PART I here: https://cleanenergyrevolution.co/2025/01/06/an-exponential-growth-of-sustainability-in-the-academic-world-part-i/

COMMITMENT AND ACTIONS TO A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

U of Toronto’s ambitious Low-Carbon Action plan aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37% and to be climate positive by 2050 across its three campuses.

Such a commitment marks the first, if not the only, such net positive commitment by a university – with plans underway to decarbonise its historic St. George campus in the heart of downtown Toronto, along with its other two campuses U of T Mississauga and U of T Scarborough.

In decarbonising its operations, U of T has undertaken a diverse mix of strategies and solutions across its campuses, from improving power and thermal production to distributing energy more efficiently.

Working towards this goal, U of T is building Canada’s largest urban geoexchange field beneath Front Campus (the system will reduce the load on existing systems and prevent the equivalent of 15,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year from reaching the atmosphere, the total length of piping works out to 185 kilometers), set to be operational in the spring of 2024, along with plans for a significant retrofit of its district energy systems via Project LEAP, an effort supported by the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

Meanwhile, at U of T Mississauga, the campus has a high-tech geothermal system beside the Instructional Centre and is actively expanding the use of solar energy across its buildings. U of T Mississauga also launched Project SHIFT, an initiative to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to electricity.

EaRTH, which stands for Environmental and Related Technologies Hub, will be a knowledge and training centre at U of T Scarborough focused on the development of clean technologies. Among the partnership’s plans: apply innovative technologies to food production in an urban setting through the development of Canada’s first net-zero vertical farm.

The university is committed to providing students with sustainability education and learning opportunities, initiatives and events. Sustainability is embedded into academic programmes, research and campus operations.

Nearly 30% of all undergraduate courses at U of T in 2023-24 have a sustainability orientation, up from 25% the previous year, and there are more than 100 graduate and PhD programs with sustainability-related content.

And as part of the university’s Climate Positive Energy initiative, they are working with industry and the government to launch a testing facility for real-time simulation of electricity grid models in its Grid Modernisation and Testing Centre.

A VOICE CRYING OUT IN THE WILDERNESS, BUT NOT A LONELY VOICE…

The 255-year-old institution, Dartmouth College of New Hampshire, part of the Ivy League, reminds us in its motto “Vox clamantis in deserto” the importance of always learning, dedicating, teaching and leading knowledge to stay ahead. Particularly giving an example framed in a budget of 500 million dollars (equivalent to 36% of the profitability that the institution has in one year) with direct actions such as:
*Reduce emissions on campus 60% by 2030, and entirely 100% by 2050. In 2022, the institution reported about 58,500 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (the equivalent of the emissions absorbed by 3 million trees in one year).
*An overhaul of the campus’s facility heating infrastructure, moving it from a steam-based to a hot-water system. The distributed nature of the system also doesn’t require centralized heating infrastructure. Instead, the college can use a variety of heating methods, such as electric heat pumps and solar powered heat pumps. It can even use water heated up in the New England summers and stored underground until winter. This means a 20% gain in efficiency.
*Improving building enclosures with LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, world’s most widely used green building rating system) platinum certification.
*Adding non-combustion technologies such as geo-exchange boreholes, large-scale heat pumps and solar energy, for electricity as well as hot water generation
*Much of the effort to date to reduce climate emissions has centered on electricity purchasing. Power purchase agreements, or PPAs, are one of the key strategies colleges have used to lower its footprint. PPAs provide institutions with long-term contracts for electricity sourcing and can focus on green energy sources.
*Reducing purchasing of things like paper and printer. Eliminate trays in campus dining halls could lighten footprints by reducing food waste and the emissions around food production and preparation that come with it, and all at essentially no cost to the institution.
*Reducing car trips and employee travel in addition to promoting the use of public mass transportation, carpooling and bicycle would also have an impact on campus emissions.
*Consider the use of energies such as biomass

MUCH MORE THAN RESPONSIBLE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Remembering and expanding a little on the message of generational change that the American artist Anna Hyatt Huntington wanted to show with her sculptural work of The Torch-bearers located in front of the Complutense University of Madrid (we can also find similar statues in Valencia or Havana), we can see and understand that knowledge is much more than an inert baton in a relay race or torch that is passed from generation to generation.
Integrating the sustainable development goals into the curricula does not mean having a single course on sustainability or simply adding a topic on sustainability to existing courses.
Rather, universities should integrate sustainable development principles into their curricula across all disciplines in a comprehensive and integrated way.
In addition to the journal impact factor of academic publications, we must understand the impact of academic knowledge and its application. A malpractice of sustainability in any branch of knowledge should immediately be intrinsic malpractice in the application of that knowledge. So that the application of sustainability is not superfluous knowledge, part of a merely compilation doxography, the knowledge and use of that sustainability must be a living part of each personal and community professional Hippocratic oath of all human beings.
This integration cannot only be vertical. And the necessary horizontality must seek to advance not by being clients-consumers but by being citizens of a global world with global decisions but local applications.
We may or may not be consumers for moments, but local and global citizens we are for a lifetime and even with actions that last after a physical end of our body.

AUTHORS:

FEDERICO WEINHOLD

COO OF BALGREEN. SPECIALIST RESEARCHER

DIEGO BALVERDE

ECONOMIST

EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK