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International Sustainable Campus Network Event

The 7th annual ISCN event was co-hosted by the International Sustainable Campus Network and the National University of Singapore.

Leaders shared best practices in campus sustainability from around the world at the 2013 Conference held June 18-20. The event focused on calling universities to advance their journey toward sustainable development, and catalyze a sustainable future.

Combining the suggestions of her fellow panelists, Golda Edwin, APSCC, tackled the topic of describing what a sustainable campus looks like in a developing country. Special consideration for India was made by noting the importance of outreach and sustainability education within the cultural context, addressing challenges like the current lack of teaching on environmental issues and on renewable energy in that country. The audience was eager to participate in the discussion related to reconciling sustainability with growth and how it is currently measured, the underlying assumptions and the relationship to quality of life. The politics associated with sustainable or unsustainable growth was a key topic addressed, including remarks on the lack of government and public understanding of “green Gross Domestic Product metric” developments, which was seen as caused by the challenging picture such metrics currently paint.

The “Green Campus Summit” (GCS-2013), organized by the APSCC, under the auspices of the Research and Transfer Centre “Applications of Life Sciences” of the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Pondicherry University (India), London Metropolitan University (UK), and Pondicherry Pollution Control Committee- Government of Puducherry took place in Puducherry, India, on 4-5 April 2013. The aims of the GCS-2013 were: to provide Universities and Higher Educational Institutions all round the world with an opportunity to display and present their works on campus greening initiatives; to foster the exchange of information, and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and experiences; to promote adopting/ implementing strategies for campus sustainability; to discuss methodological approaches for campus greening projects and provide opportunity to showcase thought leadership; to network the participants and provide a platform so they can explore possibilities for cooperation and collaboration. GCS-2013 was attended by over 200 delegates from 12 countries –representing both industrialized and developing geographical regions- and was a great success. The delegates included several leading experts/ practitioners on green campus and sustainability from around the world. Apart from the plenary lectures from the experts around the world on the state of the art knowledge and practices on the subject, the technical sessions covered important topics such as: Action research and Models of Campus Greening Initiatives, Environment Education and Curriculum Development, Green Building/ Architecture/ Land Use, Energy Management/ Energy Conservation/ Green Chemistry, Waste Management/ Water Management/ Water Treatment/ Transportation and Campus Ecology/ Biodiversity/ Food Services and Food Security.

A summary of the event and follow-up activities are as follows:

1. It was unanimously agreed by the conference participants that integrating the principles and the concepts of green campus and sustainability into the core of students’ academic experiences from the high school to College/University levels will ensure that the current and future student communities will acquire the required knowledge, skills, attitudes and values necessary to create a more sustainable economy and social environment in the future. It was also agreed that commitments at institutional level is more likely to make a positive difference and help progress towards a sustainable future.
2. As an attempt to promote and disseminate the work performed by attendees to GCS-2013, the book “Implementing Campus Greening Initiatives: Approaches, Methods and Perspectives” will be launched with selected papers from the summit. This will be a further volume of the award-winning book series “Environmental Education, Communication and Sustainability” (started in 1998). This ground-breaking publication on the theory and practice of sustainable development will be one of the most comprehensive publications on sustainability at universities ever produced, focusing on both industrialized and developing nations. The GCS-2013 Team will be implementing the above and achieve synergies with other on-going activities.