If we take sustainability seriously, the magnitude of required change is great.

One prominent way of approaching that requirement is to talk in terms of doing less damage, reducing project-specific impact and generally utilizing an overall perspective based on cutting back or sacrifice. It’s not a very motivating approach.

At The University of British Columbia we are interested in exploring a different approach—regenerative sustainability—meaning human activity that actually improves both environmental conditions and human quality of life. We are exploring this at both the building scale and the scale of our whole campus.

On the building scale, our new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is designed to be net positive in terms of both its biophysical and human impact. It is designed to be environmentally net positive in four ways: energy, operational carbon, water quality and structural carbon. In adding this 60,000 square-foot building to the UBC campus we will actually reduce the whole campus’ energy use and carbon emissions, improve the quality of the water flowing through our site and sequester more carbon in the CIRS structure than all the carbon emitted in the construction process and in manufacturing all the building’s materials.

We also want CIRS to be net positive in human terms, and are measuring productivity, health and happiness of the building inhabitants with a goal of improvement in all these areas over time. To the extent that we succeed (and of course we expect some things to fail and need to be improved since we are a test-bed), then CIRS will truly be regenerative, and offer a model for sustainability that is positive rather than negative.

I believe that this is a very different sustainability agenda, and brings up many interesting questions: How possible is this new agenda and where? Can all new buildings be regenerative? How scalable is it? Could neighbourhoods be regenerative?

Answering this question is where the UBC Sustainability Initiative (USI) comes in, allowing us to extend the regenerative sustainability question to the whole campus. Could UBC be regenerative? This is an extremely exciting research agenda, with potentially huge implications beyond the campus.

The goal of the USI is to deeply integrate operational and academic sustainability across UBC, and make our campus available as a kind of societal test-bed, where we work with partners from the private, public and NGO sectors to prove out the technical, economic and behavioural aspects of sustainability in our simpler institutional environmental.

Our view is that universities have a set of characteristics that make them uniquely qualified to serve in this role for society: we are single owner-occupiers of significant capital stock, with our own energy, water and waste systems (in UBC’s case, the Vancouver campus is about 400 hectares with about 1.5 million square metres of buildings in about 400 buildings); universities are (in some jurisdictions) public institutions that can be a little more forgiving on pay-backs and long-sighted on returns; we teach; and we do research. No other societal institution has this mix of capabilities. Thus universities have a responsibility, but also significant academic and operational opportunity, to be at the forefront of the sustainability transition.

To that end, UBC is putting faculty members on all key operational committees of the University and viewing all operational decisions through a sustainability lens, with the objective of building teaching and research around all our activities. We now have the most ambitious climate change goals of any of the top 40 universities in the world—
starting from our 2007 base, we will reduce emissions on campus by 33 percent by 2015, by 67 percent by 2020 and by 100 percent by 2050.

To reach our 2015 goals, the UBC Board of Governors has approved $150 million in capital projects which include CIRS, a 72-building continuous optimization project, a 6 MW biogas plant and conversion of our district energy system from steam to hot water. All of these projects have a positive business case, and we are building research and teaching around them. To reach our 2020 goals, we know that we will have to develop a fully integrated campus scale smart energy system, and probably add water and waste to the mix.

But it is not all about technology. We want UBC to become a complete sustainable community. To that end we will be doubling our on-campus population from about 16,000 residents today to about 30,000 in 2025 (consider that the population was 10,000 in 2001). The goal is to create a vibrant live-work community that, among other things, significantly reduces car travel to campus. Since 1997, we have tripled transit ridership to campus and have taken about one-half of our surface parking out of service and built housing on it.

The UBC Sustainability Initiative works with two cross-cutting themes: campus as a living lab (internal focus) and university as agent of change (external focus). On the latter front, our main activity is to establish Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with partners, identify areas of synergy between the strategic goals of UBC and our partners and work together to explore these goals on-campus and off. The general idea is that we offer the UBC campus to our partners as a kind of sandbox and they, in turn, act as agents for potential commercialization and policy development in their own markets or jurisdictions. To date we have signed such MOUs with Honeywell, BC Hydro, the National Research Council, the City of Vancouver, Modern Green Development and the University Neighbourhoods Association.

On the curriculum front, our goal is to transform the UBC sustainability curriculum. There are currently about 350 courses with sustainability content at UBC. Our objective is to create curriculum pathways for undergraduate students such that all students, no matter what program they are in, will be able to take up to a minor in sustainability. We are doing work on what these pathways could be, and what sustainability attributes should be common to students taking sustainability across the wide diversity of programs at UBC. We have launched a new inter-disciplinary Sustainability 101 course in January 2012.

On the research front, we are busy identifying research opportunities around the projects described above. We recently established an interdisciplinary Sustainable Building Science Program and the first course started in September 2011. In CIRS we are developing a significant research program around the behavioural aspects of sustainability at the building and community scales. Our partnership with Modern Green Developments from Beijing has resulted in a project in which they will build a 70,000 square-foot sustainable residential building on campus, and a research and demonstration centre to connect with the CIRS research program.

We know there will be roadblocks and failures along the way, but that is one reason universities are natural homes for such experiments. My hope is that other post-secondary institutions will see the opportunity represented by acting as a societal test-bed for sustainability, and that our sector can play an important role in contributing to the very significant transitions required to reach a sustainable future.

– By John Robinson

John Robinson is the Executive Director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative, responsible for leading the integration of academic and operational sustainability on the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus. He is also a professor with UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment & Sustainability, and the Department of Geography.

John was a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore in 2007.