University of Surrey is sharing good practice in the latest Staff and Student Sustainability Survey

In 2017, Surrey established a vision for sustainability across operational, curricular and research areas, and 2018 marked the start of a new effort to turn this into a coherent strategy.

Embedding sustainability into organisational culture was set as one of the major goals for the upcoming years. In order to achieve this, a better understanding of staff and students’ behaviour on campus, their perceptions of Surrey’s environmental performance and their concerns regarding global and local environmental issues was needed.

Therefore, all current staff and students at Surrey were invited to take the Sustainability Survey from the 7th to 31st of May 2019. Participants were also asked to provide suggestions on how the sustainability performance at Surrey could be improved.

The objectives of the survey were to:

• obtain information about staff and students’
• social norms, attitudes and behaviours related to energy consumption and waste production
• concerns about environmental issues in general and with relation to the university;
• perceptions of sustainability in the UK’s higher education sector, and more specifically, sustainability performance at the University of Surrey;
• create a baseline that would help the Sustainability and Energy Team measure impact of communications and engagement campaigns;
• register actions related to sustainability that staff and students were already engaging in;
• identify highly motivated staff and students who would like to become sustainability champions.

Download the report to find out more.