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Interview - University of the West of England (UWE)
EMBEDDING SUSTAINABILITY
INTO THE CURRICULUM
Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Professor James Longhurst, Assistant Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West of England, Bristol, about sustainability in teaching, a strategic roadmap for the future, and preparing students for a changing world.
By Will Vincent
The University of the West of England,
Bristol (UWE Bristol) is the largest university in the South West, with over 30,000 students and 4000 staff, and £280 million a year in annual turnover. Formerly Bristol Polytechnic, UWE Bristol acquired university status in 1992, and first adopted an environmental policy in the mid-1990s, emphasizing the wise use of resources in line with the environmental thinking of the time. Today, the institution is certified to ISO 14001-2015 standard for its Environmental Management System and has a variety of awards and accreditations for its sustainability work. UWE is a multiple winner of Green Gown Awards most recently winning the ‘Reporting with Influence’ category at the 2020 Green Gown Awards.
SUSTAINABILITY AMBITIONS
“Since 2007 we’ve been examining how our curriculum embraced and embedded sustainability issues, which came out of our original concerns with the management of our estates,” says Professor James Longhurst, Assistant Vice-Chancellor of the UWE Bristol. “This has progressed as language in the wider sector began to embrace sustainability. We soon realized the sustainability impacts of our university included the way our students are prepared for their life post-graduation.”
UWE Bristol sets out to provide students with sustainability skills to take out into the world. “A student leaving university this year will have about 60 years of life, and what they do in that lifetime will either support a sustainability agenda or inadvertently work against it,” says Professor Longhurst. “The most important aspect of our sustainability ambitions is to ensure our students have the skills, knowledge, and competencies to thrive in a potentially adverse future. We have progressively developed that capability so that by the 2015/16 academic year we were able to demonstrate and externally
verify that we achieved a presence of sustainability in every one of our taught programs. We’ve been maintaining that ever since.”
ECOLOGICAL CURRICULUM
The university has made various efforts to embed sustainability into the teaching curriculum. “Our first step was to audit our curriculum to understand what we already had,” says Professor Longhurst. “In parallel with this, we established a cross-university group called KESE, Knowledge Exchange for Sustainability Education, which has representatives from every academic department, whose role is to coordinate education for sustainable development activities across the university and to link their department’s actions with the university’s Sustainability Board.
In 2015 the UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”We saw the SDGs as an opportunity to demonstrate the contribution that each of our degree programs was making,” says Professor Longhurst. “We devised a system where our academic departments could consider the contribution of their degree programs to the SDGs. We invited them to examine their curriculum against each of the goals. At the conclusion of the first phase of this work our colleagues have produced some 80 curriculum maps. These will be updated and further maps produced in phase two of this work. The maps serve several purposes. Firstly, they enable a rich conversation to take place between academics about their work and the connections to the SDGs. Secondly, they are a means to explore the SDGs with current students and of course can be used constructively in Open Days to highlight to prospective students the connection of their future discipline with the global agenda of the SDGs. We were then able to see this flowering of ideas and initiatives around the SDGs as visible testaments to the way that sustainability is part of what we do. It’s not special, it’s not extra. It’s simply part of what we do as a university.”
STRATEGY 2030
Recently, UWE Bristol launched its new Transforming Futures Strategy 2030. “‘Transforming Futures’ is what our university is about,” explains Professor Longhurst. “UWE’s 2030 Strategy sets out our ambition to ‘work to address the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency and strive to fulfil our role in the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals’. The Strategy sets out seven ambitious sustainability goals designed to make sure that we are playing our part in developing an understanding of the issues and challenges to be faced across the decade whilst creating and promoting solutions on how to cope with this future. Fortunately, our students are very concerned about the climate and ecological emergency. We’re proud that our Students Union (SU) has been number one in the annual NUS SOS Green Impact Award scheme for an unprecedented five years in a row.”
The institution has made various changes in order to optimize sustainability in its operations. “We signed up for the Plastics Pact, setting ourselves the target of eliminating all but essential single-use plastic by 2025,” says Professor Longhurst. “During the pandemic, a vast array of additional plastic requirements to ensure safety affected our target, but we have a committed team of people across the university whose primary purpose is to embed and embrace the sustainability agenda. We have re-established our internal plastics group, who are redefining the meaning of the word essential and moving the agenda forward in partnership with our students. As part of Strategy 2030 we want to establish each of our three campus locations as a Clean Air Zone. In parallel with this, we are enhancing options for sustainable travel across our locations. We are also working hard to ensure that biodiversity is enhanced wherever we can on each of our three estates. The university has established research beacons, and one of those is our Climate and Sustainability Research Beacon. We are as concerned about the process of our research and wish to minimize the environmental implications of research processes whilst enhancing research that addresses the climate and ecological emergency.
EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY
By embracing new technology, UWE Bristol is further embedding sustainability into the institution. “As part of our ambition to create a Clean Air Zone on the Frenchay campus we have worked with South
Gloucestershire Council and Toshiba to develop the UMBRELLA air quality monitoring network which has deployed a range of air quality sensing devices within a seven kilometre network,” says Professor Longhurst. “The network provides real time information about changes in air quality, which provides operational, curriculum and research opportunities. In developing our estate we are seeking to build in a way which specifically embodies the latest technology for carbon management. Our new building for the School of Engineering has achieved BREEAM Excellent for its sustainability credentials. We are now embarking on the development of a new 900 bed student accomodation project designed to the PassivHaus standard, which is set to have a carbon footprint that is 74% less than a standard development. With the addition of extra PV arrays, we are hoping to get the overall carbon footprint as low as possible.” Technology supports the university in its ambition to be net zero in terms of Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon emissions. The university’s Combined Heat and Power station and district heating network delivers low carbon energy and heat on the Frenchay Campus supported by direct power purchase of renewably generated electricity and a REGO certified electricity supply. On site generation of electricity from PV arrays completes the university’s energy mix.
PREPARING STUDENTS
“The university works in partnership with local authorities and other enterprises to help them enhance their sustainability and to support their journey to net zero,” says Professor Longhurst. “This in turn creates opportunities for our students in the form of dissertations, projects, internships and live briefs which helps them build their knowledge and competency in addressing real carbon challenges and other environmental problems.”
“The construction of our new student accommodation is a fantastic resource to integrate into our curriculum, as our students are able to watch its development and fruition,” says Professor Longhurst. “We put real world problems into the curriculum, which we can use to challenge our students to deliver real solutions. We don’t have all the answers, we may not even know all the questions, but through collaboration we’ve got a real chance of identifying better solutions.” c
