Slides

Participants

• Walt Kanzler

• Michelle Perez

• Sara McKinstry

• Steve Jackson

• Ken Hall

• Barbara Hamilton

• Mirle Rabinotwitz-Bussell

• Jane Teranes

• Hugh Hagues

• Subrata

• Peter Sloan

• Gordon McCord

• Ping Liu

• Missing: Sherlock Liu, Dana Gibson, Hannah Campi

Action items

Decisions

1. Agreed to work on Green Team concept.
2. Asking for grant budget to award them next year. Monetary prizes with sustainability awards.
3. Subcommittees: Sustainability Curricula; Outreach and Communications

Agenda

• Introductions: All

• Restructuring of Sustainability Office: Michelle Perez, Sustainability & Facilities Management

• Review ACS Charge: Walt Kanzler (ACS Chair) and Michelle Perez

• Sustainable Building Policy Update: Walt Kanzler and Michelle Perez

• Climate Action Plan (CAP): Sara McKinstry, Sustainability

• AY20 Agenda Items: All

Discussion Topics

Restructuring of Sustainability Office

• Discussion of new Sustainability and Life Cycle Building Commissioning Office. Third party outside of DDS, CPM, FM, Real Estate, etc., to do building commissioning. Put under sustainability to better broker compromise with cost, scope and long-term vision of making sustainable, healthy, and maintainable buildings that are built according to design of record. Cradle to grave building commissioning. Building Commissioning program manager position now posted. Then new director of sustainability.

• Sustainability a broker and looking at things holistically. Not one dept that drives all of this. Sustainability will act as a clearing house.

• ACS feedback: great idea! No negative feedback.

Open

Review of ACS Charge/AY20 Focus Areas

• ACS charge was revamped in 2018 to make all RMP committees more valuable.

• Advisory to the Chancellor through VC Matthews. Engages faculty and students.

• ACS guides future of sustainability on campus.

• Information sharing is part of what we are doing, but how do we leverage ACS to work with departments and create subcommittees to get work done and move forward on goals.

• Look at new definition of sustainability in ACS charge. “The ability to improve and sustain the quality of human life and experience within the capacity of supporting systems, both nature and man-made.” Want it to be scalable with no prescriptive outcomes. Walt: this definition lets us better define what we are working on for UC San Diego specifically.

• Each ACS member an ambassador back to their departments and stakeholder groups. And then they bring back items for future agenda items.

• Green teams to foster a culture of sustainability. Every department has representation working on sustainability. Some already exist like in Geisel Library. ACS hosts those teams. See graphic on page two of ACS charge. Glue that holds things together across departments and silos. VC Matthews supports this: top-down support for green team “grassroots” level work. UC Irvine example: ID’s all curriculum that includes sustainability. Then faculty organized it. So students can see all courses. They are STARS Platinum and we are STARS Gold.

• USP Introduction to Green Buildings class coming in Fall 2019. Sweet spot between student learning and large building program happening on campus. Can ACS help foster more of this type of learning?

Green Teams concept

• Feedback from ACS: What is the Green Team? Is the ACS the Green Team?

• Walt: ACS would receive information from different green teams across campus. So if a green team is bringing up a new initiative, would go to ACS to get to VC Matthews and the Chancellor. A way to coordinate and clear efforts to go up to Cabinet and substantiate this work more broadly.

• A Green Team member could be a volunteer group or staff who have part of their job description including sustainability. Idea is to have every department engaged in sustainability.

• Mirle: Has there been an effort to see if every academic department has a sustainability contact?

• Walt: No, but we could do that and create a listserv and training for them.

• Subrata: Agrees with bottom-up and top-down approach. Would work to get everyone involved. Right now lack of knowledge and engagement by most people on campus, especially by faculty, post-docs, lab members, international students, and international visitors to campus. Involve people from the ground level.

• Gordon: RPS assistant dean handles sustainability but do they get info to share and push down? They should.

ACS Subcommittees

• Sustainability curricula subcommittee: Sara McKinstry, Gordon McCord, Jane Teranes, Mirle Rabinowitz-Bussell, Ping Liu

  • Focus on “in-between fixes” as can’t add sustainability or climate science to gen ed requirements:

  • Could create a certificate in sustainability offered to every student.

  • Sara will share STARS 2.2 credit language as soon as it’s available and set up meeting.

  • Seventh college will have something environmental in gen ed.

  • Walt has spoken to a few provosts. If adding sustainability to gen eds would have to displace something else.

  • Jane: Meet with Dean of Undergrad Education, Provosts, faculty to talk about adding climate change to gen ed. Recognize that not doing enough teaching of undergrads on climate science, but can’t add requirements to students as we are trying to help them finish on time. Over the summer 2020 will be adding climate change into existing Warren, Muir writing courses, then rest of colleges in Summer 2020.

• Outreach and communications subcommittee: Sara McKinstry, Walt Kanzler, Michelle Perez, Ken Hall

  • Jane: need to do more on educating everyone coming to campus on sustainability. More outreach to international visitors and scholars, for example.

  • Subrata: more outreach to international students and those in labs

  • Ping: need to be more transparent and accessible with information. Need more information and case studies to motivate faculty and students. No sense on campus that leadership is committed to sustainability. Explain more and showcase easy to relate to sustainability action items.

Other feedback

• Peter: Is there a way to get a tighter handle on what is sold on campus. Do we have an handle on all the things the campus buys and all the packaging?

• Subrata: hard to be sustainable on limited grant research funding.

• Could the ACS offer grants? Can the ACS get a budget to seed fund Green Team efforts to get them off the ground? Could Accept proposals in Jan, wrap into Sustainability Awards. Harvard model of tax with pool of funding. Or Chancellor’s discretionary pots of money. Through CFO’s office and Campus Budget Office. Steve has asked but doesn’t have info on how assessed and where funding goes. Partner with SSN on their grant process?

• Right now many faculty, staff and students at the grassroots level working on sustainability would say they are doing so by going around campus systems. They have to create systems outside of normal campus to do zero waste or other issues. E.g. composting and improvements in Catering.

• Add monetary award to sustainability awards?

• Highlight courses to showcase – faculty resources through ACS.

Sustainable Building Policy

• Learn more on Confluence website.

• Three working group links: policy, metrics & LCCA, real estate & P3.

• Tiering of projects, LCCA model.

• Implementation guidelines, lots of town halls and outreach events.

• Coming soon: energy and water dashboards by buildings.

• Training on guidelines for staff in DDS, CPM, Real Estate, FM, UCEN, etc.

• Hope to be done by June 2020.

• Related: USP 169 Introduction to Green Building course has over 30 students enrolled for Fall 2020. Ravi Bajaj (UCSD Esys alum) teaching course. Jan Kleissel also teaching building efficiency course.

Open

Climate Action Plan

• Full plan online on sustainability website.

• Now adding Calendar Year 2017 greenhouse gas emissions data, updating wedge diagram and projections.