The University of Manchester has been awarded the “2030 climate action” prize by the Green Gown Awards UK and Ireland at their 2023 awards ceremony.
The Green Gown awards are held on an annual basis to recognise sustainability initiatives undertaken by universities and colleges across the world.
The university aims to achieve absolute zero carbon by 2038 by switching to green energy, divesting in coal, oil and gas and “educating staff about their own impact”. So far, they have secured £157.3m of funding from internal and external sources to deliver these sustainability goals.
The judges said that they were “impressed with the honest, forward looking, innovative, transferrable, scalable and holistic approaches involving carbon budgeting to help deliver the University’s Zero Carbon Masterplan.”
They continued by saying the university has been effective in it’s ongoing evaluations of it’s progress towards zero carbon, while being realistic about what it can reasonably achieve.
One of these evaluations is that they university has been increasingly exceeding their carbon budget, which should follow the recommended pathway of a 13% year-on-year reduction in carbon, as seen below.
Picture: A graph depicting the university’s carbon budget against its goals of reducing carbon-emissions year-on-year.
Despite the University of Manchester’s ongoing effort towards zero carbon, it is the 4th highest UK university beneficiary from fossil fuel company funding; receiving £3 million from BP in 2022 and signing a new £9 million deal with Shell in November 2023. These companies generated just 0.17% and 0.02% respectively of renewable energy in 2022.
This award is just one of the several accolades awarded to the university in 2023, with the university also receiving the silver race equality award from Advance HE.
