Through our research institutes and centres, we find innovative solutions for cleaner energy and more sustainable use of resources.

We contribute to the challenge through our:

• Sustainable Futures, which brings together our successful interdisciplinary working to produce integrated and sustainable solutions to urgent environmental challenges
• Royce Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (led by the Henry Royce Institute)
• Tyndall Manchester (part of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research)
• Manchester Environmental Research Institute
• Sustainable Consumption Institute
• Manchester Institute for Innovation Research
• Policy@Manchester

Research beacons 

Our research beacons are examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest questions facing the planet, including environmental sustainability:

• Energy – explores the sustainability and efficiency of different energy sources and systems.
• Industrial biotechnology – works towards replacing our reliance on fossil fuels with plants, algae, fungi, marine life and micro-organisms to change how we manufacture chemicals and materials, and provide sources of renewable energy.
• Advanced materials – focuses on graphene and other 2D materials, pioneering innovation on sustainability in areas such as clean water and more sustainable energy storage devices.
• Global inequalities – addresses issues of global development in sustainability and people’s lived experience of environmental breakdown.

Using our Air Quality Supersite and Manchester Urban Observatory, we combine expertise from the Manchester Environmental Research Institute, the Manchester Urban Institute, the Data Science Institute, and Digital Futures to underpin world-leading research into air quality and help Greater Manchester achieve its goal of becoming a green city region.

Our Living Campus Plan has been developed as part of the University’s Environmental Sustainability Strategy, specifically to address the challenges of a growing urban campus alongside the opportunities a healthy environment provides for people and nature. The Plan recognises our dependency on the natural environment and the services it provides, and seeks to support these services and provide environmental benefits across campus.

Learn more about our living campus.

Alongside the ecological crisis, climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity.  It is critical we limit global average temperature rises to no more than 1.5 degrees, in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement. This requires severe and urgent reductions to our carbon emissions.

A carbon budget is the amount of carbon emissions an individual or organisation can emit into the atmosphere before emitting more than their “fair share” of the remaining carbon we can emit globally if we are to not exceed 1.5 degrees. 

Our carbon budget was set by climate scientists at The University’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The same team were also asked to set a carbon budget for Manchester, and this led to the adoption of the same target by many organisations across the city.  This is captured in one of The University’s eight measures of success in the Our Future strategy under Carbon Reduction: “We will align to the city’s decarbonisation pathway and 2038 target for zero carbon”. 

Although the 2038 target and carbon budget relates only to our direct emissions (Scopes 1&2 under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol), we recognise that our indirect (Scope 3) emissions – which include all the carbon associated with our “value chain” – are likely to be considerably larger than our direct footprint and must be acted upon, despite being less within our control.