What do we know about land owned by universities?

You’re probably familiar with the Association of University Directors of Estates (AUDE) Estates Management Report – fueled as it is by the HESA Estates data collection.

As well as being the source of much delightful information about car parking and the size of the various ponds you have on campus, it highlights serious issues about what we might characterise as the state of our estates. Everything from day-to-day maintenance to meeting carbon emissions reduction targets is becoming more expensive and more difficult for higher education institutions to prioritise in the face of so many other pressures on spending.

The key points of that publication for estates managers and university finance teams are the information about the condition of the estate: evidence of direct costs that will need to be met. What makes today’s new report from SUMS Consulting interesting is the emphasis on the other end of the evidence – the state of, and use of, the land itself.

Mashing together some of the familiar estates data with other geographic information sources (most notably Open Street Maps, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, the UK Natural Capital Accounts, the Met Office, DEFRA flooding models, temperature data, wind data) we get a unique look at the underlying natural characteristics (and natural risks) – and a set of dashboards to illustrate it.

What kind of risks? Well, you would perhaps imagine that the sector’s many coastal campuses would be at most risk from flooding. And you would be wrong – more than half of the land used by the University of Lincoln (including the main campus just by Foss Dyke) is at a high or medium flood risk. And the University of Buckingham (encircled as it is by a meander of the Great Ouse) isn’t far behind. As moving the location of your campus is a pretty extreme option, both these providers (and a fair few others at a lower but still notable risk – including the University of Oxford) need to think about flood defences and, increasingly, flood repair as an ongoing cost.

The impacts of a changing climate can also be felt in other ways – just about every campus includes heat islands (areas where excess heat tends to be retained when compared to the surrounding area). If there’s a bit of your campus you avoid on sunny days, this is why – in many cases the ambient temperature can be more than 2.5 per cent higher. This, again, has an impact on spending decisions – shades, passive cooling, or even air conditioning needs to be deployed as temperatures continue to rise.

But there are opportunities too. Many universities with larger campuses including substantial grass areas would be ripe for solar or wind energy production – the report highlights the potential energy from sunshine at Sussex, Brighton, and Chichester, and the scope for wind farms as part of the estates owned by Keele (which already has a low carbon energy generation park) and Heriot-Watt.

To be clear, this is just presented as a first reference point – a lot more feasibility work needs to be done before we even get to serious planning. With fossil fuel energy unlikely to get cheaper any time soon, many providers already have their own renewable energy: many even feed the excess back to the National Grid. You’d confidently predict more of this in future.

The campus could also play a role in carbon capture and sequestration. If the idea of solar panels all over your beautiful grounds doesn’t compel you, how would you feel about a Celtic broadleaf forest? As well as being a beautiful place to be, such woodland has huge potential to counteract rising emissions. The University of York and the University of Keele have a particular opportunity here according to the data presented.

This is all at a very general level, and the opportunities and threats presented in the report are sketched in a very broad way. That doesn’t mean that the report isn’t worth engaging with – it absolutely is! – but it needs to be seen as a starting point rather than a prescription. Examples of activity at particular providers, dotted throughout the text, make it clear that this is work that is already going ahead and offers comparators and case studies for universities who may just be dipping their toes into the (rising) water.

Moving to a new campus is probably off the radar for most, but work to make the existing estate safer and more productive is going to be a big part of the future of the sector. And this report is a great way to start the conversation about what this looks like.