Search these pages to explore a selection of our directory of activities. You can use the keyword search and filter buttons to discover how we are addressing each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the five priorities in our Social Responsibility and Civic Engagement Plan. You can also filter activities by location and function.
searching subjects: Regional
Each year, we host the Making a Difference Awards to celebrate the incredible and inspiring work of our University community. The awards highlight the extensive range of social responsibility initiatives of our staff, students, alumni and external partners, and covers categories such as benefit to research; widening participation; environmental sustainability and equality, diversity and inclusion.
We provide access to university facilities (e.g. labs, technology, plant stocks) to local farmers and food producers to improve sustainable farming practices as part of our H3 programme – one of four research consortia funded by the £47.5M ‘Transforming UK Food System for Healthy People and a Healthy Environment SPF Programme’ delivered by UKRI, in partnership with the Global Food Security Programme, BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, Defra, DHSC, PHE, Innovate UK and FSA. As part of this programme we provide local food producers with access to our proprietary technologies allowing them to diversify their food production. This includes access to our laboratories in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology for analysis of crop nutrition and soil carbon. We are also building a hydroponic demonstrator as part of an InnovateUK Knowledge Transfer Partnership with a local Manchester-based company who are producing a sustainable artificial growth substrate. This company has access to university facilities and technologies that is aiming to bring to market new and sustainable growth medium. This will develop a new way of reusing waste foam by mixing foam particles with adhesives that absorb water, to make a new type of synthetic soil, with many different applications that have benefits for advancing sustainable food growing practice. As part of this we are building a demonstrator at The Firs. The Firs environmental research station has recently undergone a major redevelopment with the investment of £2million from the university’s endowment fund which has enabled the creation of a state of the art greenhouses facilities that are being used for issues relating to food security and climate change. The site is made up of fourteen climate controlled growing compartments which are able to produce a range of different environments from tropical to sub-arctic. By doing this they are able to simulate different growing environments to replicate conditions from around the world and conditions as a result of climate change.
We are involved in co-operative planning for climate change disasters at both local and regional levels, working closely with government. Locally, our Grow Green Project supports local government, partners and stakeholders to design and deliver a detailed green infrastructure masterplan for climate action resilience in West Gorton, Manchester. Regionally, our RESIN Eco-cities project involves leading a consortium of researchers at the forefront of urban climate adaptation research.
100% of our electricity consumption is backed with REGO (‘Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin’) certification. This means that for every megawatt (or 1,000kWh) of electricity the University consumes, the equivalent volume of electricity is generated from renewable sources. We encourage our staff, students and our local community to make a similar move to renewable energy suppliers!
Examples of our civic partnerships include: We also prioritise global partnerships to advance our work towards the SDGs. These include:
Policy@Manchester is our University’s sector-leading policy engagement institute. It connects researchers with policymakers and influencers, nurturing long-term policy engagement partnerships and impact.
We partner with a range of organisations to carry out meaningful public engagement with diverse audiences and share ideas and research as well as inspiring informed discussion, debate and creativity. Examples include:
We partner with small local charities in Manchester right through to major government departments through our Q-Step programme. This places students on internships in organisations that require data skills and analysis and we’ve collaborated on projects with the Office for National Statistics on global, national and regional datasets used to measure progress on SDGs.
We’re committed to empowering students with the knowledge, skills and opportunities to address all of the SDGs through partnerships with public, private and civil society organisations. Our University Living Lab platform connects student projects with external organisations to address the SDGs. Our Volunteer Hub acts to advance partnerships between hundreds of charities and our student volunteers. And many academic programmes offer service-learning partnerships, where external organisations benefit from practical student interventions in areas such as dentistry, optometry, pharmacy, business and legal advice.
Our Justice Hub allows students to explore and apply various arms of the law to make real change in our communities. The Hub runs a free legal advice centre for economically disadvantaged people in areas such as family, housing and immigration law. During the pandemic, our Justice Hub set up the Virtual Vacation Scheme, which aimed to simplify some very complicated areas of law impacted by the pandemic, and created an accessible and informative method of legal help for the community through workshops, videos, briefings and webinars.
As part of our Justice Hub, The Manchester Innocence Project (MIP) is one of only 13 organisations outside of the US to join the Innocence Network. Law students volunteering with MIP have the opportunity to take on live criminal appeals for those who maintain their innocence.
Our criminology researchers have linked up with leading research and technology development company, Trilateral Research, to collaborate on Project Honeycomb. This develops relationships with organisations across the private, public and civil society sectors, and supports them to record information related to modern slavery, human trafficking and exploitation. Building on these insights, Honeycomb runs a series of campaigns and helps the city intelligently and creatively protect people from the crimes of human trafficking and modern slavery as well as interrupting traffickers’ activities.
The Whitworth created the UK’s first dedicated post of Cultural Park Keeper. This has led to the creation of a Natural and Cultural Health Service programme of outdoor activities to raise awareness, educate and inspire our diverse visitors to connect with and protect life in our park. At Jodrell Bank we work with community and voluntary groups, including the RSPB and the Cheshire Beekeepers Association, to protect and enhance our natural environment.
A renowned engagement expert from our School of Environment, Education and Development is using her Ketso Connect community and stakeholder engagement toolkit to help the government’s Natural England advisers launch their National Recovery Network. This network aims to restore 75% of protected sites and to create or restore 500,000 hectares of additional wildlife-rich habitat. The project is piloting public and civic engagement models with local libraries across Manchester.
As part of our partnership with the local NGO, Manchester City of Trees, students can use our Volunteer Hub to sign up for one-off or weekly tree planting sessions or even become a Citizen Forester. Our student volunteering is supporting their mission of planting one tree for every person across Greater Manchester, creating a healthier and more sustainable city region.
We’ve implemented watershed management strategies based on location-specific diversity of aquatic species. These ensure flow rates of water run-off in our urban environment are decreased and water quality is improved, including reducing flow into our local River Medlock on campus. At our rural Jodrell Bank site, we’ve also reduced flow into our local watercourses, protecting the great crested newt – a protected species that relies on aquatic life.
At our Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, we partnered with IncredibleOceans to deliver outreach talks and programmes to raise awareness of how oceans are facing threats from development and overfishing, climate change, pollution, acoustics and more. We teamed up with scientists, creatives, community organisations, campaigners, companies and broadcast media to maximise the impact of this educational outreach activity.
Life below water, in rivers and at sea, is threatened by waste flowing from urban river channels into the oceans. We’ve been highlighting the effect of microplastics – very small pieces of plastic debris including microbeads, microfibres and plastic fragments – on river systems and marine life through a range of pro-active media coverage, engagement with water companies and input into UK legislation on water management.
The University has pledged to support Manchester’s climate change target for zero carbon by 2038. This involves reducing carbon emissions from a 2018 baseline of 54,000 tCO2 to at least 21,000 tCO2 by 2025 and placing carbon impact at the heart of strategic decision making in the University’s new strategic plan.
Our academics are involved in GrowGreen, a five year, EU-wide project that promotes nature-based solutions to climate change. The project involves a range of citizens, business and public-private partnerships in neighbourhoods and across cities to promote learning, sharing and replicating nature-based solutions and strategies to urban sustainability challenges.
Our Manchester Museum has been awarded Arts Council England and National Lottery Project Grant funding for an ambitious two-year partnership project in collaboration with Museum Development North West and the Carbon Literacy Trust. The project will accelerate the museum sector’s ability to respond to the climate crisis. The Museum will host the ‘roots’: creating a nationally significant co-working hub of cultural environmental action that will bring together museum staff, educators, environmentalists, artists, researchers, third sector organisations and students.
Research by Alliance Manchester Business School has demonstrated how large-scale transitions are needed to deliver significant climate change. This has transformed how reducing greenhouse gas emissions is understood and addressed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has fed directly into policy recommendations made by the European Environment Agency.
To enable the UK to deliver significant carbon emissions reductions, the University created the Tyndall Local Carbon Budget Tool, helping cities, regions and organisations to play their part in achieving the global Paris Agreement. Building on the Setting City Area Targets and Trajectories for Emissions Reduction (SCATTER) project, this foundational research established the importance of embedding carbon budgets – rather than end point targets – in setting carbon reduction targets. It has been used by 250 UK local authorities, led local policymakers to focus on immediate emissions reductions and shaped global policy as part of the United Nations’ Race to Zero initiative.
We worked with colleagues at The University of Sheffield on Change Points to develop new ways of understanding how householders’ routine activities end up demanding resources, including energy, food and water. A key output was the co-design of a toolkit to support policy makers and other non-academic stakeholders interested in developing nuanced policy processes and business practices around household sustainability.
Our Manchester Museum is working with regional and national partners to host a pioneering Creative Ageing Development Agency (CADA) – a national organisation advocating for and supporting the culture sector to be more age friendly.
Making a Difference Awards
Sustainable farming and food production: sharing our facilities and knowledge
Cooperative planning for climate change disasters
Renewable energy pledge
Social responsibility partnerships
Policy@Manchester
Public engagement partnerships
Q-Step data partnerships
Student learning partnerships
Justice Hub
Manchester Innocence Project
Project Honeycomb
Cultural venues and nature
Nature Recovery Network
Manchester City of Trees
Watershed management
IncredibleOceans
UK rivers and microplastics
Towards net zero
GrowGreen project
Roots and Branches
Changing how international policy organisations understand and manage environmental problems
Empowering local climate-change action
Change Points
Ageing-friendly culture
