Carbon reporting

Cardiff University’s commitment to reducing our carbon emissions as much as possible is supported by transparency about our emissions, both current and historical.

The below chart shows our baseline emissions, and emissions according to a range of different reporting approaches, in the most up to date reporting year (1 August 2021 to 31 July 2022).

Notes

1. We have analysed our most significant carbon emissions for Scopes 1 and 2 since 2005/06 utilising our Estate Management Report tool, providing a baseline from nearly 20 years ago.
2. In the last two years, the Welsh Government’s Public Sector Net Zero Reporting Framework has offered a largely similar, but in some instances adjusted, methodology to calculate carbon emissions. For Scope 1, this adds further data on emissions from anaesthetic gases and F gases. For both Scopes 1 and 2, there are slight variations to calculations in the Estates Management Report, e.g. leased buildings are included in the Welsh Government’s reporting. The biggest difference is additional analysis of Scope 3 emissions, though we note, current methodology for calculating the very large category of ‘Supply Chain’ emissions may not best reflect our emissions accurately.  Our provision of this data supports the current Welsh Government ambition for the public sector to achieve carbon neutral status by 2030.
3. In 2023, a new Higher and Further Education sector emissions monitoring and reporting methodology - the “Standardised Carbon Emissions Framework” - was launched by the EAUC (Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges). This framework is being adopted widely across the UK education sector and Cardiff will include reporting using this (again, slightly nuanced) methodology, reporting from 2022/23 onwards.

Our reporting of previous year carbon data takes us some time to compile, hence there is a delay in reporting. We will update this page to include 2022/23 data in summer 2024.