In late September, Earthcycle, the university’s environment-themed week, held an eco-tour of campus. Designed to highlight what U of T is doing—or not doing—to help the climate crisis, it began at the concrete bastion that is Sid Smith. The tour proceeded to guide us through Trinity College’s green roof, the wall of corporate donors in the mining building, and ended under the energy inefficient lights in Robarts’ lobby.
From the greenhouses atop the forestry building to the gas guzzling furnaces at the AC, U of T has a wildly divergent collection of buildings when it comes to ecological footprints. It is evident, though, that U of T has a long way to go towards sustainability. Looking back, the university has made concentrated efforts at environmental improvement in the past. The Sustainability Office’s Rewire program, for example, has reduced CO2 emissions by 3622 tonnes per year. The primary component of Rewire was the installation of energy meters in residences and offices to help create awareness about personal consumption habits, and to encourage conservation. Facilities and Services has retrofitted a number of buildings, including the $2.3-million replacement of the lighting system at Robarts, which will reduce energy use by approximately 12,000 megawatt hours annually and offset 3,100 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
The university has also made many efficiency gains without such a concentrated effort. In 1973, when statistics began to be recorded on the topic, 53.24 gigajoules of gas were being expended per student, compared to 29.74 GJ per student this year. Water, too, has been substantially reduced from 31.46 gallons per student to 9.15 gallons each year. Even the number of people travelling to and from campus by car has decreased by eight per cent since 1991.
However, while a growing consciousness of environmental issues and advances in some technologies have lead to reductions, what the university requires to ensure long term progress is a concrete plan.
Towards 2030, President David Naylor’s audacious proposal for the University of Toronto, lays the blueprint for the institutional future, but plans for sustainability are nowhere to be found.
“I feel that [sustainability’s] omission indicates a huge lack of leadership on one of the most crucial issues of our time, as well as a lack of foresight as to the implications that our environment has for institutions like the University of Toronto,” says Zannah Matson, president of University of Toronto’s Environmental Resource Network.
Instead of making the university sustainable, Towards 2030 is concerned with another aspect of the institution’s future: growth. According to the Towards 2030 Task Force on Long- Term Enrolment Strategy, U of T cannot grow enough to meet the demands of undergraduate education. Yet the university will focus on increasing its graduate student population. These efforts to boost graduate enrollment will be concentrated at the St. George campus.
Moreover, it seems unlikely the university will be able to substantially cut the number of undergraduates enrolled, given current pressures. Recent reports by the government of Ontario estimate that the GTA will soon be facing an influx of 25,000 extra students looking for an undergraduate education by—conveniently— 2030. It seems unlikely that the University of Toronto will continue to get preferential money from a provincial government trying to ensure that these extra students get an education. U of T’s undergraduate population will have to expand.
U of T can retrofit, rewire, and reduce until it’s green in the face, but if the university’s population continues to grow as planned, we won’t be able to sustain ourselves much longer.
Let’s start with the obvious. The more students there are on campus, the more waste the university as a whole produces, and the more energy it consumes. According to VP Business Affairs Cathy Rigall, “We have been successful with a variety of initiatives that have reduced our use of resources on a per square foot or a per student basis. But on an absolute basis we are using more because we are growing.”
Additionally, according to the university’s 2009 financial report, growth has created the need for more teaching space, office space, student activity space, and residences. In the 2007-2008 academic year, each student used 23.64 square metres of space on campus. Multiply that by 62,934 students and the total space used comes to nearly 1,500,000 square metres. With enrollment set to rise, the math is obvious.
Expansion causes two problems for sustainability. The first is quantity: the more buildings there are on campus, the more greenhouse gases they produce. The second is cost.
“Even if we’re able to decrease the amount of energy use per square foot, if there’s more square footage, you’re going to have more energy use,” says Beth Savan, university’s sustainability officer.
Her office, with help from Facilities and Services, is setting out to make campus buildings energy efficient as quickly and cheaply as possible. One good example is the solar hot-water heater currently being built at the Athletic Centre.
Professor Danny Harvey of the Geography department, an expert on energy use in buildings, said that it’s possible to decrease energy use and emissions as enrollment increases, but not if U of T continues with business as usual.
“You have to insist on very strict standards, and it has to start from day one when requests go out to architects. But that’s not part of their process. We’re just following the building code, which belongs in the stone ages. The university could be using 20 per cent of the energy it’s using now.” But with no plans to make energy efficiency standards a top priority, Harvey contends, the problem isn’t going to become substantially better.
As for the problem of funding, to get an idea about exactly how much future expansions will cost, one need only look at the various construction projects started since 1999. The Bahen Centre, additions to Rotman, the Woodsworth College residence, and 12 other projects on St. George campus alone cost an estimated $1.4 billion.
U of T is in serious financial trouble. The province has cut endowment funds, and this month the university reported it lost 31 per cent of its endowment in hedge funds affected by the recession. U of T also posted a reported $146.7 million in losses, similarly caused by the recent financial crisis.
With the goal of expanding towards 2030, where will the money come from? Endowment funds simply aren’t there, students’ tuition costs can only rise so much—we hope—and there are only so many times the alumni can be tapped.
Donations from corporations are often presented as a way forward. Even with the volatility of the financial system, returns on investments are still the university’s best bet to secure the funds for the goals set out in Towards 2030. But here’s the dilemma: several of the companies that U of T invests in either practice or finance activities that are extremely environmentally detrimental. And by investing in them, U of T arguably funds these practices as well.
According to University of Toronto Asset Management statistics, the university has $10,351,000 invested in Barrick Gold, the mining giant owned by Peter Munk. Barrick owns the Porgera Joint Venture Mine in Papua New Guinea, which according to Mining Watch is known to leak toxic chemicals into the ecosystem, and is responsible for human rights abuses against workers and indigenous people. U of T has another $10,222,000 invested in Encana Corp, Canada’s largest natural gas and oil producer and owner of the controversial pipelines in the native lands of northern British Columbia.
U of T’s top two corporate equities are banks: the Royal Bank of Canada ($14,894,000) and Toronto-Dominion bank ($12,606,000), both of which invested significantly in the Tar Sands of Alberta, the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter.
It is clear that U of T is heading towards 2030 without much consideration for its environmental sustainability. Without serious reconsideration of the university’s energy, expansion, and investment policies, growth will exacerbate an already critical environmental problem.
Granted, even if U of T recycled, divested, and retrofitted enough to become carbon neutral, it would represent an insignificant change in the grand scheme of things as measured in tonnes, gallons, and gigajoules. However, universities can set an example for responsibility and forward thinking, as they have previously on issues like apartheid and sweatshops. By putting sustainability on the back burner, U of T delays progress.
U of T sets out to cultivate “Great minds for a great future.” But such a motto begs the question: what future?
