Cardiff Met recognises the important role and responsibility it has in tackling climate change, reducing our estate wide carbon footprint and contributing to improving building performance, occupant wellbeing and local air quality for the benefit of our staff, students and visitors.
Our carbon reduction journey has resulted in a number of notable achievements. Our current Carbon Management Strategy 2024-2030 aims to build on the strong energy performance of the University through the promotion of best practice energy efficiency, leading by example and the engagement of students and staff to foster a collective responsibility towards continuous improvement in sustainability across Cardiff Met.
With continued investment in energy efficiency this strategy will deliver a 60% overall reduction in carbon emissions compared to the 2005/06 baseline. This keeps us firmly on course to achieve identified sector carbon targets, work towards achieving proposed Welsh Government public sector targets for 2030 and continue the course to achieve the national target of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 against a 1990 baseline.
Welsh Government are encouraging all HE institutions to adopt the 2030 Net Zero goal and lead by example in decarbonising their estates. In response to this, we have developed a new Net Zero Carbon Management Strategy that plots our journey to achieving net zero by 2030 across Scopes 1 and 2 with a commitment for Scope 3 by 2035.
We publicly report our carbon emissions (Scopes 1-3) annually alongside other UK HE institutions on the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) website.
Our headline achievements:
In the last 7 years we have reduced our Scopes 1 and 2 building carbon emissions by 31.4% to the end of 2022/23, a saving of 1,400 tonnes of CO2e.
We now emit over 4,000 fewer tonnes of carbon each year than we did twelve years ago – the equivalent of 500 typical UK homes worth of emissions.
The electricity we purchase, since 2017, is from 100% renewable sources.
We have not disposed of any waste to landfill since 2013/14, with all general waste now processed in a local energy from waste plant.
We have converted our fossil fuel pool car fleet to electric.
We have installed 24 fast electric vehicle chargers across Llandaff and Cyncoed Campuses.
We generate around 45,000kWh annually from our solar PV on our buildings in Llandaff and Cyncoed saving grid electricity costs of approximately £13,550 per year, which equates to circa 10 tonnes of CO2e.
What have we done?
Conversion from gas boilers and water heaters to electric, reducing scope 1 emissions.
Installation of new high-performance boilers, hot water heaters and plant across various buildings.
Full upgrade of 3G sports pitches floodlighting
Improvements and expansion of the building sub-metering network across the estate.
As well as reducing our scope 1 and 2 emissions targets, we are fully aware that our Scope 3 emissions represent a significant volume of our overall carbon footprint.
We are developing systems and processes to better capture, analyse and report on our Scope 3 data to establish baselines and meaningful targets that we can work towards to reduce the indirect impacts the University has on the environment. This includes working closely with our Procurement team, our suppliers and contractors and decarbonising travel emissions through incentives and initiatives for increasing low carbon travel among our staff, students and visitors.
What's next?
As part of our accelerated drive to reduce our carbon emissions, we are in the process of reviewing proposals for increasing our estate wide renewable energy generation. We will be undertaking further BMS upgrades and optimisation, LED lighting upgrades, and optimising building utilisation through smart monitoring.
