Written by Glen Westall
Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Corey Peterson, Chief Sustainability Officer at the University of Tasmania, about how the institution’s holistic approach to sustainable solutions has turned it into a global leader.
The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is a research institution that has led the way on sustainability within Australasia’s higher education sector. Since 2010, the university has increasingly put sustainability at the heart of its activities from operations and curriculum to research and community engagement. This has been enabled by initially creating a sustainability officer role that has progressed over time to manager, director and most recently Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO). Corey Peterson has shepherded the university on the journey towards more holistic sustainability while in these evolving roles since 2010.
Mr. Peterson tells Sustainability Business Magazine about what his job involves and how it’s driving UTAS’s agenda:
We are the first and currently only Australasian university to have a Chief Sustainability Officer role, which is exciting because we do see them elsewhere such as the UK and North America. It shows the commitment UTAS has made to sustainability as an integral part of our strategy. In fact, our Vice Chancellor recently noted at an international conference we hosted that sustainability is no longer an agenda just for us, it’s an agenda for the entire sector
“We’ve come a long way towards a holistic understanding of sustainability. I was hired in 2010 to deploy minor sustainability projects such as recycling bins but then moved onto bigger initiatives such as sustainable transport and energy efficiency. I realised that while we were well-placed to minimize negative impacts, we weren’t doing enough to generate positive impacts. That’s when we started truly evolving our thinking about sustainability beyond ‘just’ environmental management but to focus on the sociocultural and economic dimensions as well.
“UTAS is and has been at the forefront of Antarctic and environmental science for decades, meaning we have researched and taught about it for just as long. We want to make the university’s broader sustainability practices an exemplar in the sector in a similar way, so that we can say we don’t just teach it, we do it too. It’s been an ongoing journey.”
STARS
To understand the impact of its changes and practices, in 2020 UTAS became the first university in Australasia to adopt the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS).
“Five years ago, senior management backed my proposal to use a field-tested, voluntary and fully transparent metric,” explains Mr. Peterson. “I had researched STARS, which was developed by sustainability professionals in the higher education system in North America to understand what actually makes a ‘sustainable university.’ It has a continuous improvement approach to innovation by offering points for ongoing development. STARS allowed us to bring together all three aspects of traditional sustainability, but also focuses on student contribution and experience (the fourth pillar of sustainability for our sector) to tell a whole story.
“At first, we did have some challenges getting data from some areas of the university for various reasons. As a result, UTAS first received a Silver rating. After that, though, I was able to go to senior management and explain that we got Silver without even really trying, and that we’d easily improve if it was made clear to all areas that they needed to prioritise both data collection and a few targeted actions. Once it was more broadly understood that this was an institutional priority, we were able to submit our STARS report again in 2022 and set another first in Australasia by achieving a Gold rating.
We have now been working on achieving the highest rating of STARS Platinum. Only 13 of the many hundreds using STARS have achieved Platinum to date so it’s a high standard that we’re striving towards.”
With the institution firmly fixed on STARS aspirations, the whole university has looked at ways it can adapt to improve its sustainability credentials.
“The curriculum is changing at all levels to centre sustainability from a wildly successful Diploma of Sustainable Living to the Sustainability University Major and on into post-graduate areas,” the CSO says. “For example, our Business school has been pivoting accounting to focus on sustainability and climate with management degrees to align with Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Our Engineering discipline is in the process of a shift to actualise around their new academic title of School of Climate Safe Engineering.”
“We’ve also done significantly more around social issues such as equity, diversity, and inclusion as well as pushing forwards with environmental sustainability. We’ve fostered a collective culture so that if people think their small contribution doesn’t count, efforts are made to ensure they know that it does including clear explanations of how everything fits into the larger picture both within STARS as well as other impact metrics we use. We also celebrate their achievements and nominate them for the Green Gown Awards, raising the profile not of my team but of the rest of UTAS. We even won five of 12 Green Gown Awards Australasia categories at the 2024 awards.
“In this way, the whole university has really galvanized action towards improved sustainability outcomes over the last four years in particular and pushing for Platinum has really helped.”
Vetting the Chain
The supply chain forms a crucial component in any sustainability commitment, and it’s an area that Mr. Peterson has really pushed for best practice. In fact, he’s able to point to the turning point that enabled better vetting throughout UTAS’s supply chain network:
“Australia is only the second or third country in the world to introduce a Modern Slavery Act, and for us that was the piece of the puzzle that brought sustainability in procurement to the forefront. We had focused on environmental issues for a decade and the new Act focusing on the sociocultural factor enabled us to hone in on ensuring that we were properly interrogating our supply chains for modern slavery alongside environmental impacts.”
Our Procurement team was also able to leverage this additional impetus to further progress a focus on localisation and diversity.
“In terms of our procurement, we give preferential treatment to local suppliers,” Mr. Peterson says. “That might be First Nations suppliers, local at-risk communities, businesses run by and for people with disabilities, that sort of thing. One of my favourites is an all-women business that’s making hemp building materials, or hempcrete, in a rural part of Tasmania with the University supporting the business by including the largest use of the product in Australia in a new academic building. The CEO of this (currently) small business is focused on making sure rural women are getting opportunities to work. She has designed the work to be flexible so that the women put in the hours that work for them, such as when it is their turn to take their children to and from school or contribute to their communities in other ways.
“UTAS has a sustainable procurement policy and over the years it has led to me becoming increasingly involved in the tender reviews. I’ve been invited to look at everything from cleaning and construction contracts to fleet procurement and architecture. We give different tenders different weightings for sustainability to encourage action. Sustainability is half the points of our marketing products, for example, so that we no longer use cheap plastic items. We participate in the Australian Universities Procurement Network so that we’re working together as a sector to contribute to and learn from one another.”
Community Service
In terms of engaging local communities, UTAS has rolled out and taken part in initiatives that involve not just the people around its campuses but also on the campuses as well.
“We do quite a range of social and community projects,” explains Mr. Peterson. “We just won a Green Gown Award Australasia for Creating Impact for a BioBlitz co-operative project, which involved spending 30 hours in one place and getting members of the local community and school groups involved with categorising every organism they found. Around 350 people joined us to catalogue everything from bacteria and micro-organisms to bats and other mammals. We were out both day and night and everyone loved it. The Devonport City Council was involved as well as a group called the Bookend Trust.
“It was a collaborative effort to raise the profile of Kelcey Tier, which is a nature reserve in a really important bio-region. We wanted locals to understand the value of Kelcey Tier in a global setting. Now we hope that it will generate a groundswell of interest in the space and help protect it into the future.”
Mr. Peterson has also helped drive initiatives on campus that have got students and faculty involved:
“In addition to our 20 ‘recycling walls’ for non-standard items and our Reuse Program that has saved the university over $650,000 in four years, we have a standardised three-bin recycling system that includes recycling, composting and landfill bins. All the organic matter is collected separately because that helps not only with emissions but also landfill expenses. We also have the largest publicly available community garden in Australia. It is situated at our new Launceston campus, which has expanded our overall portfolio of community gardens to 4000 square meters of growing space, 2000 of which is heritage orchard and fruit trees.
“One of the biggest things we’ve done recently is that, by the end of the year, our entire passenger vehicle fleet will compromise electric cars. We started that in 2014 with deployment of some of the first generation EVs that helped prove to people that electric cars were more than just electric golf carts. Today, of course, there’s many more options available, so we have increasing support to switch to EVs. We’ve installed electric chargers across all campuses with many accessible to the broader community.”
All of these initiatives have been supported by my team’s Sustainability Integration Program for Students (SIPS).
“The program was initially for curricular based projects and some interns but quickly grew into a paid role for interns and fellowships,” explains the CSO. “They work with my team and carry out all sorts of work around the university, from University investments to art-based and environmental projects. We’ve had over 2,600 students involved over 14 years and won an International Green Gown Award for it a couple of years ago. We allocate $100,000 a year out of our fully divested from fossil fuels investment portfolio to pay the students. We divested from fossil fuels in 2021 as part of implementing a new investment policy. That underlines our commitment to sustainability and to achieving our sustainable development goals in the best way possible.”
“This year we expanded SIPS to support our community more broadly through an enrollable unit where students go and work out in the community with our supervision. That might be at a not-for-profit organisation, a business, or in the health service, for example. The students help improve the sustainability of those organisations and businesses across Tasmania supported by their own learnings and expertise from across the University.”
Working Together
UTAS also plays a key role in the Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACTS) network, which collaborates to advance sector-wide sustainability efforts. Mr. Peterson, who was formerly president of ACTS for many years, highlights the university’s leadership in carbon neutrality:
“We were the second university in Australasia to achieve certified carbon neutrality. We worked with another university that got there about nine months before us, and that close working relationship shows the sectoral approach we’ve taken. ACTS has enabled that.
“In the six years I was ACTS President, we evolved a small not-for-profit community organisation into a not-for-profit company supported by a new constitution and a whole heap of working groups. These groups bring our members together to cover everything from climate scenarios and scope 3 emissions guides to supporting the new sustainability and climate-related financial disclosure requirements and assessing sustainability culture in our institutions.
“The annual ACTS conferences and various webinars and workshops enable professionals in the field, my peers across other institutions, to link together and share knowledge as well as build connections that will help foster improvements in the sector. At the most recent event, hosted by UTAS, more than 120 sustainability professionals and students attended. ACTS is also a vehicle for international collaboration so that we can move together not even just as a region but as a world.”
Going Forwards
Looking to the future, as Mr. Peterson guides UTAS towards STARS Platinum, he is fully committed to delivering the university’s sustainability program.
“We’re expecting to get STARS Platinum in the near future, and that would make us the first institution in the region to get that rating,” he says positively. “That’s backed by all levels of UTAS. We also are working hard to continue being number one in climate action in the Times’ Higher Education Impact Ranking with three years in the top spot. We’ve also improved more broadly across the SDGs including achieving equal #2 overall globally with the University of Manchester which is much bigger than us in terms of finances and staffing. We’d love to see our university community’s efforts rewarded by getting to the top spot this year!
