Sustainability is a concept that recognizes the interconnectedness and necessary balance of economic, environmental, and social issues. The most widely accepted articulation is from the United Nations Brundtland Commission (United Nations, 1987):
“Sustainable development … meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".
One aspect of sustainability is the “carbon footprint,” which reflects emissions of six greenhouse gases (GHG) in terms of carbon dioxide equivalents on the basis of their global warming potential. The carbon footprint for the University of Cincinnati (UC) had previously been computed and an action plan had been defined, listing potential mitigations to reduce GHG emissions.
However, GHG emissions comprise only a portion of the scope of sustainability issues faced at UC. A comprehensive sustainability model was created during this study in order to give a more holistic framework for university decision-making around resource allocation by including Brundtland-style impacts on a) economy; b) environment—particularly, water use; and c) social equity.
To create the new framework, more than 600 indicators from key sustainability metric systems were analyzed. Systems included the Global Reporting Initiative, United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals, UN Commission on Sustainable Development indicators, and USEPA Report on the Environment indicators, plus systems relating specifically to universities: the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System; the Princeton Review Green Campus criteria; the Sustainable Endowments Institution College Sustainability Green Report Card; and the UC 2019 Strategic Plan, which includes sustainability as an institutional goal. None of the existing sustainability sets covered all the elements relevant to UC. A new comprehensive set of indicators was defined to gauge UC performance across the three sustainability categories of economy, environment and social equity.
Based on the new sustainability framework, over 300 potential mitigation actions were identified to improve UC sustainability performance. Their costs and benefits were compared to a list of 107 possible GHG reduction actions that had been listed in the UC Climate Action Plan (CAP). To perform this analysis, several factors customized to UC were computed, including an estimate of energy embedded in drinking water from the Greater Cincinnati Water Works, and factors for GHG emitted per unit of individual utilities used at UC. A new suite of optimally effective actions was defined that maximizes results per dollar spent. Sustainability consideration resulted in actions being deployed in different buildings than those listed in the CAP. The set of sustainability actions had a higher Net Present Value, shorter payback period, and resulted in more GHG emission reductions.
While the resulting prioritized action set applies specifically to UC operations, the sustainability framework and the action prioritization methodology could be applied to other universities and organizations in virtually any sector interested in improving their sustainability performance by defining those actions that have maximal impact on sustainability.
Several areas of opportunity were also identified for future research in order to further understand sustainability and advance performance in that field