Energy efficiency and CO2 emissions in the UK universities

Shaikh Eskander () and Khandokar Istiak

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Understanding how energy efficiency improvement can mitigate CO2 emissions is critical for global climate change policies to ensure environmental sustainability and a low carbon future. Being the catalyst for training future generations, universities can play an instrumental role in this vision by adopting energy-saving and CO2 reduction strategies. We investigate how energy efficiency and affluence affect the emissions reduction experience of the UK universities. Using HESA data, a centralized system of reporting energy use and corresponding emissions, we adopt a two-step estimation strategy to first develop efficiency and activity indices for residential and non-residential energy use and emissions, and then to employ a two-step system GMM estimation procedure that captures the environment-economy-energy nexus to analyze the impact of the energy efficiency on CO2 emissions. For 122 UK universities over the period between 2008-09 and 2018-19, econometric results, which are robust to alternative specifications and restricted samples, confirm higher energy efficiency is conducive to lower emissions. However, the less-than-elastic relationship between energy efficiency and emissions implies that the UK universities will not be able to comply with their net-zero objectives unless they increase their investments in renewables and energy-efficient technologies. These findings will draw interests from pro-environment activists, university and government administrators, and policymakers.

Keywords: Emissions; Energy; Index decomposition; University (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q41 Q42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:camaaa:2021-94

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