Our commitment to addressing the climate emergency is far from theoretical: we live it daily here in College. Our historic buildings act as a laboratory for us to solve sustainability challenges on our doorstep, and we ensure we turn our green lens on every aspect of our operations. St John’s adopted a zero-carbon ambition some years ago, and since 2021 we have been implementing a demanding and ambitious action plan that focuses on the changes where we expect to achieve the greatest impact in three key areas: energy consumption; biodiversity gains; and sustainable everyday operations.
Most of our carbon emissions as a College come from gas. Harnessing the research expertise in our Fellowship, we developed and are now delivering a programme to de-gasify the main College site. Our solutions include using air source heat pumps and we are exploring using ground source pumps or even heat exchangers to draw water from the River Cam as a source of heat in winter.
We are building a large PassivHaus project of over 130 new student rooms: Passivhaus buildings are created to rigorous energy efficient design standards so that they maintain an almost constant temperature and require very little additional heating or cooling. We are also trialling innovative technologies to minimise heat loss in our historic buildings and allow more precise control of energy use. Alongside this, we are working with partners across the city on the potential for district heating.
Our intention is to halve scope 1 and 2 emissions from the main College site within a decade. Progress in College is very promising; our main dependency is the electricity supply constraint facing the city centre.
Biodiversity enhancement runs alongside our decarbonisation plan. The Bin Brook is an important watercourse flowing through St John’s, into the River Cam. By removing the concrete banks from the brook, we are enabling it to adopt a more natural course and behaviour. Among the many benefits of this measure, the enhanced habitat is likely to attract water voles and otters and support more bird and insect life.
Similarly, we are changing the planting of the College grounds: by removing lawns and less sustainable planting, we can replace them with more varied and resilient plants and trees. This diversity, as well as supporting more insect life, small mammals and birds, will improve the wellbeing of human life in College too.
This ranges from using electric ride-on mowers (instead of diesel) to cut the lawns in our historic courts to ‘Swish’ pop-up clothes swapping events. We have been active in reducing food waste, using sustainable materials, recycling and adopting sustainable transport measures. Staff, students and Fellows help to generate new ideas and share good practice in our Sustainability Forum. Opportunities for participation range from our postgraduate allotments and student gardening volunteers to the St John’s bird sanctuary and beekeeping society. This is all reflected in St John’s achieving Gold and Platinum awards in the Cambridge Green Impact Awards since 2020.
In terms of our financial investments, the College had divested from all direct fossil fuel investments by 2013, and we remain on track to meet our commitment to divest from all meaningful indirect fossil fuels investments by 2030.
