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Nowadays, several higher education institutions around the world are integrating sustainability topics into their daily operations, functionality and education systems. This paper presents a case study from a pilot project implemented by the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald (hereafter, Greifswald University), Germany on its way towards a “carbon-neutral university”. The purpose of this paper is to share an institutional process targeting a gradual transformation towards achieving carbon neutrality. This might be relevant to other higher education institutions striving for a systematic and progressive change from a traditional system to a low emission or carbon-neutral pathway.

To achieve carbon neutrality, three major transformative strategies were adopted: carbon reduction, carbon offsetting and mainstreaming sustainable actions via teaching and research.

A locally adaptable institutional framework on sustainability was successfully developed to: promote changes in daily operations, implement interdisciplinary research, incorporate sustainability into teaching and education and enhance outreach programs. Strong commitment from all stakeholders resulted in reduction of the university’s carbon footprint from 8,985 to 4,167 tCO_2e year⁻¹. Further, the unavoidable emissions could be locally offset through enhanced carbon sequestration on the university-owned forests.

Based on the experiences of Greifswald University, this paper presents major challenges and success lessons learned during the process of gradual institutional transformation to achieve the target of carbon neutrality.

The purpose of this paper is to understand local perceptions on climate change and its impacts on biodiversity, rangeland, agriculture and human health.

A household survey with 300 interviewees and focus group discussions with key stakeholders were conducted and validated at two steps, using the climate data from the nearest weather stations and reviewing literatures, to correlate the local perceptions on climate change and its impacts.

Majority of the respondents reported an increase in temperature and change in the precipitation pattern with increased hazardous incidences such as floods, avalanches and landslides. Climate change directly impacted plant distribution, species composition, disease and pest infestation, forage availability, agricultural productivity and human health risks related to infectious vector-borne diseases.

Because of the remoteness and difficult terrain, there are insufficient local weather stations in the mountains providing inadequate scientific data, thus requiring extrapolation from nearest stations for long-term climate data monitoring.

The research findings recommend taking immediate actions to develop local climate change adaptation strategies through a participatory approach that would enable local communities to strengthen their adaptive capacity and resilience.

Local knowledge-based perceptions on climate change and its impacts on social, ecological and economic sectors could help scientists, practitioners and policymakers to understand the ground reality and respond accordingly through effective planning and implementing adaptive measures including policy formulation.

This research focuses on combining local knowledge-based perceptions and climate science to elaborate the impacts of climate change in a localised context in Rakaposhi Valley in Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan.