School Strategy
The School of Mathematics is developing a strategy in order to have a coordinated School-wide approach to resolving sustainability issues.
Sustainability Strategy
For the academic year 2021/2022, the School is addressing sustainability on two distinct fronts: making our own operations more sustainable; and using our unique role as an academic institution to promote sustainability within our curriculum and in wider society.
The School will focus on decarbonising our heating and power, our catering, and our travel.
-
We are supporting the University to decarbonise heat and power on the King’s Buildings campus as fast as possible. We are seeking improved radiator technology in our building, the James Clerk Maxwell Building, plus other buildings on campus, and we are arguing to decommission several aging on-campus power plants which produce electricity at a higher carbon intensity than increasingly renewable grid electricity.
-
We are promoting train travel over air travel where possible. To this end, we have provided cost- and comfort-incentives to promote train travel within the UK, including reimbursing first-class rail travel.
-
We are working to empower research and professional services staff to attend meetings remotely to reduce unnecessary travel – around the city and around the world. We are equipping our seminar and meeting rooms with modern video-conferencing technology to facilitate hybrid in-person and online attendance.
-
We have moved to vegetarian food as the default option for catering at all School events.
The School will consolidate and celebrate mathematics related to sustainability as it appears in our curriculum and research.
-
We are involved in University-wide initiatives to embed sustainability throughout our curriculum. For mathematics, this means speaking in a clear voice about the important role of operations research, data science, and numerical analysis in addressing the climate crisis in a data-driven and scientific manner.
-
We are identifying role models and case studies among our researchers, and within our student body. These are mathematicians who have applied their training and skills to solving real-world problems related to decarbonisation in energy and the economy, to addressing climate instability, and to measuring the ecological impact of climate change.
Sustainability Committee in the School of Mathematics
Sustainability issues are embedded in every aspect of the School and its work, requiring a coordinated approach to tackle these issues. As part of the School's strategy to take on these issues and make improvements, we have created a bespoke directorship; Director of Sustainability. We are pleased to say that our current Director is Dr David Jordan. Whilst the School's work on sustainability is driven by our Director, it is underpinned by the work undertaken by our dedicated Sustainability Committee, composed of both academic and professional services members of staff, and of undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Overall, the School’s Sustainability Committee oversees the development and implementation of the School’s sustainability strategy and policies. They promote environmentally sustainable action in all aspects of the School’s activities, allowing us to create a positive sustainable culture in which all scholarly aspects of the Mathematical Sciences can flourish. Through the committee, we aim to raise awareness of the challenges faced in creating such a culture, as well as widen engagement across the School to help overcome these challenges.
In addition to supporting work within the School, members of the committee are active in both College and University-level sustainability work, championing the broader implementation of policy to tackle sustainability issues.
The membership of the committee consists of: