Beth Savan, director of U of T’s new sustainability office, spoke March 9 at the Earth Sciences Centre about various efforts the office has recently undertaken to involve students in its projects to reduce energy use on campus.

The lecture, entitled “Students Driving Sustainability: Energy Conservation and the Kyoto Protocol Come to U of T,” was part of U of T’s Environment and Social Justice Week and was sponsored by the Institute for Environmental Studies. Approximately 40 people attended.

Savan spoke about how the sustainability office has been able to involve students in many of its projects. She praised the eagerness of students to work with the office.

“The student work has been very impressive,” she said. “We’ve been really fortunate to engage such enthusiastic students.”

Savan explained various student projects with the office. One is collecting data about how much energy each building in the university is consuming; the sustainability would like to start putting the data on a website where each building’s occupants can monitor their performance.

“We’re hoping to see exactly how much energy is being used, on a building-by-building basis,” Savan said.

Another group is conducting a survey of students’ energy use at Trinity College and doing a pilot study to see if students’ behaviour can be changed there. The office is currently running a student anti-idling campaign, to dissuade students from running their cars when they’re not driving. One group at the office is examining how sustainability fits into the university’s curriculum. Savan said that some of these students are volunteers, others are work-study participants, and others are doing projects are part of their schoolwork, “using course work as a vehicle to implement goals of the ‘S.O.'”

“This cooperation is a great model of how sustainability can work,” Savan said. “We’re trying to build in the community here, work with the researchers and work with the students.” She praised the work of Joanna Angus, a fourth-year Trinity College student who is coordinating student volunteer projects at the office.

Savan began her talk by explaining the background of the creation of the sustainability office, pointing out that the university’s size means that its energy use has major effects. “We’re a really big player in the City of Toronto”, she said, because U of T is, after the City, the largest non-profit landowner in Toronto. “What we do here has a massive impact.”

The principal goal of the sustainability office, said Savan, is to make the university’s energy use more efficient so that the university is able to reduce its carbon emissions to 1990 levels, as stipulated by the Kyoto Protocol.

“It’s going to be a struggle for us to meet the Kyoto Protocol,” Savan said. “We have a tough job ahead of us, but I’m sure we’re up to it”.

At the end of the lecture, Savan said that the quality of environmental sustainability measures in recently built buildings on campus has been mediocre.

“Overall, I can’t say that I’m thrilled,” she said. Savan called for stricter university policies for new energy use in new buildings.