New Book: Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education
This edited collection explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon of sustainability education. Authors imagine alternative futures for the field and attempt to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually and pedagogically. Authors chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today.
Center for Food Loss and Waste Solutions Resource Center
The Further With Food website provides comprehensive information about food loss and waste in the U.S. and about solutions dedicated to reducing it. This virtual resource center is a platform to find and share information about proven solutions and innovative new approaches to reduce the volume of surplus food generated, feed hungry people, and divert food and scraps to the highest beneficial use.
New Issue: Environmental Education Research
The latest issue includes articles on environmental education preparation for teacher candidates, how the university fosters a global perspective in students, community-level environmental projects as learning tools, and pre-service teachers and their relationship to education for sustainable development.
Ethics in Higher Education: Values-Driven Leaders for the Future
This new book offers diverse insights from 19 different authors, writing from eight countries in five continents, providing explanations and recommendations for the ethical crisis present around the world that can be mitigated by suitable education in ethics, particularly in higher education institutions. The resource has been released by Globethics Publications on behalf of its Education Ethics Series.
Educating for Sustainability: 2017 Best Practices from ISCN and GULF Universities
This report, released in conjunction with the 2017 World Economic Forum, contains case studies on educating for sustainability provided by 30 members of the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) and/or the Global University Leader Forum (GULF). The report also summarizes the results of a corporate-university dialogue on sustainable development in education.
Better Buildings Financing Navigator
The Better Buildings Financing Navigator, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Initiative, is an online tool that helps energy managers explore a wide array of financing choices and identify relevant financing options for their energy efficiency projects.
New Book: Sustainable Development Research at Universities in the United Kingdom
This new book from Springer gathers inputs from a variety of researchers in the field of sustainable development in the widest sense across the U.K., from business and economics, to arts and fashion, administration, environment and media studies. The book also describes research, curriculum innovation and campus greening in a comprehensive way.
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.