All Things ASE

Counting the Carbon / Making the Carbon Count.

Jonathan planting trees as part of ASE’s support for a local Co-Forest initiative.

Jonathan Hope, ASE’s Dean and Director, writes about the challenges faced by the study abroad industry in an era of climate crisis, and what ASE is doing to address the programme’s environmental impact.

The global environmental and climate crisis is undeniably one of the most urgent issues of our time. The ASE Team and I are wholeheartedly committed to making our Programme as environmentally responsible as it can possibly be.

This isn’t an easy matter, of course, when hundreds of return flights across The Pond are an annual - and unavoidable - part of the study abroad experience we offer students. 

I recently returned from the Forum on Education Abroad’s annual conference in Boston, where - as has been the case for some years - sustainability and eco-awareness were among the most common topics of discussion at the various sessions I attended.

It is encouraging, certainly, that so many people in international education are talking about global warming and the destruction of the natural environment, and how best we can address these as a field. There is also wide acknowledgement, at least, of the damage we know is done by the airmiles racked up by students, faculty and staff studying and working abroad.

The United Nations’ Sustainable development goals. (www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/)

I found myself deeply disconcerted, however, by what seems to me a complacent consensus among too many of my professional peers - even some of those doing award-winning work where the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are concerned.

I’d sum this up as an oft-expressed wish to make the carbon count, coupled with a curious and deeply problematic reluctance to count the carbon.

Lots of international educators are vocal about the good work their organisations (and others) are doing, or striving to do, to ensure that students become more eco-aware while they are abroad. There are also plenty of intelligent initiatives to try and make students’ activities while abroad more sustainable.

I applaud these efforts, at the same time as noting the apparent lack of any sustained effort on the part of many US institutions, or the schools and programmes to which they send their students, to actually collect and share verifiable data about their own carbon footprints.

The Forum itself, for instance, appears not (as far as I have been able to establish) to be measuring and publishing data on the environmental impact of its own conferences.

I am confident I was not the only delegate in Boston who would have liked to know, for instance, how the carbon footprint of the annual event I was attending (which included around 1,500 people from all over the US and the world) compared with that of the event that took place in Seattle in 2023; or might compare with the conference to be held in Toronto in 2025.

What isn’t measured, as they say, isn’t managed. And cannot be improved.

On the plus side, it was heartening to see our friends at CANIE (the Climate Action Network for International Educators) beginning to get the recognition and support that they deserve at The Forum. Through their work, I am confident more in the field of study abroad will begin to assume responsibility for measuring and reducing our impact - as well as merely learning about sustainability. 

So, what is ASE doing when it comes to counting the carbon?  

Well, as of October 2022, UK-based Carbon Footprint Ltd have been helping us track and minimise our carbon emissions. The carbon accounting process covers all aspects of the Programme, from the flights our students and staff take to and from the UK, to study trips and residential stays, the energy used in our buildings, and every staff and faculty commute. 

What we can’t avoid (including all those transatlantic flights - which last year made up 76% of our total footprint) we compensate for through investment in Gold Standard carbon offsetting projects. These currently include a tree-planting project in our local area, a safe water initiative in Zambia, a cookstove project in Malawi and a wind power project in Thailand. 

While we accept that carbon offsetting is problematic, and certainly not a long-term solution to climate change, we are confident the projects we support make a positive (if not easily, incontrovertibly measurable) difference.

We have also been making steady progress when it comes to making the carbon count.  

Students gaining an understanding of sustainable food and farming at Bath City farm.

ASE students from any discipline can now choose from a growing range of seminar courses and internships which make Climate and Sustainability their focus, from Environmental History and Global Activism to a placement with a local charity dedicated to reducing the harms of climate change and the depletion of nature.   

Meanwhile, the Advanced Tutorial Programme offers students the opportunity to work one-on-one with a UK professor specialising in any area of Environmental Studies that can be taught outside a laboratory.

Our Green Week highlights local environmental issues, opportunities and activities available throughout the semester. Students visit the vegetable gardens run by Bath Organic Group, are encouraged to go meatless for the day, take in the natural beauty of the Bath Skyline and are led on a tour of the city’s many charity shops (thrift stores).

While there’s lots more we can do, I’m genuinely proud of the work we’ve begun at ASE.

Dr Matthew Griffiths, an ASE faculty member and author on eco-criticism, recently gave a paper as part of our Core Lecture Series titled, intriguingly, ‘Why (or what) should we read as the climate changes?’

Thank you for reading this, as the climate changes.