good practice, and offering the support to help them replicate that success.

To that end, we created the Climate Commission for Higher and Further Education – a unique partnership between sector bodies in the U.K., including the Association of Colleges, GuildHE, and Universities UK, helping to deliver the leadership so often

lacking from government in terms of the role of universities and colleges in the climate crisis, and what they should be doing to play their part.

Looking internationally, we also run an alliance with similar organizations around the world to share knowledge, promote the role of education, and bring voices together. It provides a platform to organizations already facing down the climate crisis – in low-lying or tropical countries – whose voices aren’t often heard. They are institutions that for a number of reasons are already having to adapt and mitigate against damage, and they can offer a massive learning experience.

CAMPAIGNING FOR GREEN EDUCATION

The EAUC is the secretariat for the Race to Zero campaign across universities and colleges. Through the campaign, we’re encouraging universities and colleges to take action to commit to the Race to Zero – to set challenging targets, to reduce and limit the emission of greenhouse gases, and to devise solid targets and plans on how that’s to be achieved. We have nearly 700 institutions signed up, representing nearly 8.5 million students across the world.

In addition to the Climate Commission for UK Further and Higher Education, we’ve also developed two further key forms of support, including a Further Education Climate Action Roadmap designed specifically for further education or smaller educational institutions, outlining a series of steps for how to achieve its targets. We also have a Higher Education Climate Action Toolkit, another useful tool that encourages a comprehensive and holistic approach to sustainability. For any institution, it’s not just about your carbon targets – it’s about your leadership, governance, research, and your teaching, and how you engage with your staff and your students.

INTERNATIONAL GREEN GOWN AWARDS 2021

The International Green Gown Awards represent sustainability in the widest sense. So many different universities are doing so many different things: promoting the green transition, improving access, achieving equality, and expanding diversity. We had one application that looked at supporting refugees, giving them life skills on how to adapt into the new communities in which they find themselves. Another provides teachers and parents with the skills and tools to help encourage girls get more involved in sport.

The awards bring together all of those excellent examples – giving universities and colleges a voice to shout about their work, and providing a showcase for products, projects and ideas, which can then be implemented across an ever-broader range of institutions. Most inspiring of all, our applicants aren’t just big universities with ample resources – they’re small institutions in rural Mexico, in Brazil or Malaysia, all of whom are doing such innovative and groundbreaking work, and really making a difference in their local communities.

Within universities and colleges specifically, there’s a real pipeline of issues that we have to tackle. This is a pivotal year in terms of ensuring countries and governments take climate change seriously. The pandemic has been traumatic and devastating across the world, but we have to learn from it. We’ve been given a time to reset, to reflect on what our car-crash future was going to be, and to now decide what we can do avoid that.

We have to make sure that our teachers, academics, lecturers, and researchers have the experience and knowledge they need to be able to pass that on to students, starting at the very beginning of pupil learning, from primary school through all levels of education. The leaders of tomorrow come from our universities and our colleges, and we have to make sure they’re fit for purpose and equipped with the capabilities to solve these real life, worldwide issues. c