carbon reduction roadmap

CLIENT: University of Chicago DATE: 2015 - Ongoing LOCATION: Chicago, IL
PROJECT SCOPE: Strategic academic and research initiative, leading to a series of high-impact carbon footprint reduction projects. MIST conceived of and co-leads initiative.
DESCRIPTION: The Campus as a Laboratory (CaaL) Initiative is based on the idea that, to truly be at the forefront, not only must UChicago work to understand the world’s current natural resource use and potential trajectories; it must also focus on understanding and reducing the resource use of its own campuses. Using the campus as a test bed, students, faculty and staff combine to bring the collective brainpower of the University to bear on researching, creating and implementing facility retrofit projects and building operations improvements that lower UChicago's carbon footprint.
SERVICES PERFORMED: Strategic Planning, Facilitation, Advising, Education, Project Management, Communications
PARTNERS: Computation Institute, UChicago Departments: Office of the Provost, Facilities Services, Environmental Studies, Student Government, Energy Policy Institute, Urban Labs
RESULTS: To date:
- Correlated UChicago internal structure and team dynamics against sustainability results to assess effectiveness
- Created inter-disciplinary University sustainability leadership group and re-worked governance structure
- 4 carbon reduction projects addressing energy, food, waste and behavior
- An open-source database of campus energy use from 2013-present
- Creating a CaaL Internship Program to allow for deeper investigations of CaaL related research
PUBLICITY:
- Office of Sustainability Advisory Council: created University-wide sustainability structure and leadership group to steer, oversee and support major efforts
- Energy Efficiency Hackathon: an energetic and collaborative event to improve campus energy efficiency
- Campus Cafes Food Service Sustainability: an academic and professional study, to quantitatively assess campus cafe sustainability and implement feasible improvements