10:10:10 - GREENING THE CAMPUS

Sustainability has to do with reducing our footprint on the future. Most people will agree it contains the following main components - 1) improving economic efficiency, 2) protecting and restoring ecological systems, and 3) enhancing the well-being of all peoples. A sustainable campus program addresses all of these components. Of course, you will find many definitions depending on who you ask. But, they generally will have these three components. Sustainable initiatives must account for all of these at the same time.
Academic institutions/Universities have a leadership role in advancing knowledge, technology and tools to create a sustainable future. To fulfill this role effectively and with high credibility, they need to include a focus on sustainability also in their own operations and facilities. Campus projects, be they educational or corporate campus developments, present interesting sustainability challenges and opportunities. Institutions are to focused on education, research, development or distribution of new ideas, products or services.
In other words, they are dedicated to trigger changes. That makes campus projects, where a large student body and/or work force tries to make a difference in academia or the market place while at the same time experiencing a more or less sustainable built environment around them, potentially highly effective catalysts for sustainable development.
Sustainable campus programs pertain to all aspects of campus life. They can include a wide range of issues such as organic food in the cafeteria, gender balance and cultural diversity, and landscape design supporting informal learning outside of the classroom. While the organizers recognize the value of a comprehensive approach that includes topics like those mentioned before, the network described here will focus on sustainability aspects for which specifications and requirements have to be defined already in a conceptual stage for specific buildings or whole ensembles of the built environment. Once requirement specifications are completed, design competitions based on these specifications won, and buildings proposed in these competitions erected it is very difficult and costly to change fundamental aspects of energy use or of transport in campus areas.
For this reason, the organizers propose to take sustainable building design, energy-efficiency, renewable energy applications and environmentally sound mobility concepts as key topics and integrate into Sustainable campuses.
Institutional commitments are typically multi-dimensional, addressing curriculum, research and operations. They can be as individual as individual institutions themselves. However their ultimate sustainable campus goal, climate neutrality and interim greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals within campuses.
A successful endeavor to transition to a sustainable or green campus involves four aspects of the university community - the administration, academic departments (students and faculty), the university research effort, and the local community.
Concern about Global Climate Change has existed on academic campuses for decades. However, it is only within the last few years that institutions of higher education have recognized importance and thinking Sustainable campuses. Often the call for collective campus-wide sustainable action has come from students and faculty with very little management support. It is now commonplace for institutions of higher learning to make institutional commitments to address the warming of our planet as a result
of excessive fossil fuel use and other human activity-induced causes. A movement by institutions to demonstrate leadership on sustainable campuses has emerged just in time to catalyze broader societal action on this critical issue.
Green Campus Mission
Energy : Move toward Fossil Fuel Independence
Water : End Water Waste
Materials : Become a Zero-Waste campus
Food : Eat Foods Produced Sustainably
Land : Create green earth
Transportation : Promote Alternatives to Transit
Built Environment : Create “Green” Buildings
Community : Ecological Literacy