A climate-neutral university by 2030? That ship has sailed

Every year, Utrecht University's operations become a little more sustainable, according to the university's 2025 annual report, The Campus as a Compass. UU is replacing old appliances with more energy-efficient models, improving building insulation and has made all its cars electric. By 2025, its natural gas consumption fell by 27 per cent, its CO₂ emissions decreased by 25 per cent, and the university sent 6 per cent less waste to landfill or incineration.

Last year, for the first time, UU calculated its biodiversity footprint, the measure of the impact of its activities on nature and biodiversity at Utrecht Science Park (USP). Things are moving in the right direction for the flora and fauna on campus: new species have been discovered, and the plants and animals that UU would like to see at USP – the so-called indicator species – are being spotted more frequently.

Lastly, the university has an action plan to protect university buildings and the Science Park against more extreme weather.

Climate-neutral
Even so, some are concerned. Twenty years ago, UU set a target to become CO₂-neutral by 2030, but it revised the goal a few years ago. One problem with this ambition is that it is complicated to calculate CO₂ emissions from commuting, as well as the emissions from suppliers or contracted companies. The current goal is to achieve climate-neutral operations by 2030, but this focuses on areas over which UU has direct control.

According to Jeroen Hutten and Jeannine van Bree from the Sustainability Office, the department tasked with promoting and supporting sustainable initiatives, it is “complicated” to achieve such sustainable operations by 2030 for several reasons. “The main reason is that the university has fallen behind schedule on several construction projects. Buildings such as Veterinary Medicine's Androclus and Nieuw Gildestein, which consume a lot of energy, cannot be phased out by 2030,” Hutten explains. Under the current schedule, the new building for the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine will not be used before 2031.

Grid congestion is also preventing this ambition from being realised. “Although we would love to run entirely on green electricity, that's just impossible right now. Not enough green energy is available, which means we have had to run the combined heat and power plant more than we would have liked to generate electricity from gas. On a positive note, UU used the plant far less frequently last year. This resulted in a 27 per cent saving on our natural gas consumption in 2025 and contributes significantly to the reduction of the UU’s CO₂ emissions.”

Hutten argues that the university could offset CO₂ emissions by donating money to an organisation that plants trees, but this measure is not desirable, as it is less sustainable. The university hopes to commission the solar park in Bunnik in 2027.

Another area the university needs to focus on is its energy consumption. Its electricity consumption increased in 2025, and the reasons for this are still being investigated.

Waste sorting is complicated
Although the university is sorting and reusing more waste, it needs to step up its efforts if it wants to become a zero-waste institution by 2030. “Being zero-waste means that the institution no longer sends waste to landfill or incinerates it. Each person is only allowed one Brussels sprout’s worth of residual waste per day. The rest must be reusable,” explains Hutten.

His colleague Jeannine van Bree explains that the university sorts its waste regularly, and it found that “50 per cent of it does not belong in the residual waste stream. It is actually intended for a different waste stream”. The total volume of commercial waste fell by 6.4 per cent between 2022 and 2025 to 1,171,679 kilograms. 63 per cent of this waste is sent to landfill or incinerated. The proportion of waste sent to landfill or incinerated is expected to fall to 20 per cent by 2030, but the target is 0 per cent. “We are working hard on additional measures to ensure we'll still achieve this target.”

This year, the university began working to turn the Vening Meinesz Building A into a zero-waste building (link only available to users with a Solis ID). “We’ve started working on three floors,” says Van Bree. The university has gathered valuable information about the confusion staff experience when throwing things away by placing a "doubt bin" at several places across the building. Van Bree hopes that better information provision will help people understand which waste belongs in which bin. The lessons learned from this experiment can then be applied in other UU buildings. “Perhaps we’ll still make it by 2030.”

Looking ahead
In 2025, the Sustainability Office was told it had to reduce spending, like all other departments under the University Corporate Offices. This has caused implementation delays. “We managed to avoid firing staff members, but we had to cut back on our responsibilities,” says Hutten. “Now, we need help from other people across the university more often. We have received that help, and that’s great to see, but those other parts of the university have also had to cope with cutbacks.”

Nevertheless, new initiatives are also underway, such as work on climate adaptation, which is one of the five areas by which the university measures its sustainability. The four other areas are energy, biodiversity & ecosystems, circularity & waste, and climate mitigation, which concerns the carbon footprint.

“Climate change is making the weather more extreme,” says Hutten. “Earlier this year, the university had to close its doors for several days due to extreme heat and snowfall. An action plan is now in place. For example, we’re going to investigate where critical infrastructure is located on the USP campus that we may need to protect against heavy downpours. We'll also investigate where we need to provide more cooling on hot days – both inside the buildings and outside.”