In an effort to make students aware of the wealth of similar sustainability-related opportunities on campus, the team of undergraduates and Robinson created three inventories of sustainability courses, projects, groups, co-curricular and extra-curricular programs.
They describe their work and results in a paper published in the open-access journal Sustainability, which recently received an international campus research award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
The article was written by Robinson, who is also at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, as well as Brugmann, Côté Postma, Emily Shaw and Danielle Pal – all U of T undergraduates at the time. Postma, Shaw and Pal were all Trinity College students, while Côté was at University College. Brugmann studied in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.
The students screened all undergraduate courses in U of T’s online catalogue for sustainability content and found 25 per cent – or 2,022 courses – relate to one or more aspects of sustainability.
“This is an important number,” says Robinson, who is the presidential adviser on the environment, climate change and sustainability. “Its magnitude surprises people to whom we show it.”
