NCSE Recommendations from A New Generation of Sustainabilty Leadership
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At the January 2010 NCSE Conference a breakout session was held that yielded the following recommendations to NCSE. What are your thoughts about these recommendations and how do we go about implementing them?
BREAKOUT SESSION RECOMMENDATION TEMPLATE
Breakout Number: 03
Breakout Session: A New Generation of Sustainability Leadership: The Role of Higher Education in Building a Green Economy
Task 1. Universities as individual institutions and a collective sector should adopt a comprehensive strategy and holistic approach to sustainability leadership development (including metrics that assess impact
Task 2. The higher education community should define what it means to be a sustainability literate graduate
Task 3. Funding agencies and higher education institutions should institute procedures to provide incentives and rewards for faculty that encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and research (e.g. funding, tenure and promotion requirements, awards, connecting research areas with institutional practices, removing risk from trying new concepts) that include sustainability literacy impact metrics
Task 4. Faculty and staff should be mentors of sustainability leadership by modeling best practices and innovation in their actions (e.g. create multi-level leadership opportunities, give advice, provide resources, giving recognition, reaching across class, race, cultural barriers, etc.)
Task 5. Accreditation bodies should include sustainability literacy and practices in their evaluation criteria
Task 6. All higher education institutions should adopt STARS as a mechanism for measuring tangible progress
Task 7. Researchers, government agencies, NGOs, think tanks, etc. should forecast jobs that will be part of a new green economy and linking them to educational programs, and identify current successful sustainability-literate professionals and determine the skills and knowledge that has made them successful to feed back into educational institutions
Task 8. Faculty should receive pedogogy training
Task 9. K-12 teachers should be enabled to teach sustainability literacy at the K-12 level
Funding agencies and professional organizations should help to establish models for communicating sustainability effectively to create cultural transformation
Task 10. Higher education institutions should make sustainability a part of their cultural identity, modeling and prototype sustainability best practices, value systems, measurement (impacts, effectiveness) as living laboratories.
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Excellent ... as long as AASHE's (slightly reworded) definition of sustainability precedes the task list:
Sustainability is a concept which deals with mankind's impact, through development, on the environment. Sustainable Development is "development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainability is about environmental protection and regeneration, social equity and sustained economic growth - in that order.