Energy efficiency and CO2 emissions: evidence from the UK universities

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 a leading role in this vision by adopting energy-saving and emissions reduction strategies. Using HESA data, a centralized system of reporting energy use and corresponding emissions, we adopt a two-step system GMM estimation procedure to estimate the effect of energy efficiency on CO₂ emissions for 119 UK universities over the period between 2008–2009 and 2018–2019. Results confirm that higher energy efficiency is conducive to lower emissions. However, the less-than-elastic relationship between energy efficiency and emissions implies that energy efficiency improvement alone cannot enable the UK universities to comply with their net-zero objectives unless they increasingly adopt renewable energy sources. Despite this, universities were able to avoid 2.21 gtCO₂e emissions over the sample period due to energy efficiency improvements. Our results are robust to alternative specifications.

Shaikh M.S.U. Eskander & Khandokar Istiak (2022) Energy efficiency and CO₂ emissions: evidence from the UK universities, Applied Economics, DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2022.2130872