Creating a Culture of Sustainability

ileana Brunetti, Ellen Vaughan, Elida Erickson, Alessandra Bicudo Alvares & Derek Martin

The Sustainability Office strives to foster a culture of diverse, equitable and inclusive sustainability at UCSC. We actively engage students, staff, faculty and community members through education, leadership development, institutional change and behavioral transformation. We build partnerships with students and community members to improve UCSC's environmental performance, seeking to model the way for how large institutions can work collaboratively to solve some of the world's biggest environmental and social justice challenges.

Goals

    • Institutionalize sustainability. Work proactively to integrate sustainability into the core responsibilities and daily activities of faculty, students, and staff.
    • Create centralized communication and promote successes. Create a central space for coordination of campus sustainability activities, educational initiatives, noteworthy campus achievements, reporting and national rankings.
    • Promote a culture of inclusive sustainability. Work to advance different cultural definitions of how to care for environmental spaces and human communities, promote social justice and anti-racism work, and advance multicultural inclusion in sustainability initiatives across campus.
    • Integrate sustainability into the classroom. Build bridges between operations, teaching and research to establish UCSC as a living, learning laboratory in which students can learn and apply sustainability principles and techniques.
    • Improve environmental performance through the Sustainability & Climate Action Plan. The Sustainability Office facilitates and manages UCSC's Sustainability & Climate Action Plan (update coming this Spring 2024) and supports the campus to refine, track, and implement goals and benchmarks.
Goal 1: Build communities of care, resilience and preparedness in the face of climate change
Goal 2: Decarbonize campus to build an equitable, accessible, and fossil-free future
Goal 3: Steward the land and water to support healthy ecosystems while balancing infrastructure needs to minimize impacts
Goal 4: Advance a circular economy in the consumption cycle