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F the climate emergency is the biggest challenge faced by humanity, it must become a greater focus for academic libraries. CILIP’s Green Libraries initiative is a welcome start, and we must all turn commitment into action at scale to make a difference. If we are to achieve this, we need to understand what we are best positioned to affect


In higher education, the role of universities in the climate emergency is significant. Through research, universities have made a major contribution to the understanding of climate change and how society can respond. Through education, graduates apply discipline skills to solve problems. Universities are also making strong public commitments to sustainability, including embedding the climate emergency into the curriculum and setting targets to achieve net zero. Given this context, what can academic libraries contribute? Last summer, Leo Appleton and I co-authored an article1


on the role of academic


libraries in climate action. We outlined several areas of activity beyond the usual focus on the physical estate and there are two in particular I want to explore here, the first is an opportunity and the second is a challenge.


An information and education issue


The first is coloured by my personal experience and has reminded me not to assume prior knowledge or shared perspectives. Before I became an information professional, I was an earth scientist and since school had lived and breathed the science of climate change. I was also an environmentalist, and never imagined anything other than taking action to avert a clearly existential risk. But not everyone sees things this way and the climate emergency is in part


June 2024


Through research, universities have made a major contribution to the understanding of climate change and how society can respond.


an information and education issue. You need only spend a few minutes on social media to observe outright denial, conspiracy theories, and the cherry- picking of facts to match personal beliefs.


Reading, talking, and acting At Sheffield Hallam, the Library’s Big Read for 2021/22 was How to Save Our Planet: the Facts, a uniquely accessible and engaging book by Professor Mark Maslin, an accomplished and internationally respected climate scientist. Working in partnership with our academic community, the Library distributed 8,000 print2


copies, and organised


institutional-wide opportunities for learning and conversation. The interest was clear, but so too was an uneven distribution of knowledge. I was particularly struck by the passion of the humanity students who delivered a public reading of the book, whilst at the same time acknowledged information that was new to them.


Literacies and climate change in the curriculum


So, given the climate information war and the value of cross-institution co-curricular learning opportunities, what action can academic libraries take? I believe our role as experts in information literacy and academic skills, and our position as a multi- disciplinary resource, means we are well placed to enable and facilitate institutional education and connection on the climate emergency. Whether to help our community critically evaluate information or to actually deliver climate and carbon literacies directly.


What gets measured


The second area where we need to pay attention is the impact of digital. Many stakeholders instinctively assume physical media is less sustainable than digital, but thus far I have not seen any compelling evidence for this. We need to know what the impact of digital is,


including the hundreds of millions of searches and downloads of scholarly information and data academic libraries deliver, and where responsibility lies. Universities monitor emission targets using industry standard frameworks which categorise emissions as scope 1, 2, or 33


. The Library’s digital footprint is largely outside the organisation and in theory falls into Scope 3. However, where I know my targets for Campus Services at Hallam, there is no equivalent guidance or information for the Library, and we risk leaving it to the wider knowledge community to solve if we do not take a grip ourselves. IP


References 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2023.2230652


2. For anyone interested in carbon footprints and how they compare I recommend How Bad Are bananas: the Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners Lee. In this case, print books have a relatively small footprint.


3. See https://ghgprotocol.org and https://www.eauc.org.uk/scef INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 37


Nick Woolley, Director of Library and Campus Services at Sheffield Hallam University.


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