Climate scenarios project wins Green Gown award

A collaborative project on the impact of climate change on the New Zealand tertiary education sector has been awarded a 2024 Green Gown Award.

The awards recognise exceptional sustainability initiatives undertaken by tertiary education institutions. Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, was part of the NZ Tertiary Education Sector Futures Group (TESFG), a cross-sector group that won the award in the Powerful Partnerships category.

The TESFG explored the urgent issue: How will climate change impact Aotearoa New Zealand’s tertiary education sector between now and the end of the 21st century?

“This joint achievement, for all Aotearoa New Zealand universities, wānanga, and Te Pūkenga, demonstrates the value of sector collaboration on matters of global significance,” said Simon Neale, Chief Property Officer. 

The sector-wide Climate Scenarios project started from the premise that climate change is underway with significant impacts for Aotearoa New Zealand projected within the next decade.

As a key pillar of society, tertiary education needs to understand its climate-related risks and opportunities, and to make headway on climate adaptation planning. To this end, the TESFG used scenario planning as a tool to assess plausible futures.

Scenario-planning workshops were held concurrently in five locations across Aotearoa. Over 100 participants attended, including academic and professional staff, student leaders, and representatives from local and central government, iwi, business and civil society.

In Workshop One, participants discussed and mapped potential drivers of change in terms of the following: student numbers, the form of learning, structure of the sector, and role of the sector.

In Workshop Two, they considered what might happen between now and 2090 across a range of scenarios with varying degrees of global warming, as well as differing degrees of planned societal responses to climate change.

The TESFG then developed four plausible scenarios for the future. These were published in a report that will serve as a tool for each institution’s climate adaptation planning.

At Waipapa Taumata Rau, participation in the TESFG was sponsored by Chief Property Officer Simon Neale and led by the Environment and Sustainability Office. AUT and the University of Auckland co-hosted the Auckland region’s workshops, which were held in the University's Unleash Space.

Participants from the University included student leaders from AUSA, and staff from the Environment and Sustainability Office, Risk Office, Planning and Development, Facilities Management, Finance, the Curriculum Framework Transformation Project, Sustainability Hub, International Office, Faculties of Science and Engineering, and Ngā Ara Whetū, Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society.

In the Green Gown Australasian awards, Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland was also a finalist in in the Climate Action category, a submission that focused on the B201 adaptive reuse project as a flagship in the University’s journey to Net Zero carbon.