People & Planet’s (P&P's) University League is a comprehensive and independent league table of UK universities ranked by environmental and ethical performance. It is compiled annually by the UK’s largest student campaigning network, People & Planet.
P&P Sections
The University of Kent has a publicly available Sustainability Policy The current version of the sustainability policy was signed by the interim Vice-Chancellor Professor Georgina Randsley de Moura and the Chair of Council Mark Preston in July 2025.
This policy is reviewed annually as part of the Management Review of our ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management System (EMS). Policy review usually takes place over the summer and the most recent policy was signed off in July 2025.
Our EMS sets out SMART targets for our significant environmental aspects. The Sustainability Policy outlines our commitments to the areas specified. Most areas have their own strategy documents that highlight the targets and timescales. The targets are reported and reviewed through the EMS Team, and reported upwards through the Sustainability Steering Group to Council.
Sustainability is included within the portfolio of a member of the University's Executive Group; John Duffy, Chief Operating Officer and University Secretary.
All areas of environmental sustainability are overseen by the Sustainability Steering Group (SSG). The SSG exists to provide directional guidance on delivering the requirements of the UN Sustainable Development Goals Education Accord and for leading development and implementation of a University-wide Sustainability and Net Zero Strategy.
The Sustainability Team, Dr Catherine Morris, Sustainability Manager, and Emily Mason, Sustainability Officer are supported by colleagues across the University with specific responsibilities to support this work.
All staff are encouraged to get involved with supporting sustainability. Our staff engagement programme empowers staff to take action and is supported by our network of sustainability champions.
Reducing the carbon footprint of our digital infrastructure is an objective within our Sustainability Strategy and we will be working to develop a sustainable digital strategy over the next year.
Specific initiatives take to date include:
- Produced guidance for staff and students on responsible AI use.
- Initiated a continuous improvement project on digital management to reduce the file storage and produce guidelines for staff on retention policies and best practice.
- All our procurement agreements (including digital) include sustainability standards such as ISO14001.
- Our E-Waste is processed through Stone where all items are reused or fully recycled.
As a university, we have an externally verified Environmental Management System (EMS), which covers the whole University estate. We have maintained the ISO14001:2015 standard since 2012 and successfully recertified for 3 years in December 2024.
The University includes its Ethical Investment commitments within the Investment Policy.
Ethical Investments are monitored by both the Sustainability Steering Group and Finance and Resources committee. The ToR of the Finance and Resources committee are given on the Governance webpages
We also published a list of our investment holdings which details how our investments held with Cazenove Capital are in their Responsible Multi-Asset fund, this is a highly ethically sound investment fund, designed to also monitor the carbon footprint of investments.
We are committed to not investing either directly, or in pooled investment funds a major part of whose business is pornography, gambling, tobacco, fossil fuels or armaments.
We publish information about the University's investment practices and procedures in such a way that facilitates greater transparency and access to information for students, staff and the general public. All of the information above can be found on our Finance webpages.
The University includes sustainability and ethical standards, particularly with regards to high risk sectors such as fossil fuel, arms, mining and tobacco, in its vacancy handling policy which is updated annually.
Information about the careers service structure and staff can be found on the careers and employability webpages.
The University of Kent Careers and Employability Service is not part of any combined Careers Service but uses the resources and support provided by a number of third parties as set out in our Code of Practice.
We have a publicly available Carbon Management Plan statement which sets out our short, medium and long-term targets to achieve net zero by 2040.
This document also includes our baseline data and interim targets for Scope 3 emissions in line with our target to achieve net zero Scope 3 by 2050.
As well as the data, the published statement sets out the responsibilities, governance and financing of our carbon reduction work.
We have now calculated our entire carbon footprint across scopes 1, 2 and 3 and have published a full breakdown of this data.
The University is committed to improving the terms and conditions for its own workers as well as for those involved within the University's supply chains.
We are a member of the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) which is fully affiliated to Electronics Watch on behalf of its members.
The University has also signed up to the Can't Buy My Silence universities pledge.
We have a publicly available Sustainable Food Action Plan reviewed annually by the Sustainable Food Steering Group and reported to the Sustainability Steering Group (SSG). This sets out our vision for the provision of affordable, healthy and sustainable food across all of our outlets.
Key objectives include:
- embedding sustainability into the tender process for our suppliers
- adopting a plant-forward approach
- reducing food waste
The Sustainable Food Steering Group includes representatives from Commercial Services, Procurement and Sustainability as well as student and staff representatives.
Details of our sustainable food activity can be found on the Sustainable Food webpage including information on plant-based food available across campus.
Staff, students and the local community are part of the Kent Community Oasis Garden (COG), a sustainability hub centred around growing food. Food grown at Kent COG is purchased by our catering outlets to produce meals served on site.
Our Sustainability Engagement Plan outlines our approach for engaging and communicating with staff, students and other stakeholders.
The Sustainability Communications sub-group made up of colleagues from the sustainability team and central communications allocate time and resource to ensure that the objectives of this strategy are met.
Engagement is also embedded throughout our Sustainability Strategy with specific targets and objectives outlined in the action plan
Students, staff and trades union representatives are represented across the University's strategic decision making process including:
- Council - the governing body of the University
- Finance & Resources Committee - decisions related to financial expenditure
- Senate - responsible for the academic governance of the University
- Joint Staff Negotiating and Consultation Committee (JSNCC) - forum for consultation between the University and its staff, on all matters of mutual interest.
We host events published on our events calendar and use our Instagram to post about our own events, as well as boost events hosted by others.
Big engagement projects this year included our ongoing campus wide habitat mapping project; our iNaturalist species count; and our program of events through KentCOG.
Students also lead on large-scale biodiversity mapping of our estate as part of the annual BioBlitz, an engagement event that brings students and community together. Data is collated through our iNaturalist project. This project is funded by the University.
Kent Union are working towards their Environmental Strategy 2020-25.
All students living on campus are given a handbook that helps them settle into University life. This includes information about sustainability, opportunities for sustainable education and volunteering, energy saving and waste and recycling. This is updated every year with current information.
All staff at the University are required to undertake the Introduction to Health, Safety and Environmental Sustainability module. The training highlights the University’s sustainability policies and goals and how to contribute to their achievement. This general introduction complements the role-specific information provided by line managers. This module is mandatory for all staff, with a 3 year refresher period.
The University's commitment to ESD is set out in our Sustainability Policy and supported by our Sustainability Strategy
The Sustainable Curriculum and Research (SCR) Steering Group deliver on our framework for embedding ESD which is reported to the Sustainability Steering Group chaired by John Duffy (Chief Operating Officer).
We worked with Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS) to map our curriculum against the SDGs during the summer of 2022 and have published the full report.
The Sustainability Team supports ESD through training for academic staff including an ESD online toolkit, designing projects for students and facilitating living-lab projects.
We offer scholarships to enable students to access Higher Education, such as the Article 26 Award.
We support sustainability in research through delivering on the commitments set out in the concordat for sustainability in research and innovation practice and by promoting sustainability research.
The University Ethics Committee have responsibility for setting criteria on the acceptance of research funding, donations, gifts and sponsorship via external partnerships.
2025/26 Results
The University of Kent maintained its 2:1 class in the 2025/26 People and Planet University League published in The Guardian (11 December 2025) achieving 63rd place overall out of 147 universities.
Summary
Despite the significant challenges faced over the last few years we perform well in many areas of the league table which reflects our institutional commitment to sustainability.
In particular, we scored 100% across the Policy & Strategy, and Environmental Management System sections. We also performed well in ethical investment, scoring 78% placing us in the top 10 for this category and Education with 96% placing us joint 16th nationally.
There is room for improvement of course, in some areas we unfortunately lost marks compared to previous years. We scored relatively poorly in the Sustainable Food category, missing points due to the switch over to Chartwells as our catering provider. This is something that we are already addressing internally and hope to improve our performance in this area in the future.
There is also scope to improve our carbon management score. We reached the milestone of a 50% reduction in scope 1 & 2 emissions this year and the Net Zero Working group will be ensuring our carbon management plan meets the criteria to score higher next year.
Unfortunately, despite scoring well compared with other universities, our overall score is significantly impacted by our operational performance, which scored relatively poorly compared to the sector. This is partly due to the nature of our campus. As we are a campus university with a large proportion of students living in our on-campus accommodation our per capita energy and waste is often higher than other campuses. However, our partnership with Siemens and the work of our accommodation, facilities management and housekeeping teams will hopefully result in improvements over the coming years.
Find out more
If you have any questions about our performance in this league then please contact sustainability@kent.ac.uk
You can find the full league table and details of the scoring methodology here
