This spring I am working with a student to extend a project from Environmental Research (ENVR 401) project that created a campus sustainability report card for McGill. While universities are important testbeds for the development of a sustainable civilization, too often science is not used to monitor and evaluate what is actually been accomplished. The report card project is meant to address this gap. It is designed to be used to help guide McGill’s sustainability policies by identifying how McGill’s sustainability efforts have been performing. The client for this project is University Services at McGill, whose new sustainability director is Dennis Fortune.

There has been quite a bit of work done on sustainability at McGill. The Sustainable McGill Project conducted a the McGill Sustainability Assessment.

Rethink has a list of the many McGill student groups working on environmental issues. Environmental Officer Kathleen Ng has a good understanding of past and present initiatives, and she has helped organize the ReThink events at McGill – including this years event March 28, and the website hosts lots of documents, and presentations from past years.

Some of various efforts on sustainability at McGill have been reported in the McGill Daily articles Wild students, old monster and Stepping up, and last year, former MSE students made a documentary on recycling at McGill, In the Quiet and Still Air of Delightful Studies, which captures some of the issues and conflicts circulating around sustainability on campus. And the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education recently had an article on a recent visit one of their staff made to McGill.