Students Organising for Sustainability UK (SOS-UK), alongside the National Union of Students (NUS), the University and College Union (UCU) and People & Planet (P&P) are calling for ambitious carbon reduction targets to take action on the climate emergency and ecological crisis.

We know that in order to have any hope of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees we need to commit to and start delivering these ambitious targets by the end of the academic year (2020/21).

​We've collated UK university and college carbon reduction targets to view and compare across the sector. Targets were collected based on a 2022 snapshot of the sector so may not reflect later updates to policies. They are scored based on the ambition, and we will develop the resource at a future date to score based on progress and implementation. Check out our scoring methodology.

Find out about your university or colleges carbon target, according to our 2022 snapshot assessment.

Institutions can re-submit data here if there have been updated to their targets and we will adjust scores at the time of our next update.

We have articulated a suitable goal for the sector to support institutions to develop targets. However, this is not a prescription, and we would expect individual targets to be developed in consultation with students and staff, and justifiable to their own university community.

UK universities and colleges should publicly commit to being net zero emissions for scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2030.

Within 12 months of this commitment, institutions should have developed a fully-costed, comprehensive action plan showing the planned emission reduction curve.

Targets should be set by the end of the 2020/21 academic year and action plans published by the end of the 2021/22 academic year.

​Visit our website to see more detail.

For any queries on this work, please contact hello@sos-uk.org.