Climate action

We’re committed to becoming a zero carbon university by 2038 for our direct carbon emissions. This not only mirrors Manchester City Council’s own zero carbon pledge, but also supports the wider aim to make Manchester one of the world’s leading cities for responding to the climate emergency. Because we believe that it’s when we work together – every organisation and every individual –that we can make the biggest impact.

We were the first University in the UK to introduce Green Gown award winning Carbon Literacy training programme into the general curriculum, taught and co-designed by students. Through our innovative peer-to-peer Carbon Literacy for Students (CL4S) training model, over 1,500 students have now achieved Carbon Literacy certification. Our Department of Natural Sciences is a certified Carbon Literacy Training Organisation – home to a specialist team of Carbon Literacy Consultants, offering expertise to our students and staff, together with external organisations and partner universities. This offer is soon to extend to waste training and is provided to external organisations as part of our circular economy behavioural change provision.

In the first strand of a long-term research collaboration (2023) with Manchester Met academics and pioneering explorers, Professors Andy McCann and Marc Jones analysed the psychological effects of prolonged, isolated exposure to the most extreme environments. Further missions and data analysis in a variety of different challenging climates are already planned.

The ECO-I North West (NW) programme was named as ‘Net Zero Collaboration of the Year’ at the 2023 PraxisAuril Knowledge Exchange Awards.  The programme brings Manchester Met together with five other North West universities to help businesses develop new products and services, adopt a future-ready business model, and reduce the carbon footprint of their operations.  It has already supported over 100 businesses and the implementation of 31 new-to-firm innovations, resulting in thousands of tonnes of carbon savings (further details of the project can be found below).

Findings from a two-year study by Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Oxford, the University of Reading and Imperial College London have been published (November 2023) in the Royal Society for Chemistry’s journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres. The research outlines aviation’s non-CO2 effects on the atmosphere, both in terms of climate and air quality, and how these may change in the future, as well as the effects of future technologies and fuels.

New research from Manchester Metropolitan University and collaborators, published in Science of the Total Environment, (2023), suggests sustainable aviation fuels might not be as effective at reducing emissions as previously thought.   

Cutting-edge green energy and digital technology innovations that can help spur sustainable economic growth will be developed through Manchester Met thanks to a new business support programme. As part of the nationwide £100m Government Innovation Accelerators funding (2023), the University will lead two consortiums: Greater Manchester Electrochemical Hydrogen Cluster and the Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI) to deliver initiatives for Greater Manchester’s small and medium-sized (SME) enterprises.

Glaciers could have been present in Antarctica’s mountain regions for at least 60 million years – almost double the time interval previously predicted by experts – according to new research published in Nature Communications (2022). Led by scientists from Manchester Metropolitan University, their findings suggest glaciers could have been present in the most mountainous regions of the continent significantly earlier than previously thought. Scientists say it could help them understand how the area will be impacted by climate change in the future.

Global Cities 2022 - Greater Manchester has been named as one of only 12% of cities globally to receive an A score from a leading environmental charity thanks to a range of projects and research led by Manchester Metropolitan University and its partners. CDP - a not-for-profit charity that helps companies, cities, states and regions to manage their environmental impact - has identified Greater Manchester as a place taking bold leadership on environmental action and transparency, proving that the city is establishing itself as a trailblazer in climate action.

Manchester Met will act as a ‘Champion’ for two new schemes launched as part of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, by sharing the University’s facilities and expertise with local schools and colleges. The National Education Nature Park and the Climate Leaders Award initiatives were announced in April 2022 as part of DfE’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy for education and children’s services – which has been developed as a commitment to climate action.

Net Zero Exchanges: Connecting policy and research for climate action: Parliamentarians and leading UK universities produced a collection of essays describing areas where work is needed on climate policy, with Manchester Metropolitan’s academics Laurie King and Yagya Regmi writing about the role of fuel cell electric vehicles in achieving net zero emission from the UK transport sector by 2050. 

In 2022, Manchester Metropolitan University was commissioned to develop a new mapping system which will make it easier for National Highways, the government-owned company responsible for motorways and major A roads in England, to keep track of the ecosystems bordering the country’s 4,300 miles of road network. The innovative research and development programme will use more than 20 different sets of data to overlap and layer National Highways’ soft estate, roughly 28,258 hectares of green land close to the roads.

The University’s procurement strategy recognises the impact of embedding sustainable procurement into our procurement process and providing outcomes which support our sustainability strategic theme. Our procurement strategy explains how we will embed Environmental Sustainability, Economic Sustainability and Social Value into our tender process and the contracts that we procure, committing our supply chain partners to deliver sustainable solutions that reach beyond the University’s direct influence.

Voices of the Future led by Manchester Met brings together a set of partnerships with local, regional and national organisations including early years’ contexts, primary and secondary schools, Natural England and the Community Forests to explore how young people perceive and connect with treescapes and how they can participate in changing the present and imagining the future of treescapes. The project will advance new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society to inform educational policies, teacher education, urban planning and treescapes design.

International Action to reduce emissions from aviation: Our research is shaping global measures to mitigate aviation’s climate change effects. It has directly informed the technical specifications and UK and European negotiations that have led to a comprehensive suite of internationally agreed policy and regulatory measures to reduce the global impact of aviation, including the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA), and new standards for aircraft CO₂emissions and engine emissions of non-volatile particulate matter.

Our modelling of carbon emissions across the whole airport system shaped the development of the international Airport Carbon Accreditation scheme which today has reduced airport emissions by around 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ since its launch in 2009. The research directly shaped the creation of Airport Carbon Accreditation (ACA), the leading global carbon management certification programme for airports. It is endorsed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and many other international aviation sector organisations.

Protection from rising seas and severe storms: By modelling how waves interact with coastal structures, our research has helped improve coastal flood defences. Our open-source computer code, AMAZON, can be used to model the geometry of moving and floating structures. AMAZON uses high-resolution sensors to capture the interaction of water and air. It can identify sudden changes in system dynamics, and model wave generation, steepening, overturning and breaking over a structure. The code can also create a full set of flow variables.

H2020 PantEOn (2019-2022) is a Marie Curie-funded project which has gathered empirical evidence about the long-term evolution and regime shifts due to Climate Change of the functional and structural properties of Mediterranean ecosystems. This evidence is crucial for the identification of ecosystem resilience thresholds & the development of land degradation indicators.

Manchester Met is collaborating with academics and the British Antarctic Survey to investigate regional climate effects of tiny particles of sea salt in the air above the Arctic ice fields. The project will trace the source of the sea ice and find out how it gets mixed with blowing snow and helps seed clouds in the Arctic region. Scientists know very little about these processes, so they are poorly represented in current climate models.

Almost a third of the world’s population relies on getting its fresh water from the Tibetan Plateau, so any disruption to the monsoon cycle due to climate change will have a huge impact on these people. To accurately model future climate change scenarios and their consequences for ecosystems, Manchester Met scientists are investigating the timing, duration, and intensity of past climatic variability and previous large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation systems.

The Centre for Place Writing brings together award-winning creative writers and field-defining critical thinkers with shared interests in place and its many meanings. An urgent commitment to ‘writing as activism’ underpins much of its work with high-profile members including the Guardian country diarist Paul Evans and the novelist Gregory Norminton. An interdisciplinary approach to climate action is also integral to the work of the Centre with members from across Manchester Met.