Karolinska Institutet has produced a new environmental policy to tackle present and future environmental and sustainability challenges. The environmental policy describes the intentions and directions of KI's work with environmental sustainability. In integrating the environmental perspective throughout the organisation, KI will make an active health-focused contribution to addressing society's key environmental and climate challenges.
"In launching this new environmental policy, we in the university management want to show just how important KI's environment and sustainability work is," says KI president Annika Östman Wernerson. "The policy makes it clear that everyone at KI must not only be aware of its contents and of the university's environmental impact, but also make an active contribution to effective and systematic environmental practices, so we need to make sure that our staff and students have the resources and abilities needed to do this."
The drafting of the new policy was led by Maya Petrén and Lilia Daianova , environmental coordinators at the Sustainable Development and Equal Opportunities Office, along with representatives of other parts of KI.
"The policy states that the environmental perspective is to be integrated throughout the university, both strategically and operatively, and so a broad-based working group and anchoring process have been an important part of our work," says Petrén. "KI is to increase its positive environmental footprint and decrease its negative one, both direct and indirect. In doing so, we'll also be contributing towards national and international environmental and climate targets."
The policy shows the way
The new environmental policy is based on the Ordinance on Environmental Management in Government Agencies (SFS 2009:907), the ISO 14001 standard for environmental management systems and other steering documents and guidelines.
Here, the Department of Dental Medicine and the University Dental Clinic, which were granted an ISO 14001:2015 environmental certificate in 2009, brought valuable experience to the table. To get inspiration and for the purposes of benchmarking, the work group also conducted a situation analysis.
"It's important to point out that the environmental policy doesn't identify significant aspects of KI's environmental impact or go into detail about what we have to do to achieve our environmental targets," says Daianova. "Instead, the focus is on showing KI's intentions and the direction that KI's environmental efforts are to take."
The environmental policy will therefore be supplemented with a new action plan for 2025-2027 containing information about concrete environmental targets and how to achieve them. The process of drawing up the new action plan is underway.
The action plan will be followed up annually and the results reported to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Ministry of Education and Research. This part of the process is important in terms of gauging goal achievement, the effectiveness of the measures taken and the need for any improvements. More long-term goals stretching until 2030 are contained in KI's Climate Strategy 2030.
An important guide
In order to have the policy properly integrated into our daily activities, it will now be communicated via the Staff Portal, newsletters, meetings and so forth. We also need to find routine ways of introducing it to new members of staff and KI's external partners.
"Hopefully, the environmental policy won't just end up on a shelf but will be a living document that we use to guide decision-making and important changes," says Daianova. "It will help us develop our environmental processes and improve KI's performance in the field."
