Sustainability initiative for a Malaysian university campus: living laboratories and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions

Urban university campuses may be a substantial producer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the environment, through either campus operations or research activities. To date, there is little research on GHG emission reduction in higher education institutions—particularly in developing countries—so this work presents such an initiative from an urban university located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Higher education institutions in Malaysia are progressively integrating similar strategies to apply the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to education-translational research activities. The paper presents the GHG emission reduction data from campus activities and a living laboratory project conducted within Universiti Malaya (UM) main campus. Emissions reduction was categorised based on the standard GHG Protocol from the Kyoto Protocol into Scope 1, 2 and 3. GHG Scope 1 contributes the most activities and yielded the main GHG emission reductions in electricity consumption (in kg CO2-eq/kWh) with a 90.72% decline for the year 2016–2017. The highest reduction for total annual GHG emissions was found for the year 2017–2018, with a reduction of 6,590,000 kg CO2-eq/year. Most of the living laboratory research activities in that year were categorised in the change management core area. These activities benefitted from continuous funding and were more successful when the research was in mature phase, regardless of research constraints and difficulties.