The Problem: Young people want to push forward the fight against climate change, but are struggling to achieve change.
The Solution: Create financial incentives in university to create a clear goal and a massive rush to achieve net-zero emissions.
Climate change has risen to become one of the big political issues of the day, especially for young people whose futures will most be affected by the consequences of a warming planet.
Calls have grown for the British Government to commit to becoming net zero in emissions by 2025, in what most commentators consider to be an unrealistic and expensive goal. Pupils in schools and students in universities have walked out of their studies to protest against climate change and demand action, and there is growing frustration among young people in Britain.
Young people should be given more encouragement and support to bring about the changes they wish to see with regard to the movement of the UK economy to net zero status.
Universities conduct and publish the research showcasing the threat of climate change and are home for more than 2 million students a year in the UK, yet they are not yet net zero themselves. They are therefore an obvious location to start the shift to net zero.
A simple way to help achieve this with an initial small but significant step, is to run a competition for students to make their universities net zero as soon as possible.
To encourage such a change and show that the government is serious about tackling climate change, the government should run a nationwide competition to challenge students to make their universities net zero as quickly and effectively as possible.
To incentivise such a transition and to show how the intelligent use of financial markets and demand pressures can achieve social and environmental change, the government should offer to cancel all student debt of British undergraduate students enrolled at the time the first university achieves net zero status.
The second and third universities to achieve the goal should have half of the student debt of British undergraduate students enrolled at the time cancelled, and students at any university that achieved net zero within 12 months would have £10,000 of debt forgiven to incentivise rapid change at all universities.
By way of example, if the first university to achieve net zero status had 5,000 UK undergraduate students enrolled at the time, the full 3 years of student debt of those students would be written off by the government.
Such a scheme would create a bold and powerful project to effect change in the country and show the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to a low carbon economy. It would also show that fighting climate change can be profitable; students could get upwards of £50,000 of debt written off. Since most student debt is written off eventually anyway, the cost to government would not be that large.
Bold action is required to fight the global threat of climate change, and young people who are passionate about the issue need to be given more support to empower them to drive the change to a low carbon economy.
This proposal would offer clear financial incentives for students to drive change and help showcase the way forward for the country at large.
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