A Global Snapshot of Circular Economy Learning Offerings in Higher Education
Research from Tim Forslund, Ellen MacArthur Foundation Research Analyst, captures current circular economy learning offerings from 136 higher education institutions, taught in the languages of English, Dutch, Finnish and Chinese. The work shows that most of the learning offerings are found in the space of more traditional sustainability-related studies, engineering, business and design.
Campus Food Pantries: Insights From a National Survey
This report demonstrates that significant financial, physical and personnel resources are being invested in campus pantries. The College and University Food Bank Alliance members who participated in this survey helped to shed light on the work involved in operating pantries and offered valuable insight into how to improve them. The College and University Food Bank Alliance provides support, training and resources to campus-based food banks and pantries and other food-insecurity initiatives that primarily serve students.
New Website: People of Color in Environmental and Climate Justice
The People of Color (POC) Environmental Justice and Climate Justice Resource Persons Database is a repository for potential speakers, advisory board members, fellowship recipients, technical assistance providers and staff members. The site also allows for people to sign up to be added to the databases–environmental and climate justice professionals, graphic notetakers, and anti-oppression, diversity, equity and inclusion professionals.
Green Guy Podcast: UCLA's Living Laboratory for Climate Change Research
University of California Los Angeles' Chief Sustainability Officer Nurit Katz and Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Bonny Bentzin share why UCLA is called a “Living Laboratory” for climate change research, what is the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge and how sustainability on campus impacts the city of Los Angeles.
Envisioning Public Scholarship for Our Time: Models for Higher Education Researchers
This book proposes a new paradigm of public scholarship that supports a diverse democracy and promotes equity and social justice. It demonstrates how public scholarship in higher education can increase its impact on practice and policy and argues that public scholarship should be recognized as normative practice for all scholars and integrated into the curriculum of graduate courses.
Sustainability Case Studies: Best Practices in Campus Life
This is a collection of short case studies highlighting a range of best practices that enhance environmental stewardship, improve cost and energy efficiencies, and provide for greater collaborations among students, faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Compiled by APPA, this book includes 123 best practices from 92 separate colleges, universities or schools.
2018 AASHE Sustainable Campus Index
The 2018 Sustainable Campus Index recognizes top-performing colleges and universities overall by institution type and in 17 sustainability impact areas as measured by the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS). The report also highlights innovative and high-impact initiatives from institutions that submitted STARS reports in the most recent calendar year.
Sustainability and the Humanities
This book explores the links between sustainability and the humanities, which attempts to go beyond the inclusion of social sciences in discussions on sustainability, and offers a holistic discussion on the intellectual and moral aspects of sustainable development. The book reiterates the need to promote integrated approaches to sustainable development.
The Landscape of Student Housing Insecurity and Homelessness
This report highlights findings regarding the scope of student housing insecurity within the Campus Compact network. The findings are based on data from Campus Compact's Student Housing Insecurity Mapping Tool and represent a variety of institution types: rural and urban, public and private, and two-year and four-year.
Election Imperatives: Ten Recommendations to Increase College Student Voting
This report offers 10 recommendations to increase student voting and to improve campus conditions for political learning, discourse and agency during the election season and beyond. Released by Tufts University's Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, Election Imperatives is a collaborative, practitioner-focused document drawn from research on college student voting and the campus climates of highly politically engaged institution.
Raising & Mapping Awareness of the Global Goals
Raising & Mapping Awareness of the Global Goals is Sulitest’s second annual report to the U.N. High-Level Political Forum. The report highlights Sulitest’s currently available tools, research and initiatives in development or planned and summarizes global trends and indicators on awareness of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
RFC Real Food Standards 2.1
Real Food Challenge's technical update to the Real Food Standards is in response to changes in certifications and in food policy. This technical update also captures deeper understandings of the food system to reflect emerging consensus amongst food justice and food industry organizations.
Options for Endowment Investment in Solar Energy
Serving as a follow-up resource to the Clean Energy White Paper, this briefing paper from Intentional Endowments Network focuses on solar energy and how to most effectively enable endowments to make investments in solar projects, and the solar energy market as a whole. It provides guidance on three main approaches endowments can utilize to invest in solar: allocating capital across traditional asset classes in the investment portfolio, sponsoring a project by investing funds for its development, and allocating capital to a campus green revolving fund.
Energy Star Commercial Buildings College Course
The three-unit course offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency explores energy efficiency, overcoming efficiency barriers, and benchmarking. Available at no cost, the content includes an overview document about the course, slide decks for each unit and descriptions of optional assignments. The main optional assignment is a project where students apply their learning by going out into their community to benchmark a building using Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
GSA Fan Engagement Playbook
The Green Sports Alliance Fan Engagement Playbook is a guide for sustainability and sports professionals describing how to ideate, design and manage fan engagement programs that develop effective, behavior-changing fan engagement programs around environmental sustainability.
New Ashoka U Publication: Changemaker Institutions
Changemaker Institutions: How Higher Education Can Use Social Innovation to Better Prepare Students, Transform Campus Culture, and Lead Society toward a Better Future makes the case that social innovation can be used for institutions to meet the demands of the 21st century. It claims that social innovation can be used both as an educational framework and as an approach for institutional innovation.
Leadership for Sustainability in Higher Education
Leadership for Sustainability in Higher Education is a book for higher education sustainability change makers that brings together the core constructs of leadership theory and sustainability, perspectives through which to view and value sustainability, successful activities and actions undertaken by sustainability leaders, and models and methods to successfully implement sustainability that are new to the sector. It also examines influencers on the sustainability agenda, and barriers to and enablers of success for leaders at individual, institutional and sector levels.
New Book: Academic Social Responsibility: Sine Qua Non for Corporate Social Performance
The book makes the case that responsible management education is essential not only for academic stakeholders, but for the whole of society. Divided into three parts – “Towards the Socially Responsible University”, “Socially Responsible Education for Enterprise Development” and “Human Voice in Responsible Management Education” – it is a combination of theories, studies and experiences gained by authors from different countries and institutions who function in various institutional and cultural conditions.
How to Start and Run a Student-Managed Socially-Responsible Investment Fund
This toolkit from Intentional Endowments Network is designed to aid in the creation of new student-managed funds, expand current student-managed funds, and increase the number of funds that include socially-responsible investment (SRI) strategies in the investment process. It highlights the different ways student-managed funds can be designed, as well as the growing interest in how new and existing funds address sustainability factors in the investment process.
Climate Atlas of Canada
The Climate Atlas of Canada is an interactive tool for citizens, researchers, businesses, and community and political leaders to learn about climate change in Canada. It combines climate science, mapping and storytelling to inspire action at all levels that will move the needle from risk to resilience.
Reframing the Curriculum: Design for Social Justice and Sustainability
A new practical and hands-on guide will be released in August that seeks to integrate the concepts of healthy communities, democratic societies and social justice into academic disciplines. The book presents a method for designing units that give educators the tools to bring sustainability and social justice into experiential, project-based instructional approaches, and comes with a free facilitator's guide.
Still Hungry and Homeless in College: Results From an Annual National Basic Needs Insecurity in Higher Education Survey
A new report out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin HOPE Lab summarizes survey results from a survey of 43,000 students at 66 institutions in 20 states and the District of Columbia. The report finds that 36 percent of university students and 42 percent of community college students were food insecure in the last 30 days. In the past year, 36 percent of university students and 46 percent of community college students were housing insecure, and 9 percent of university students and 12 percent of community college students were homeless. It also shows that basic needs insecurities disproportionately affect marginalized students. The report provides recommendations for what students, campuses and policymakers can do to ensure basic needs insecurities are addressed.
Beyond Doom and Gloom: Engage in Climate Solutions
Created by the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium (HEASC), this resource offers teachers and students simple steps to participate in American democracy and encourages energy policies to reduce climate instability. It can be used as a supplement to finish any course or activity on climate change.
Earth Day 2018 MobilizeU Toolkit
The Earth Day 2018 toolkit from Earth Day Network's higher education campaign, MobilizeU, is a teach-in guide that aims to support institutions and individuals in taking personal responsibility for plastic pollution by choosing to reject, reduce, reuse and recycle plastics. The resources also includes a plastic pollution primer and action toolkit.
New Issue: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education
The latest issue contains articles about implementing sustainable development at the university level, measuring student performance on learning outcomes, a case study on mainstreaming sustainability into campus life, and three separate articles related to engineering students and sustainability.
Case Study on the Benefits of Shared Equipment in Collaborative Research Space
Using the Biochemistry Cell Culture Facility (BCCF), a shared scientific resource utilized by 16 labs from three departments at the University of Colorado Boulder, researchers studied the comparative costs to build and operate a BCCF shared-space versus a hypothetical scenario where 16 labs are built to conduct cell culture in individualized spaces. This case study demonstrates that a shared cell culture facility can provide qualitative benefits and significant avoided costs to scientists and their academic institutions, as well as a reduction in the environmental footprint.
Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments
Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments is a book that seeks to confront the contexts that make environmental pedagogies difficult, the challenges to the well-being of the teacher-scholar, and the corrosive academic structures that compartmentalize knowledge and people. The collection simultaneously offers models for working through and within these challenges to advance understandings and ways of being on local, global and personal levels.
Report and Action Plan for Affordable Textbooks
Open 101: An Action Plan for Affordable Textbooks is a report that investigates high textbook prices for common courses at U.S. higher education institutions. It contains recommendations that could save students a lot of money on the materials they buy for general education classes.
University Sustainable Development Best Practice Report
At the World Economic Forum in January 2018, the International Sustainable Campus Network in collaboration with the Global University Leaders Forum released Sustainable Development: Educating with Purpose, a report that includes 42 campus sustainability case studies provided by universities across the globe focused on sustainable development. The report is separated by the following chapters: Living Lab Approach, Equality and Wellbeing for All, Sustainability on Campus, Education as a Catalyst.
New Issue: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education
The new issue includes several articles covering assessment and reporting of sustainability in higher education. Other articles cover participation of students as authors of sustainability reports, analysis of innovations in campus sustainability, and an investigation into bolstering sustainability in food on a campus.
New Issue: Sustainability: The Journal of Record
The most recent issue of Sustainability: Journal of Record includes a special feature on the 2017 AASHE Sustainability Award Winners, and the articles “Giving Up Hope Won’t Save the Planet - Ending Poverty Might” by Jane Goodall and “Shines! University Engineering Students Advancing Duluth's Sustainable Development”, which articulates project‐based learning and subsequent collaborations between the University of Minnesota Duluth and a nonprofit, local utilities, and area businesses.
2018 Edition: Choices for Sustainable Living Course Book
The Northwest Earth Institute's 2018 edition of Choices for Sustainable Living course book includes a new session on water and has also been designed to complement the EcoChallenge, an online friendly challenge that helps participants discover new ways to make sustainable change more possible.
