As a leading research centre looking at the importance of people at the heart of climate action and policymaking, we recognise that academic research is a high-carbon activity.
It can produce significant emissions from flying to conferences, project meetings, and fieldwork. This perception can impact how our work is received, and public trust in our research may be undermined where our activities are seen to conflict with our ethos and aims.
In 2020, we launched the CAST Sustainability Charter, a statement which sets out our ongoing commitment to a low-carbon research culture, as well as to confront the environmental impact of our work. It seeks out transformative solutions, whilst acknowledging that the circumstances and values of individual team members are not identical.
We seek to embed low carbon transformations in our research culture and practices and recognise the potential for our choices to influence the sustainability strategies of our member institutions, funders, and partners.
What does the CAST Sustainability Charter involve?
The CAST Sustainability Charter covers the series of actions we take in our day-to-day work such as minimising travel, avoiding flying for domestic and European travel, as well as our role as advocates within our institutions. These actions and advocacies are currently linked to four key areas: food and diet, travel, material consumption and how we heat and cool our buildings.
In addition to covering our direct environmental impact, it also covers our role in advocating for change in higher education (recognising we are constrained in what we can do as an organisation with multiple member institutions but that we can also learn from one another). Several members of CAST are involved in advising our institutions on climate action.
For example, our CAST Director Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh MBE sits on the University of Bath’s (our centre hub) Climate Action Framework Advisory Board, and on the Senate, to help ensure environmental issues are considered in organisational decisions and to advocate wherever possible for change. This includes working with student groups and the catering team to make plant-based milks free on campus.
As Academic Lead for Carbon at the University of Manchester, Professor Carly McLachlan has provided leadership on institutional climate action in various ways. This includes setting a target of limiting post-pandemic aviation emissions to 50% of the pre-pandemic levels and providing a sustainable business travel top-up fund. She also significantly revised the travel and car parks policy to support active travel and bring car parking costs more in line with public transport costs. Additionally, she embedded environmental sustainability in role descriptions, signed a power purchase agreement so that 60% of electricity comes from a new renewable asset and secured £175m to invest in campus decarbonisation projects over 10 years.
Examples of the CAST Sustainability Charter in Action
Members of the CAST team at the ICEP 2023 conference in Aarhus, Denmark.
In June 2023, several of the CAST team travelled to Aarhus, Denmark for the International Conference on Environmental Psychology (ICEP). The majority travelled by train in an exciting two-day journey across Europe through eight major cities.
In line with our research on lifestyle changes, we ensure that vegetarian catering is standard at our events and meetings and aim for at least 50% wholly plant-based options.
We also prioritise reducing consumption and try to integrate sustainability considerations into all purchasing decisions. These commitments were a key part of planning our recent CAST Showcase 2024 event, where we launched our key messages report: ‘Catalysts of Change: People at the Heart of Climate Transformations’ based on five years of social science research on climate change. We also discussed and celebrated our first five years with around 120 guests from partner institutions and policy networks.
We chose a community venue with excellent public transport links and strong sustainability credentials and ensured that all catering was vegetarian with wide plant-based options. We also took steps to minimise paper use and printing at the conference and worked with small suppliers with a commitment to sustainability for design and production work.
Looking towards the next five years
As CAST continues its research for a further five years, we will explore additional areas for improvement for the CAST Sustainability Charter, such as supporting people to make low-carbon travel choices (e.g. via financial incentives or extra time to travel); better understanding the sustainability implications of working from home vs in the office; and reducing the environmental impact of our IT and data storage.
For future updates from the CAST team, follow us on BlueSky and LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter.