I am sure that our sustainability team is well aware that turning off light bulbs and recycling isn’t putting us on course for averting dangerous climate change. This was made very clear by the recent IPCC report, showing that the developed world, of which our university is a member, is failing on climate change.

Please tell us what the auditors said about our carbon emission reduction target?
By which I mean this target: “The University of Southampton is committed to managing its carbon emissions and in particular to use energy more efficiently. We have a target to reduce our carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 (based on a 2005/06 baseline).”

According to our Carbon Management Plan report (here: /susdev/our-approach/reports.page) emissions have actually risen since 2005! And this only includes scope 1 and 2 emissions, our scope 3 emissions (including air travel) will undoubtedly have risen significantly in this period.

So in fact far from our university being “successful” as this post is misleadingly titled, we are failing in what is the most important aspect of sustainability. And we will continue to fail until we take action on construction (low-carbon rather than more massive concrete, steel structures), our energy provider (currently not low carbon) catering (by reducing meat), and air travel (stop reimbursing domestic air travel).

Until we stop paying lip service to sustainability and actually make significant and difficult choices we are undermining all the environmental and climate change research that our researchers do. Why should people take seriously our research on the threat of climate change to biodiversity when we have no meat reduction policy (animal agriculture being the biggest threat to biodiversity)?

The university management appears more interested in profit than the planet.

And this is why the responsibility should be upon our entire community to change what is a dangerous course of action from the University of Southampton.

(on the plus side, at least the comments that I post on Sussed are now getting published, and no longer vanish with the ‘moderator’).