A new initiative, a new blog, and new targets
I am launching my blog this week to correspond with one of UBC Vancouver’s most significant sustainability initiatives.
Today UBC announces its climate change targets, which are more ambitious than any other university targets we know in North America. On its Vancouver campus, the university will now aim to:
- reduce GHGs an additional 33 per cent from 2007 levels by 2015
- reduce GHGs to 67 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020
- eliminate 100 per cent of GHGs by 2050
I am proud to be part of this initiative, and when I think of the last 18 years of working towards sustainability goals here at UBC and in other organizations and jurisdictions, I am struck by the speed with which things have moved in the last year or so. Of course this was a classic case of an overnight success which was ten years in the making (the Campus Sustainability Office is 11 years old this year), but the speed of change since roughly 2008 is remarkable.
Moving our Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) to the UBC Vancouver campus, getting rapid-fire Board approvals, creating a proposed Sustainability Academic Strategy in 2009, the creation of the UBC Vancouver Sustainability Initiative to implement that strategy in Jan 2010, and now the climate change commitments; all this, together with a suite of ongoing initiatives, makes for a pretty breathless time. We have moved the dial on sustainability at UBC; now we have to make it happen.