Colorado State University: A Midscale Market Solar Customer Case Study
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) case study provides details about Colorado State University's solar energy deployment, which began in 2009 with the installation of an 18.9-kilowatt rooftop installation at its Fort Collins campus. CSU’s efforts to integrate solar energy into its campus illustrate some of the key considerations for universities growing their renewable energy portfolios within the context of a continuously evolving solar electricity landscape. This case study highlights CSU’s decision-making process, campus engagement strategies, and relationships with state, local and utility partners.
New Book: Systemic Structural Constellations and Sustainability in Academia
This new book from Routledge argues that to create truly sustainable universities, new methods are required of visualizing and interpreting them holistically as institutions built on complex relationships and systems, rather than as individual departments and people operating independently. The book is targeted towards students and researchers of education for sustainable development, organizational learning and sustainable management, and those tasked with transforming the higher education system for the future.
Handbook of Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development in Higher Education
The handbook offers an overview of what universities around the world are doing to implement sustainable development via curriculum innovation, research, activities and practical projects, and how their efforts relate to education for sustainable development at the university level. The handbook gathers information, ideas, best practices and lessons learned in the context of executing concrete projects. It also assesses methodological approaches to integrating the topic of sustainable development in university curricula.
GSA Greener Cleaning Playbook
The Green Sports Alliance released a guide designed to help sports facilities reduce the health and environmental threats associated with cleaning sports venues. The aim of the playbook is to help venues save money, generate new revenue, build a more sustainable brand, provide valuable marketing opportunities and improve health and environmental performance.
Toolbox for Renewable Energy Project Development
Offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the toolbox examines six topic areas, including policies and regulations, economic assessments, and financing and funding opportunities, that have important implications for developing on-site solar projects on college and university campuses. Each topic area offers a brief summary of the issue, identifies key resources and addresses major questions and hurdles campus sustainability experts have identified as information gaps or obstacles in the development of new on-site solar projects.
AASHE 2016 Conference Presentations Now Available
Over 550 AASHE 2016 conference presentations were recently added to the Campus Sustainability Hub, an online resource library that allows AASHE members to connect, share and learn about sustainability in higher education. Using advanced filtering, the conference presentations can be searched by sustainability topic, tags, organization and more.
White Paper: Investing in Clean Energy: Campuses and Endowments
The Intentional Endowments Network's report was designed to encourage conversation about the financial and societal benefits of clean energy investments higher education can make both as a customer and an institutional investor through endowments. The paper also explores the current opportunities and barriers to such investments.
New Issue: Environmental Education Research
New articles in the most recent issue of Environmental Education Research include exploration of academic development and sustainability education and student views on sustainable development.
Contemplative Approaches to Sustainability in Higher Education
This new book presents a rationale and theoretical framework for incorporating reflective and contemplative pedagogies to help students pause, deepen their awareness, think more carefully and work with complexity in sustainability-focused courses. It offers a variety of relevant, timely resources for faculty to use in their classrooms.
A Nearly Carbon-Neutral Conference Model White Paper & Practical Guide
The guide was created to help stage nearly carbon-neutral conferences based on a model first implemented at the University of California Santa Barbara, where roughly one-third of its carbon footprint comes from air travel. Compared to traditional conferences, the proposed model can reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly by taking an online approach, where talks are pre-recorded and the question and answer session is interactive. This document both explores the rationale behind this approach and provides a step-by-step guide for staging nearly carbon-neutral events.
AASHE 2016 Sustainable Campus Index
The 2016 Sustainable Campus Index produced by AASHE using data from the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) recognizes top-performing colleges and universities in 17 distinct aspects of sustainability and overall by institution type. The report uses STARS data from institutions that submitted a report within the year prior to July 2016.
Sulitest Version 2
The new version of the Sustainability Literacy Test, Sulitest.org, allows users to build in customized modules for improving alignment with institutional priorities. The Sulitest is a tool designed to measure and improve sustainability literacy for all students in higher education regardless of the area of study, level of study or country of origin.
Sustainable Business Courseware
AASHE has partnered with Sustainable Business Consulting to provide plug-and-play, online sustainable business courseware to help members accelerate the integration of sustainability into the curriculum. The content is consistent with AACSB accreditation standards and is designed to supplement existing classes by enabling instructors to drop content right into their existing syllabi. The content is divided into a series of modules that can be used individually or as a package.
Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities
This book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided into four sections to help teachers integrate climate change into the classes and topics they are already teaching as well as engage with interdisciplinary methods and techniques.
Energy Efficient Ultra-Low Temperature Freezer Report
During fall 2015 and winter 2016, staff and students from the University of California, Riverside Office of Sustainability evaluated three energy-efficient, ultra low-temperature freezers. This study tested the freezers on criteria that included energy consumption, temperature uniformity, noise and heat production.
Offset Network Website
The Offset Network is a web-based resource, sharing platform and educational tool to share best practices and help expand the option for developing carbon offset projects to better integrate curriculum development, academic research, student involvement and community engagement. The Offset Network is a collaboration between Duke University, Oberlin College, the University of Florida and Second Nature.
Preparing for Campus Sustainability Month 2016 Archived Webinar
This AASHE webinar held in September 2016 explores ideas and inspiration to engage and inspire incoming students and other campus stakeholders to become sustainability leaders. Speakers from University of Massachusetts, ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, University of Washington, University of Washington and University of North Florida share examples for how campuses can participate, lessons learned and suggestions to leverage this international event to promote sustainability on campus and beyond.
PLAN Resource Center
The Post Landfill Action Network's new Resource Center is a collaborative platform to discuss projects, upload documents and share ideas geared toward the zero waste movement.
InTeGrate: Interdisciplinary Teaching about Earth For a Sustainable Future
This curriculum-based project has two goals: to develop curricula that will dramatically increase Earth literacy of all undergraduate students, and to increase the number of majors in the geosciences and related fields who are able to work with other scientists, social scientists, business people and policy makers to develop viable solutions to current and future environmental and resource challenges. The website offers a host of curriculum resources, workshops, implementation projects and other strategies to increase Earth awareness.
Coalesce: The Campus Sustainability Accelerator
Coalesce, The Campus Sustainability Accelerator, partners with schools to build cohesive and enduring sustainability initiatives by equipping and empowering stakeholders in four interrelated core competency areas: assessment and benchmarking, governance and leadership, planning and measurement, capacity and execution. Coalesce’s Accelerator provides sustained facilitation and coaching to co-create work plans and implement solutions.
Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City
This new book from Greenleaf Publishing examines approaches that Portland State University has used to work collaboratively within the university and with community partners. It introduces the themes of the engaged university, social justice, climate change and sustainable economic development.
Energy Dept. Implementation Model: Emory University's WaterHub
Emory University’s WaterHub uses on-site, adaptive ecological technology to reclaim up to 400,000 gallons of campus wastewater daily. The system has cut potable water consumption by as much as 35 percent, saving millions of dollars over a 20-year period while improving campus operations and opening new opportunities for education and research. This Implementation Model from the U.S. Department of Energy shows how Emory implemented this technology and provides a variety of supporting materials, including a flow diagram, technical overview and water quality measurements.
Energy Dept. Implementation Model: Tying Energy Costs to Building Occupants
University of California Berkeley's Energy Management Initiative (EMI) targets building occupants through building surveys and energy dashboards, and allocates energy cost responsibility to individual campus operating units to achieve savings of $6.5 million, 58.7 million kilowatt-hours and 893,000 therms in just three years. This case study from the U.S. Department of Energy shows how UC Berkeley accomplished this program and provides a variety of supporting materials.
Residence on Earth Advocacy Resources
Devoted to how to participate in and teach advocacy, the list of resources is not designed to help an individual reduce their environmental impact so much as how to engage in collective political action to address environmental problems.
The Future of Air Conditioning for Buildings Report
Released by the U.S. Department of Energy, the report characterizes the landscape and trends of the global air conditioning (A/C) market, including direct and indirect climate impacts, and documents solutions that can help achieve energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Solar for Colleges and Universities Toolkit
This toolkit provides guidance and resources from Solar Market Pathways projects to inform the development and implementation of targeted solar programs and policies for higher education institutions. Specifically, these resources are intended to assist college and university program managers, sustainability directors, faculty, staff and other stakeholders as they seek to take advantage of the benefits of solar energy.
Solar Energy on Campus Webinar
This archive of the July 15, 2016 webinar features staff from National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Center for Resource Solutions explaining the implications of various renewable energy purchasing options to ensure that the desired solar energy claims will be supported.
Campus Climate Adaptation Planning Survey Results
Results from a survey conducted in 2015 by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, reveal that while more than half of the 45 institutions that responded to this survey have set emission reduction targets, and a quarter have established stand-alone climate change mitigation plans, only five of them have, or are developing, similar plans for climate adaptation. However, the results also demonstrate that almost a third of the institutions participating in this survey have taken specific steps towards analyzing and/or adapting to future climate change impacts. The survey results indicate strong support for assessing the likely impacts of climate change on university campuses and for developing a climate adaptation plan in response.
A Higher Calling for Higher Education
Cristina Escrigas, the former executive director of, and current adviser to, the Global University Network for Innovation, offers a compelling essay regarding the need for "a new conception of human progress that recognizes the interdependence of the economic, social, political, and environmental spheres". Escrigas states, "To achieve this goal in theory and in practice, higher education institutions must become agents of progressive social change," which she says "requires rethinking the mission and practice of higher education".
New Developments in Engineering Education for Sustainable Development
This book, from Springer as part of the World Sustainability Series, discusses essential approaches and methods in connection with engineering education for sustainable development. Prepared as a follow up to the 2015 Engineering Education in Sustainable Development (EESD) Conference held in British Columbia, Canada, it offers the engineering community key information on the latest trends and developments.
Educating for Responsible Management: Putting Theory Into Practice
Released July 2016 by Greenleaf Publishing, Educating for Responsible Management profiles cutting-edge approaches to pedagogy for the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) that go beyond current discussions of sustainability and corporate social responsibility content, to include a wider lens that highlights the processes of educating the next generation of responsible managers.
Teaching Education for Sustainable Development at University Level
This book introduces readers to the latest research and findings from projects focusing on teaching education for sustainable development at universities. In particular, it describes practical experiences, outline courses, training schemes and other initiatives aimed at promoting better teaching on matters related to sustainable development at institutions of higher education.
LEED Lab
LEED Lab is a multidisciplinary immersion course that utilizes the built environment to educate and prepare students to become green building leaders and sustainability-focused citizens. At the close of the semester, students are prepared to sit for the LEED Accredited Professional for Building Operations and Maintenance (LEED AP O+M) exam.
Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Research Grant Competition
The BCFN YES! (Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Young Earth Solutions) is an international competition for students and researchers under 35 years of age from across the globe. Launched for the first time in 2012, the aim of the initiative is to reward the best ideas about food and sustainability. Projects are assessed by an international jury according to their social impact, innovation, originality and feasibility, and the best win a monetary prize to implement them. Completed proposals must be submitted by July 27.
