The Student staff interviewed Dave Gorman, the first director of Social Responsibility and Sustainability to discuss the significant role of the department within the university and issues prevalent to society as a whole.
What duties/responsibilities does your job entail?
I’d probably generalize it to say that it’s not just about me, it’s about the department and about our allies across the university. Our department exists because the university decided, sometime ago now, that it wants to be socially responsible and sustainable and make a significant contribution to the world. We want to do more than just be about research, and teaching, and knowledge exchange. We want to do that for society, for impact, and for a positive purpose. So, our department exists to then do three things to help the university with that commitment. The first one is conveying the understanding of what we mean when we say social responsibility and sustainability and identifying some of the threats. This includes things like climate change, products that we buy and the impact it has on human rights, how we invest, and how we teach.
After we identify what it means, we then try to put out policies and plans to deliver that, such as helping the university write a response plan to climate change. The third thing we do is action, essentially raising awareness of these issues. The matter of fact is, that not everybody arrives at university aware that modern slavery exists and that if you’re not careful, you could be contributing towards it.
What made you choose this area of research; how did you end up joining your team?
Luck, I guess. Some people have this terribly planned story, but that really wasn’t the case with me. I trained in engineering originally and I was good at passing the exams but didn’t think I made a really good engineer. For a while, I didn’t really know what I wanted so I did a few years of voluntary work with disadvantaged groups such as homeless people, children, etc. My natural state is sort of middle-class bookworm, so to be exposed to these issues of real social need stuck with me. However, my first interest had always been climate change, so I spent a lot of my early career doing recycling and working on environmental issues within councils. I was with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency when a headhunter approached me about this position. I believed that the university could make a real difference and so I took it, knowing it would be an amazing opportunity. I’m a committed environmentalist; I’m committed to social
inclusion. I wouldn’t be here if I thought the university wasn’t.
What steps has this department, or the university taken in the past to address climate change or sustainability in general?
Well, we wrote the new climate strategy in 2016, accepting the fact that it was imperative we do more on climate change and that there were two things that it was critical that we focus on: cutting our emissions to become net zero by 2040 and that we needed to make this about more than just gas and electric. Although they are still important, we’ve also been able to give emphasis to other parts of the problem such as investments, research, how we travel, what we buy, etc. I think we’ve had some success in trying to embed sustainability within our investments. We’ve also been able to raise awareness on human rights and child labor, as well as the impact we have on other people around the world of our own decisions in terms of what we buy. We’ve had the opportunity to challenge some companies on their poor working conditions in parts of the world where we are buying products from and we’ve made it very clear that we don’t want to be accidentally supporting modern slavery. The last thing I would like to talk about is our investments which there has been a lot of passion about throughout the years. We sold off our coal and tar sands investments in 2015. At the request of students, the university asked us to move a million pounds of that into positive investments, but we were actually able to move 60 million pounds into the endowment fund which is now committed to renewables and sustainable technology for the future. More recently, we’ve invested in a social enterprise which are businesses that also deliver a social benefit. One example is a business we’ve funded called Invisible Cities, which are walking tours around Edinburgh delivered by people who were recently homeless and who had an opportunity to turn their life around.
What is the university planning on doing to address the climate crisis?
At the highest level, what we need to do is to cut demand. We don’t want to be producing
emissions in the first place. In order to do that, we are trying to build sustainably and are working on reducing energy consumption, which is where everyone can help by doing small things like turning off the lights. There’s also something we have called the Sustainable Campus Fund which helps us identify ways of being sustainable within the university through students and staff. Anyone within the university can apply for funding if they have a project in mind to help make the university more sustainable in the progress. The second thing is that at the moment we don’t think we can get to zero right now, so we want to do carbon sequestration. But we want to do this in a way where it’s real and we know that it’s genuine. Essentially, you reduce the number of emissions as much as you possibly can and you take the ones that are left, and you plant trees, or you do something else in order to offset it and bring it back to zero.
What is the best way for students to get involved and make a difference?
In a very practical way, we want students to act as if we’re living in a time of ecological and climate crisis; we want everyone to act like that. You can start with really small things: turn the lights off, get yourself a KeepCup, don’t use a plastic water bottle when you can use a reusable one, think about your food choices, think about your travel choices, etc. Also, if you feel that your courses aren’t giving you enough on social responsibility and sustainability, make that known to the university. You can also take part in any of the programs we run here within the department, like getting trained to become a student auditor or become a volunteer (which is always needed). There’s also an online course you can take called Be Sustainable, which will teach you and advise on ways you can be more sustainable in your everyday life.
Regarding sustainability, is there anything you think that people should know about?
I’d like to make a point that when people say that renewables don’t work or that they’re more expensive- it’s just not true, it’s absolute nonsense. Renewables have made more progress in the last twenty years than anyone could have imagined. We are now at the stage where solar power or wind power will be the cheapest option around the world for something like fifty countries now. It’s always been the case that if you consider the whole picture, the economics of it, it’s more cost-effective for society to use renewables than oil or gas because of all the harm caused by climate change; that has always been clear. What we are now seeing is that even if you forget about that big picture and you just look at the costs of running renewables and compare to the costs of say, coal, renewables win. Most importantly, please don’t think that because you can only do small changes yourself that they don’t matter- they do. If we all come together, we can
make a difference. Scotland and this university can be a beacon for the world. I can tell you this, people are watching everything that we are doing and therefore, we are inspiring change.
Image credit: Dun Dwagh via Flickr