Environmental Report 2023

Dear readers, dear university members,
The environmental report is today an established tool that enables us to review past and future activities in the fields of environmental performance, teaching and research at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. It is an invaluable monitoring tool for the university as a whole as well as for me as Climate Officer to ascertain what we have achieved in this field here at the university in the past two years. I am therefore delighted to be able to introduce the environmental report for the first time with this foreword in my role as Vice President for Social Transformation. The fact that the 2021 environmental report was presented immediately after I was appointed Vice President by the Senate at the meeting on 9 June 2023 proved a happy coincidence. For it allowed me to take the authors’ findings and appeals on board and begin addressing the associated tasks right away. The focus was on clarifying how the university addresses the topic of sustainability as a whole – not just the environmental dimension, though, but the social and economic ones, too.

A few years ago, in 2019, when I was a senator, I witnessed how students called on the Senate of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar to declare a climate emergency. At the time, we didn’t do as they asked, but rather decided to proactively address the climate crisis. A growing amount has been achieved at the university since then: Within teaching, the number of degree programmes addressing aspects of sustainability has increased steadily. Meanwhile in research, the questions considered increasingly focus on tackling the climate crisis. And most recently, in January 2024, the budgeted units resolved to invest 1% of their budget in tangible improvement of the environmental performance. This is a clear sign of the university’s commitment to the goal set by the Presidential Board newly appointed in 2023 to become a certified sustainable university in accordance with EMAS. It is a lot, but until we manage as a global society to slow climate change and mitigate its consequences, we must continue to work intensively on our own issues.

I would nonetheless like to emphasise a number of important, positive decisions: Since the summer of 2023, the department for sustainable development headed by Dr. Tonia Schmitz has been working under my leadership with the Sustainability Team to implement measures to boost at the university and develop criteria to quantify these measures in the areas of research, teaching, transfer, governance and construction/operation.

The two authors of this report are also part of the sustainability team: Environmental Officer Steven Mac Nelly (MSc) and, in an advisory role, Climate Protection Officer Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eckhard Kraft. My heartfelt thanks to them both for their commitment to preparing this report as well as to all those who contributed data and especially all members of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, who remain committed to our goal of becoming a sustainable university.

The challenges we face as a society are complex and require our collective action. Let us continue drawing on the blend of ingenious knowledge, design creativity and humanistic reflection for which the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is renowned to achieve a more sustainable future. May the 2023 environmental report serve as inspiration to you all for this.

Warm wishes

Ulrike Kuch
Vice President for Social Transformation