We welcome Wadham's first Director of Sustainability

The College is striving to become one of the first historic colleges serving as an exemplar of sustainability and climate change adaptation. Wadham’s Governing Body has recently adopted an ambitious Sustainability Strategy to deliver a net zero campus by 2035 and ensure that future students, staff, and fellows can thrive in an environment at the forefront of tackling the practical implications of climate change and biodiversity loss. This will demand significant investment; as part of Wadham’s next fundraising campaign, the College has set a target of £10m to implement the first phase of our Sustainability Strategy, and generous alumni are already contributing to this area.

Integral to delivering this ambitious plan is the appointment of the College’s first Director of Sustainability, Frances Lloyd, who steps away from her substantive position as Domestic Bursar to take on this role for a two-year period. Frances will be working with Joe Bull, Wadham’s Fellow in Climate Change Biology, who has led the development of the University’s net zero and biodiversity strategy, and with others to take forward Wadham’s Sustainability Strategy.

Frances, how did the role of the College's first Director of Sustainability come about?

Humanity is facing the biggest crisis ever – climate change. This is happening now. Global temperatures continue to rise, causing flooding, pollution, wildfires, habitat and species loss. Colleges are joining the University and setting ambitious sustainability targets to address this climate emergency, with the aim of being carbon net zero and biodiversity net positive by 2035. Best practice has shown that senior leadership is a critical part of planning, delivering and implementing strategic change to achieve success in these areas. With the generous support of a Wadham alumna, Wadham has been able to create the first role of Director of Sustainability within the University’s collegiate structure. I'm excited and honoured to be in this pioneering role. I’ll be working closely with Joe Bull, our Fellow in Climate Change Biology, to accelerate the college's priorities to address climate change and create an exemplar college in an historic setting for future generations and benefit others faced with similar challenges.

Joe, how will you and Frances work together?

Well, I come at this from a both research background and as someone with experience of working with organisations. So, my focus is the research side, and I’ve worked with industry on sustainability strategies as a consultant over the years.

A lot of the challenges we’ll be working on are operational challenges, which Frances leads on. Research can identify the questions that organisations need to ask to meet operational challenges, and this is where I and my group can help. The Estates team is using the best available technology to support Wadham’s Sustainability Strategy by exploring some of these issues and to monitor energy and efficiency in different rooms. This will eventually lead to further research as it provides a huge amount of data that we can analyse to explore the best way forward.

I've got almost 20 years’ worth of experience of advising organisations as a consultant on sustainability in practise, and so, although Frances is hugely experienced herself, I’ll provide to some degree a second pair of eyes and ears and a second opinion on some of these strategies and their implementation for the College.

In our Sustainability Strategy, we commit to using our research expertise to advance and implement effective sustainability solutions. Could you tell us more about this, Joe?

We have a couple of research programmes that are all about organisational sustainability, particularly related to biodiversity, but also to carbon and climate change. Increasingly, we’ve been tailoring research to provide findings that can be useful to colleges and organisations that are implementing sustainability strategies. This is an ongoing programme and we will continue to work in a way that supports such strategies.

An example of this is the research that we’ve done recently on Wadham specifically, in a year-long programme with one of our Masters in Biology students. The idea was to look at Wadham as an exemplar college as a case study for an interesting research angle. We have a huge amount of data from Wadham’s Estates Manager, Chris Cox, and the rest of the team that we can use to look at operations and as a basis to calculate the best way forward for the sustainability strategy. We wanted to ask the question, if Wadham has a net zero carbon strategy, how far does that take us towards a net gain for biodiversity outcomes? We asked this question because it is what a lot of organisations are doing. Carbon and climate change is a far more mainstream sustainability issue for many than biodiversity and nature. Lots of organisations around the world have carbon and climate strategies. They are asking if they make gains in this area, will it address issues around biodiversity? Or do they need additional initiatives to do so? We felt that Wadham was a good test case to explore this question quantitively, and we conducted this research over the last year. We hope that the findings will be published soon.

We’ve heard how operations and research at Wadham will work together to make changes. Frances, will you be working with others outside the College?

Yes, we plan to. We are at the early stage of discussions with the Zero Institute about joining their working group. The Institute is bringing together researchers and those tackling the practical implications across Oxford to achieve the goal of guiding global energy implementers towards a zero-carbon energy future, working closely with policy and practice. We also plan to partner with experts in other organisations to trial and support innovative solutions and share knowledge and ideas.

We aim to deliver a new environmental sustainability engagement plan across the College to raise awareness and deliver behavioural change. Frances, how will students, staff, and Fellows be involved in making our College community sustainable?

Collaboration and individual actions across the whole community are crucial for achieving our sustainability commitments and ensuring that they endure in the long-term. Sustainability engagement champions are needed across the whole college to make a real difference. We will build on our existing networks and create new ones. The Sustainability Strategy Working group, Department Heads Sustainability Action Group, Sustainable Food Action Group and Sustainability Department Champions Action Group are already bringing people together and supporting them to take actions. We are proud of the progress made within departments and by the student body to engage college members and drive positive change. The Students’ Union appoints two Ethics and Environment Officers who are responsible for considering and incorporating sustainability in their activities. Student Staircase Sustainability Champions promote and support positive behaviours.

We plan to share more information and activities via our website, intranet, social media channels, seminars and webinars. Our forthcoming Environmental Sustainability Engagement Plan aims to inspire the whole College community to get involved and take actions.

Joe, what are your priorities for the next two years?

The key thing is to act. Lots of work from Frances and the team has gone into developing an ambitious strategy. We have the evidence and some funding to support what we want to do. Crucially, we must start making inroads on the implementation of projects that are related to the strategy. We don’t want it to sit on a shelf - we want to see some tangible outcomes soon, showing current and future donors that we can convert the strategy into actions that are beneficial to the College, and much more widely. In two years’ time it will be 2027, getting closer all the while to 2030. Two hundred governments across the world agreed that by this time, we should be heading towards the point where we start to halt and reverse the global decline of biodiversity. We need to make serious progress towards this and towards halting and reversing climate change. So, the key thing is – ‘spade in the ground’.

Frances, the same question for you.

I’ll be working with Joe to provide strategic leadership on behalf of Governing Body for these ambitious sustainability commitments. One of my priorities is to build and develop a successful delivery roadmap, which will include sharing this work with decision makers in other organisations. I’ll be working with our Development Team to fundraise for advancing sustainability, which will steer future initiatives. My priorities will align with our ambitious sustainability strategy. I plan to share progress on developing plans and actions on carbon reduction; biodiversity; waste and water management; food sustainability; recycling; supply chains; travel; engagement and social sustainability in the College. It’s important that our culture supports this, as how people use the buildings and travel to work, for example, will help to make real and lasting changes.

Thank you, Frances and Joe, for sharing your thoughts and plans with us. We look forward to seeing the next steps for sustainable Wadham.

To get in touch, please email Frances.