Energy & Carbon

Cardiff Met recognises its responsibility in tackling climate change, reducing estate wide carbon footprint, and improving local air quality.

Carbon Management Plan 2024-2030

Our current Carbon Management Strategy 2024-2030 aims to build on the strong energy performance of the University through the promotion of best practice energy efficiency, leading by example and the engagement of students and staff to foster a collective responsibility towards continuous improvement in sustainability across Cardiff Met.

With continued investment in energy efficiency, this strategy will deliver a 60% overall reduction in carbon emissions compared to the 2005/06 baseline. This keeps us firmly on course to achieve identified sector carbon targets, work toward achieving proposed Welsh Government public sector targets for 2030 and continue the course to achieve the national target of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 against a 1990 baseline.

Welsh Government are encouraging all Higher Education (HE) institutions to adopt the 2030 Net Zero goal and leady by example in decarbonising their estates. In response to this, we have developed a new Net Zero Carbon Management Strategy that plots our journey to achieving net zero by 2030 across Scopes 1 and 2 with a commitment for Scope 3 by 2035. We publicly report our carbon emissions (Scopes 1-3) annually alongside other UK HE institutions on the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) website.

Progress and Achievements

Our carbon reduction journey has resulted in a number of notable achievements. We have made significant progress on reducing our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and we are currently developing better systems to capture, analyse, and report on our Scope 3 data, with the aim to establish targets for reducing the indirect impact the University has on the environment.

• Since 2017, the electricity we purchase is from 100% renewable sources.
• We have installed 24 fast electric vehicle chargers accross our campuses.
• In the last 7 years, we have reduced Scope 1 and 2 building carbon emissions by 31.4%.
• We generate around 45,000kWh annually from our solar PV, saving grid electricity costs of around £13.5k and 10 tonnes of CO2e a year.
• We now emit over 4,000 fewer tonnes of carbon each year than we did twelve years ago.

'Halve the Half' Energy Savings

In our ambition to improve building performance, the Environment and Estates team found that approximately half of Cardiff Met's energy was being consumed out of hours. As a result, we were able to prioritise low-cost operational fixes such as adjusting heating schedules that allowed us to significantly reduce our energy use. The initiative, which has resulted in a 22.3% decrease in gas use, a 7.5% reduction in electricity, and 11.3% reduction in water reduction, has won four awards.

Cardiff Met receives national recognition for environmental efforts at Times Higher Education Awards