Saving resources, reducing environ-mental impact, promoting sustainable mobility – the University of Graz has been consistently pursuing these goals for years. Now it is setting another milestone. It is the first university in Austria to set up a software solution, the "data warehouse", which centrally collects and evaluates all data on environmental performance.
The University of Graz is on the way to becoming one of the first climate-neutral universities in Austria. By 2030, the greenhouse gas emissions generated on campus are to be drastically reduced. The goal is to achieve true climate neutrality by 2040,” says Rector Peter Riedler, giving an outlook into the future. To achieve this, Institutional Carbon Management (ICM) with transparent greenhouse gas accounting was installed in 2019 by a team led by climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast. And since 2016, the University of Graz has been operating consistent environmental management certified according to EMAS and ISO 14001.
The new "data warehouse" now makes another crucial contribution to improvements. For the first time, information from all areas of the university relevant to the environmental balance and the ICM will be brought together in a central database: from buildings, energy and procurement to IT and controlling to mobility. The data imported by those responsible for the respective departments can be accessed in the form of tables or diagrams using a reporting tool for the university's key figures and emissions.