Sustainability at UBC isn’t just a word to define—it’s a term that defines us and how we interact with the world.

UBC’s strategic plan, Place and Promise, commits all aspects of the University—its infrastructure, research, teaching and learning elements—to exploring and exemplifying social, economic and environmental sustainability.

The Sustainability Academic Strategy, a mid-level plan created through a collaborative process involving students, staff and faculty, informs the UBC strategic planning process and provides recommendations around specific academic themes and actions. It also articulates UBC's approach to sustainability:

• We see sustainability not as a prescribed set of outcomes, but as the emergent property of a societal conversation about what kind of world we want to live in, informed by some understanding of the ecological, social and economic consequences of different courses of action.

Our commitment transforms the entire UBC campus into a living laboratory—a societal test-bed for sustainability. In this way, the University’s physical plant becomes a testing ground in which staff, students, faculty members, researchers and partners test, study, teach, apply and share lessons learned, technologies created and policies developed. Through our partnerships, outcomes are applied beyond the campus, ensuring the University acts as agent of change to address some of society's most pressing sustainability challenges.

To meet our commitments, UBC has implemented strategic sustainability plans, developed an ambitious program of campus initiatives and established processes  to track our progress.  We are proud of the external recognition and awards we've received and are eager to tell our story so that other post-secondary institutions and communities might learn from--and teach us--how to make a world of difference.