Goal 13: Climate Action

What we're doing

Climate Change Strategy

In January 2020, the University's Climate Change Strategy was published to show our commitment to tackling climate change. It demonstrates that, both operationally and academically, we will lead on the solution and avoid contributing to the problem.

Our approach is to:

1. Avoid – reducing our environmentally negative impact
2. Mitigate – increasing our positive impact and offsetting
3. Adapt – ready our campus for a changing world
4. Positive impact – teaching and innovating for a better world

Centre for Landscape and Climate Research

The Centre for Landscape and Climate Research is pursuing research excellence through discovery science and applied research with industrial partners. Our research develops Earth Observation methods, addressing environmental problems of the land and vegetation.

Research themes include:

• Earth Observation Data Science, using high-performance computing and cloud computing for the analysis of big satellite datasets
• Human/environment interactions, understanding the drivers and consequences of land use change, fire disturbance, deforestation and forest degradation
• Water and carbon cycle interactions, using Earth Observation to initialise, constrain and validate land surface and hydrological models

George Davies Centre

Our George Davies Centre building is the UK's largest non-residential project built to the ultra-energy-efficient Passivhaus standard.

The new £42 million building includes a 1.6km-long ground-to-air heat exchanger, inter-slab cooling and a highly-insulated and airtight building envelope. 

The building brings together Leicester Medical School, the Department of Health Sciences and Psychology under a single roof, and achieved a DEC 'A' rating in its first recorded year. This demonstrates its very low carbon emissions, helping the University to achieve its ambition to be recognised for 'environmental and sustainability excellence'.

Courses that feature modules relating to this goal