Amelie on the school's environmental work
Head of School Amelie Eriksson Karlström writes about the CBH School's environmental work and the climate impact of our business trips.
This week, the school management group did the annual review of our environmental work. This review is part of the environmental management system at KTH, where an annual cycle is used to set goals, work on improvements, and then follow up on the work. KTH has sustainability goals in education, research, collaboration and a number of other areas. During the management review, we went through activities and statistics in several of these areas.
One issue that has been discussed a lot in recent years is the climate impact of our business travel. Since we have a lot of international collaborative projects and often present research results at international conferences, we need to do some air travel. This however, makes it difficult for us to reach KTH's goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from business travel by 40% by 2025.
Travel decreased dramatically during the pandemic, but has now picked up again. However, a review of the schools' carbon dioxide emissions shows that the CBH School had slightly lower carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 than in 2019, and that CBH's emissions per person in 2023 were about the KTH average; carbon dioxide emissions were lower than at two of the other schools at KTH, but higher than at the other two. At the meeting, we also went through interesting statistics that show what proportion of our scientific publications are related to one of the global sustainability goals, and here the CBH School is above the KTH average. The two SDGs that most publications at CBH address are goal #7: Sustainable energy for all, and goal #3: Good health and well-being.
Amelie