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This blog, kindly authored by Thomas Owen-Smith, Principal Consultant at SUMS Consulting, and William Phillips, Data Analyst at SUMS Consulting, is part of a three-part mini series on UK universities’ approaches to land use.
Today’s final blog in the series focuses on opportunities and value. You can find part one of this series, which introduces the work, here. Part two of this series, focusing on risk, is here.
The opportunity landscape
2025 sees many higher education institutions looking for innovative approaches to rebalance their profile of income and costs.
Universities’ estates might offer the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds on energy costs through harnessing the sun and wind, as well as opportunities to play a role in the local and regional systems that will play an important role in the UK’s energy transition.
Local and regional connectivity through infrastructure also brings opportunities around education, skills and jobs, as well as applied research, industry partnership and knowledge exchange. These offer means for institutions to nourish relationships with their local communities, with positive impacts on public opinion and consent around universities’ legitimacy and the public goods they bring to society.
We have also explored opportunities around afforestation and the natural capital value of ecosystem services supplied by UK universities’ lands – which stands separate to the commercial land value. (And there are many additional opportunities which we did not have time to investigate in detail).
Again, many institutions have already taken steps (in some cases over many years) around the opportunities outlined. Our mapping of sector land use cannot pick up these existing examples, but we have referred to some accessible cases in the report.
We hope the insights of this work can help individual institutions which may not yet have engaged with these questions to understand their initial option space, opening the track to more detailed investigation; and support the higher education sector and policymakers to have more informed conversations about what these options may mean for decisions and guidance at the aggregate or whole-sector level.
We also refer to sector resources around topics such as carbon credits, improving biodiversity and reducing impacts on nature (the greatest of which, for universities, are typically through their supply chains).
Mapping opportunities and value
Using our mapping tool, institutions can explore the potential of their estates for solar and wind energy generation, as well as suitability for broadleaf forest growth.
These opportunities vary across the country according to latitude, topography, aspect and a range of local conditions and constraints. We used an assumptions-based approach, referring to sector-wide averages, to model the potential aggregate impacts of sector-wide uptake (noting that some institutions have already done this).
If 10% of universities’ built land were equipped with solar energy installations, this could generate an estimated 208,826 megawatt-hours (mWh) per year. This would equate to around 2.9% of the sector’s total energy usage in 2022/23 (as reported by 135 institutions in the Estates Management Record). Based on current commercial unit rates for energy, this could achieve an annual saving of around £42 million on energy bills. It would also abate in the region of 47,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) annually, representing around 3.3% of the sector’s reported scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2022/23.
If 10% of universities’ grassland was used for solar power generation, this could generate an estimated 189,360 mWh per year. This would achieve energy savings, financial savings and abatement of carbon emissions of a similar, slightly smaller magnitude than the estimates just above for built land.If the same percentage was used for wind generation, this could generate an estimated 19,920 mWh per year. This would achieve energy-saving, financial and carbon abatement benefits of roughly 10% the size of those set out for solar opportunities.
Using carbon flux factors extrapolated from the UK Natural Capital Accounts, we also estimated the annual carbon sequestration of the university sector’s (core) estate as 3,162 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) per year. If 10% of universities’ grasslands were put to forests, this could sequester an estimated 571 tCO2e per year of greenhouse gases over a 40-year period, increasing carbon drawdown by around 18% annually.
Although the potential carbon impacts would be smaller than those around renewable energy, afforestation would bring positive impacts for nature, biodiversity and the sector’s natural capital.
Our natural capital calculations are based on a value transfer approach, which extrapolates generalised national-level data (also from the UK Natural Capital Accounts) to a local area based on the assumed ecosystem services supplied by one unit of land (typically hectares).
We estimate the asset value of ecosystem services (including renewable electricity provisioning, water provisioning, air pollution regulating, greenhouse gas regulating, noise regulating, and recreation health benefits) provided by UK institutions’ lands at £248.5m. Of this, £147.4m (59.3%) is provided by built environment, £54.9m (22.1%) is provided by grass, £43.3m (17.5%) is provided by trees and £2.9m (1.2%) is provided by water. This is likely an underestimation.
Why this matters for universities
The way that we use land is a critical part of securing a sustainable future for the planet. In global terms, land use is a key driver of climate change and degradation of nature; but it can also be a solution to reversing these.
There already exist both regulatory and market-based frameworks which reflect various dimensions of the value of natural capital and ecosystem services.
Partially due to concerns around the credibility of commercial offsetting schemes, some universities have turned to approaches for carbon sequestration or “insetting” on their own lands, which allow for easier assurance and impact evaluation. We refer to some examples in the report.
While still emergent, these developments represent attempts to account for the true value of nature and the cost of destroying it (which traditional accounting and financial systems fail to do effectively) and may bring new economic opportunities around the stewardship of nature and natural resources.
Ultimately, everything depends on this.