The Academic Environmental Footprint
A priority of each of the university’s key management portfolios should be the continual search for ways to reduce the institution’s carbon emissions, along with its consumption of energy, water, and materials.
Purchasing contracts should favour local suppliers, for both ecological and social reasons; the university has an enormous impact on the local economy.
The VPs Academic and Research should be assisting academic staff to minimize air travel by ensuring that state-of-the-art technologies are available for connecting to classroom speakers, holding virtual workshops, presenting work to conferences, or hosting these conferences and meetings.
The reduction of plastics waste should be a priority, as outlined in the preceding section. This may require terminating contracts that have been made with various corporations.
Land, Place, Community
Universities occupy, and exercise planning authority, over large land areas. They may not have complete autonomy regarding the disposal of properties (depending on the legislation that governs them, or the conditions attached to endowments), but they have significant power to determine such decisions. They therefore have significant capacity to demonstrate institutional environmental citizenship—to model ecologically sustainable practices, design, and land use for their surrounding communities.
Ideally, universities maintain active communications with the neighbourhoods that are directly affected by their decisions, and with Indigenous nations that may have historical claims to the land on which a university is situated (M’Gonigle and Stark 2006). Such decisions could pertain, for example, to changes to university-owned properties, the location of student housing, parking and transportation issues, or the sale of university-owned lands.
The university’s “internal” constituencies, too, have stakes in these decisions, and indeed constitute the community that should have the biggest role to play in decision-making. “The university,” after all, is constituted first and foremost by the academic staff who carry out its core mandates and who work on its campuses—often for decades. The physical spaces and operational practices of the university are important determinants of the quality of academics’ working conditions.
Like decisions about the investment of endowment funds or the pursuit of external research funding, the decisions made by universities regarding facilities, operations, and land use model, on a daily basis, the institution’s principles and commitments in relation to ecological sustainability. These decisions are integral to the learning experience of students. Do they see their alma mater implementing decisions that are consistent with knowledge of the climate crisis and related ecological and social crises? Does the university use the spaces available to it for ecological learning and research, such as the production of organic food using ecologically sustainable methods, or for the preservation of biodiversity?
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