Published before February 2009
When it comes to climate change, universities have been slow to heed the warning of their own science departments. Though many play a leading role in researching sustainable development and low-carbon technologies, few universities have done much to clean up their own environmental track record.
A survey by Business in the Community has revealed higher education as a whole scored just 55% on their environment index, lagging well behind the business average of 83%.
For student focussed campaigning organisation People & Planet, which has active groups at over 55 universities and colleges, this simply wasn’t good enough. It launched a Go Green campaign for which it has recently been nominated for a British Environmental Media Award.
“We’d had massive support for the Go Green campaign, and it had been very successful on a case-by-case basis at universities where people had really gone for it,” recalls Bronwen Thomas, Climate Change Campaigns Officer.
But the group wanted to construct a media campaign that would treat the higher education sector as a whole, effectively naming and shaming those universities that hadn’t clean up their act.
The solution was a Green League Table. It was the media work around it that made Vice Chancellors sit up and take notice, and saw People & Planet nominated for the BEMA.
“We’d compiled a huge amount of research and examples of good and bad practice. So the next challenge was how to use all this and what the groups were doing on the ground to have an impact on the sector as a whole,” says Thomas.
The league table – a concept educational institutions know only too well – ranked UK universities according to eight environmental factors, including carbon emissions, recycling rates, fair trade status and green travel plans. Each university was rewarded a First, 2:1, 2:2, Third or Fail, a memorable way to showcase the best and the expose worst performers.
While People & Planet is best known for its grassroots student activism, the group decided to approach the Green League Table from a different angle. So it decided to target the sector press with the university rankings.
The report was first published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in June. “Using the Times Higher Education Supplement was very purposeful, as we knew it would be read by the right people,” says Thomas.
The team were surprised by the impact.
“Even before it was published, we had universities phoning up wanting to know how they’d performed, then once it was out, we were getting calls from environmental managers saying: ‘We came 86th and now I have to go and explain why to the Vice Chancellor.’”
Other sections of the press quickly picked up on the story, with the Guardian and Independent both running follow-up articles. Meanwhile, university PR departments went into overdrive, with the high achievers trumpeting their success and the strugglers attempting to justify their position.
Some questioned the research methodology and the accuracy of the data, but this lack of transparent and reliable information is one of the very things the campaign highlights. Any controversy caused only served to give the story legs and raise the campaign’s profile still further.
The next stage, now that the new academic year is underway, is to get student groups to use the league table in their own campaigns, and already it is proving a useful tool.
“Now that this has been in the Times, university authorities have begun to realise that People & Planet is more than just the student activists they see on campus,” says Thomas. “Student groups have been finding it easier to arrange meetings with their Vice Chancellors."
People & Planet has an enviable reputation for attracting student support “on a scale unmatched within the UK charity and campaign sector”, according to former Oxfam Chair Lord Joffe. While they embrace the possibilities of technology (students can download ready-made green ‘degree certificates’ and press release templates from the website), their success in communicating with young people owes little to text messaging, viral marketing or social networking sites.
“We actually do old-fashioned things, like talking to people,” says Thomas, who was herself a People & Planet activist during her student days. “We train students in things like communication techniques and how to run campaigns, and they in turn talk to other students, so there’s a multiplier effect. Things like social networking sites then happen organically, because that’s what many young people are doing naturally anyway.”
“What you see with People & Planet, and elsewhere, is that there are still strains of very passionate activism in student life. When students get fired up about something, they have a huge amount of energy and can involve many people,” she concludes.
People & Planet - www.peopleandplanet.org