An update on climate action at UAL
Learn about the origins, progress and challenges of our Climate Action Plan
The origins of the Climate Action Plan
In 2019, students and staff across UAL formed climate assemblies to call on UAL to declare a climate emergency. These assemblies brought the work of existing sustainability committees together with a wider community to develop a plan for action. This momentum and energy from was channeled into a set of working groups, who co-authored the Climate Action Plan.
In 2021, this plan was approved by the University’s Executive Board. It was announced during COP26 in parallel with the Carnival of Crisis, which mobilised our creative community to show that the arts can, and must, respond to the climate and ecological emergency. In 2022, the plan was published in full to ensure transparency and scrutiny within our community and sector. A year on, we are now able to report on what has changed, our areas of progress and challenge.
This year, during our social purpose listening exercise, our community reasserted stabilising the climate and regenerating the environment as a shared priority. It is one of four social purpose goals, our task is to embed this in everything we do.
How does the Climate Action Plan work?
Actions, progress and next steps are clustered around what we do here at UAL: we teach, learn, research and exchange knowledge with others across creative disciplines and practices. We operate buildings, purchase goods and services and administer courses in order to do these things. We are a distinctive community of artists, creatives, learners, academics and professionals formed around them. These are all pathways through which we can change the world through creativity.
The progress update focuses on the ultimate impacts we have set out to reach:
- Make climate justice part of every student’s learning journey, in order to change the creative sector and beyond through our graduates’ creative practice.
- Ensure the impact of our creative research in tackling societal challenges in order to influence climate action in the creative industries, government policy and the higher education sector.
- Achieve net zero carbon emissions in our institution by 2040, while modelling behaviour and sharing our learnings with others.
- Nurture the activism of our students and staff to create positive change in the world.
It is essential we have a long-term mindset to bring this change — we have a responsibility to the future generations of UAL staff and students who will inhabit it.
But what does embedding our purpose mean?
Our work to embed climate into our curriculum is an example that guides the way. There has been pioneering practice across all our colleges for years prior to the formation of the Climate Action Plan. The working group that formed around teaching and learning brought together expertise from across all colleges and role types — from Graduate Teaching Assistants to Course Leaders to Deans.
They created a set of teaching and learning Principles for Climate, Racial and Social Justice with a wider group of students and staff to underpin curriculum change. They tested an embedding framework, based on a model already developed by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion. They designed this mechanism to work within our existing quality processes, which review our courses on a regular basis. They worked with over 30 Climate Advocates to understand our progress after one year. They made the case for four new curriculum development roles to support this work at college-level. They piloted Carbon Literacy Training to give the staff and Climate Advocates who are redesigning our curriculum the foundational knowledge they need to do that.
This is the work of transformation: amplifying and sharing the work that is already here, understanding barriers for change, participatively designing models for change, making the case for investment and building the support structures for those tasked with that change.
To understand how this success story might play out in other areas of the university’s work, researchers at UAL have been mapping the University as a complex, adaptive system and working participatively with our community to imagine what we would look like if we made our maximal contribution to stabilising the climate and regenerating the environment. The ability to imagine futures is often asserted as a unique contribution that creatives can make. Our projective and anticipatory ways of thinking will be needed both here, and in the world around us, in the work of transition.
Transparency as a lever for change
Reporting on our progress should honour the transparency and candour that is necessary for accountability. This means facing uncomfortable trade-offs, compromises and shortcomings. We must acknowledge and celebrate progress while giving an honest account of the daunting task of transformation.
On the one hand our estates team have reduced Scope 1 & 2 emissions at a steady rate. On the other, Scope 3, a much more substantial proportion of our emissions, has risen and requires urgent action.
While we have harnessed our research expertise to map UAL as a system and identify actionable pathways and leverage points for our transition, we still need to understand the tangible impact of our research and knowledge exchange to increase its scale and impact.
We are proud to have gathered more than a thousand students and staff in a network that places creativity at the heart of our response to climate crisis. Our responsibility now is to mobilise and coordinate that strength to advocate for change.
What will we do next?
In reporting on progress, we learn and redouble our efforts. Some key learnings we take forward from this year are:
- We need better data infrastructure and accuracy to inform science-aligned targets and effective action.
- We need governance which balances participation with urgency.
- We need to build empathy across our constituencies, resisting silos.
- We need to shift from pioneering, individual initiatives to embedding, scaling and replicating across everything we do.
To achieve systemic change, we all have a role to play: those who have a standpoint on climate and environmental action (whether through knowledge and expertise or lived experience), those who are tasked with the work of transformation, and those who are accountable within our institutional structure. This is the work of many hands.
Yes, the change we need is operational, but it is also a fundamental change in mindsets, behaviours, relationships and ways of being in the world. This is the work of people — many more than are thanked in the Climate Action Plan. Institutions are often abstracted into policies, processes and protocols, but they are made of people. Our work in social purpose at UAL, and climate action as part of this purpose, is to take who we are — our values and principles — and bring them to life in everything we do.
