Kingston University London

News

1st February 2012

Dr Victoria Hands, the new Director of the Sustainability Hub has been in post for 2 weeks now. We catch up with her to hear about her early days at KU.

 

First impressions of Kingston University? 
Friendly people, both staff, students and the local community.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the warm welcome, thank you very much. I have really enjoyed meeting various staff from around the university and hearing how they are taking the sustainability agenda forward in their own roles. I would like to meet with as a many people as possible over the next couple of months, to find out how the Hub can best support the integration of sustainability in your decision-making processes, and daily operations. Feel free to book in with me at v.hands@kingston.ac.uk

Of course, the work of the Sustainability Hub continues on a day-to-day basis, and ranges from organising events for Go Green Week to providing sustainability teaching on relevant courses, following links initiated by Ros Taylor across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. We have started training as a team on our environmental management system ready for the next phase towards the ISO14001 accreditation which started off with the work of Nicola Corrigan in 2005.

We are still looking for Green Impact teams to form across the institution. You could form a team as a department, building or a floor in a building and you undertake a simple checklist to green office practices – also found to save money!  We are happy to advise, as we have formed our own team in the Hub and this project ran very successfully at my previous institution where over 20 teams signed up in the first year.

 

Sustainability Hub Director’s Diary – highlights

Week commencing 16 Jan
What:

I chaired the London Universities Environment Group (LUEG) workshop on Scope 3 emissions with guest speaker Joanna Simpson from HEFCE. Scope 3 emissions are those CO₂ emissions coming from waste, travel and procurement. HEFCE will require us to report on them from 2013 and this will be linked to our funding allocation along with Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

What does this mean for KU? This will mean collaborative working with colleagues from Finance, Procurement, KUSCO and Estates with the expert input of the Sustainability Hub and the Energy Manager. Like other universities, KU will need to ensure the requirements for tracking CO₂ are included in the tender process, so our waste, travel and other suppliers give us information on CO₂ emissions.  It will also mean ensuring KU internal procedures enable us to extract relevant information, for instance about business travel undertaken by staff and travel undertaken by students for field trips.  We’ll need to focus initially on our high spend areas in procurement, likely to be construction and refurbishment. We need to be able to track daily commuting patterns too and encourage more walking, cycling, public transport and car sharing.

Background:
Under the Climate Change Act 2008, the UK is committed to reducing its carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.  To help deliver these targets, the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) who distribute Government funding to universities through the Capital Investment Framework (CIF) have introduced reporting mechanisms as part of the CIF returns which track carbon reduction. This means all KU staff and students have an interest in helping to reduce carbon emissions and maintain levels of CIF funding.  HEFCE gave guidance on how all HEI’s can deliver a Carbon Management Plan and Kingston University has had one in place since 2008.  Carbon emissions can be Scope 1 – from gas/vehicle fleet, or Scope 2 from electricity, or Scope 3 from waste, travel and procurement.

Week commencing 23 January
What:

I spoke about the Mayor’s £20k Low Carbon Prize to students at the Bright Futures workshop held at Penrhyn Road campus.
What does this mean for KU? On the one hand KU students can apply to the Mayor’s Low Carbon Prize and the Sustainability Hub is available to mentor and comment on applications.  On the other hand, the Bright Futures workshop which welcomed almost 40 students from Roehampton, St Georges, Royal Holloway, Brunel, Kingston, Westminster, Portsmouth, Surrey and University of West London is an excellent example of the extra-curricular support available to both KU students and those of our near neighbours. The workshop was stimulating and provided support to develop entrepreneurial and employability skills, learn to communicate more effectively and build networks.

Background
The Mayor’s Low Carbon Prize is a competition for London’s students to win up to £20k of funding to make their low carbon idea a reality. Entries can be tweeted, emailed, filmed and submitted by 29 February.  
Click here to find out more about the competition.
Tweet: @glaenergy
Follow: #MayorLCPrize
Like/comment on: Facebook

 

Support to grow your ideas at Kingston University

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