At the start of this year we were visited by Primary School students from all over Cork County as part of our 10 Year Green Flag Anniversary. We were inspired by the hopes that these students have for the future and they challenged us to do better!

Between the winding boreens and the coastal highways of Cork, UCC’s Electric Bikes have travelled them all, over the past 6 months and not without the help of our friends at the Cork Bike Shed who serviced and maintained our fleet throughout. Our E-Bike trial has continued to be a resounding success, both in and out of the varying levels of Covid-19 Lockdown. Happy staff have enjoyed the benefits of the E-Bike trial and restricted their excursions in line with the travel limits.

Needless to say the closing of the campus in March 2020 due to the COVID pandemic had a big impact on our energy performance for the Academic year 2019/20. Our weekly electrical consumption reduced by 40% while our natural gas consumption, used to heat our buildings, reduced by over 50%.

By the end of the academic year the University reported that the total energy load reduced by 11%, when compared to the 2018/19 academic year.

Our beautiful campus is not only a place of learning and independent thinking but is also a home to 27 different forms of biodiversity habitats.

Every year UCC, like other public bodies, are required to undertake an exercise to calculate the energy performance of our buildings and display that performance through a Display Energy Certificate (DEC). The original intent of the DEC process was to give building owners an idea of how their buildings are performing in comparison to othe

As we head into the 2020/21 Academic Year, we are acutely aware of the difficulties faced by many of our staff and students over the last six months. We wish everyone the very best of luck over the next year and hope that Green Campus can continue to be a valuable asset to the campus community in these tough times.

UCC recently launched a new project (funded by the National Forum for Teaching and Learning) to strengthen our institutional commitments towards sustainability by developing a suite of digital resources to assist teaching staff with the integration of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into UCC curricula.  The project is being jointly led through Green Campus and UCC’s Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CITRL).  It builds on the success of our University Wide Module in Sustainability run through the Department of Sociology and Crimnology, with input from all four Colleges in the Univeristy.

We have learned a lot during lockdown; one of the most striking aspects has been the way that we humans have turned to the natural environment to help us cope with the mental anguish that COVID-19 has brought to our lives.  The link between time spent in green space and mental health and wellbeing is well established.  In taking time for nature we are also taking time for ourselves. 

Every day our Estates Office actively track and monitor 95% of the Universities energy load through its online energy metering platform. It records data from 192 energy meters across the estate. Working with our significant energy users to promote energy conservation, the University was on target, pre closure, to reduce its annual energy load by 1% absolute, a 6^th straight year of reducing our energy use.