Sustainability

About

Part of the UCOP Department of Energy & Sustainability, the Office of Sustainability develops, coordinates, and supports campus sustainability efforts throughout the system, including the UC Sustainable Practices Policy, Carbon Neutrality Initiative, and Global Food Initiative. We identify best practices on one or more campuses and work strategically to turn them into standard business practice on all campuses.

We play a leadership and facilitation role by building consensus among all campuses for aggressive yet feasible systemwide goals to move all UC campus sustainability practices forward quickly and efficiently. We coordinate the development and implementation of the UC Sustainable Practices Policy, and track key metrics to analyze and report on progress towards our goals. Externally, we work to reinforce UC’s position as a national leader in campus sustainability.

Sustainability across UC is a broad, collaborative effort with contributions from students, staff, faculty, and university leadership working at multiple levels to achieve progress.

The systemwide UC Sustainable Practices Policy (pdf) is overseen by the Sustainability Steering Committee, which meets annually to review progress towards sustainability goals and to evaluate new policy proposals. The Global Climate Leadership Council advises UC leadership on implementation of the Carbon Neutrality Initiative and shares best practices.

The UCOP Office of Sustainability is committed to ensuring that UC’s sustainability policy initiatives and programs are diverse in their staffing, and representative and inclusive of the communities who are engaged in these initiatives and programs. We recognize that the environmental and sustainability fields have a legacy of systemic racism that impacts all of our sustainability work. We have a collective and individual responsibility to learn about environmental racism and systemic racism and to address and dismantle it. In order to achieve this, the UCOP Office of Sustainability co-developed and signed onto a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement of UC Sustainability Offices and Staff that commits us to specific actions, accountability, and transparency.