A recent look at the sustainability programs cropping up at colleges and universities across North America raises two questions: Do those classes include everyone who could or should be there? And what steps can institutions of higher learning take to address these structural inequities? 

When we at Diversity in Sustainability completed our State of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Sustainability report in 2021, it was clear that sustainability professionals are a privileged group. Sixty-two percent hold a master’s degree (that drops to between 5% and 13% among the general population in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom). Three-quarters come from a middle-class or higher level of social mobility. And while research showed that younger sustainability practitioners are more ethnically diverse compared to more seasoned professionals, we also know that many communities of colour are pushed to the social and economic margins, which can make accessing higher education in these fields difficult.  

Our recent research looks into how some schools are trying to attract more racially diverse students by taking alternative approaches. Arizona State University is working with environmentally focused high school teachers to build relationships with potential enrollees. Ontario’s Trent University and the Yellowknives Dene First Nation recently introduced an Indigenous Environmental Students & Sciences diploma for Dene students in the Northwest Territories that blends Western science with Dene Traditional Knowledge.  

Admissions departments are also considering a wider set of extenuating factors that could affect a student’s application, asking students how they have overcome adversity, along with adjusting testing requirements, since privileged students score higher on standardized tests thanks to multiple retakes and additional academic support. More and more schools such as Johns Hopkins University and the University of California system have eliminated legacy admissions, known to give preference to the most privileged.    

Among faculty, professors are expanding the syllabi beyond Western authors and guest speakers. “Elevating BIPOC voices is essential to sustainability innovation, and we actively incorporate their expertise and lived experiences into our work,” says Kimberley Smith with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. “We believe these diverse perspectives will drive the transformative change needed within the higher-ed sector.”

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Still, barriers persist, and many racialized youth say that they simply can’t afford pricey tuition for sustainability programs. There are ways around it: the University of Toronto’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management program has an internship program where close to 100% of interns are paid, lowering barriers for students financially while allowing them to gain experience. The Yale School of the Environment’s Three Cairns Scholars program offers tuition and non-tuition support for qualified students from the Global South who are focused on climate solutions.  

Bottom line: cultivating a diverse community in sustainability takes a village, and schools have an important role to play as the entry point into the profession. Creating a sustainability sector that’s accessible to communities of colour will be critical if we’re serious about a just transition toward a future that benefits more than a select few. 

Heather Mak is co-founder of Diversity in Sustainability. 

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How did the fossil fuel industry manage to raise a generation of climate change deniers? A research group has just identified a big component of that attitude shift: the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to bury the truth by cozying up to universities and discrediting climate science.

The researchers, from Canada, the United States and Ireland, just published the first comprehensive review of academic and private research into the oil industry’s attempts to stymie and stifle climate science. “In an era of widespread concern about corporatization and declining public funding of higher education, and a worsening climate crisis met by limited government action,” their report says, “fossil fuel companies have embedded themselves in universities across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and beyond.”

(By the way, that’s not just language bias at work here. The researchers note that these four nations lead the world in per capita carbon-dioxide emissions and rank among the countries most responsible “for holding back international climate negotiations.”)

The evidence indicates that the oil lobbyists fund research, sit on governing boards (especially at the University of Alberta), host recruitment events and seek opportunities to influence academic curricula. As Jennie Stephens, a study co-author who is a professor at Ireland’s Maynooth University, told the climate news service DeSmog, “When you pull it all together, you realize how pervasive a strategy this has been.”

A few examples of the sort of skullduggery the researchers collected: BP sponsors Princeton University’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, which aims to “lead the way to a compelling and sustainable solution to the carbon and climate change problem.” A recent peer-reviewed article funded by the American Gas Association concluded that existing research “does not provide sufficient evidence regarding causal relationships between gas cooking or indoor nitrogen dioxide and asthma or wheeze,” despite growing research to the contrary. Oil firms helped develop climate programs at Oxford, Edinburgh and University College London. And two studies, in 2012 and 2022, found that fossil-fuel-funded research came to conclusions more favourable to the industry than did unsponsored research.

Particularly noteworthy was a 2018 study of energy giant Enbridge’s influence on the University of Calgary. Enbridge endowed the “Enbridge Centre for Corporate Sustainability” in the university’s business school, and the university’s then-president served on Enbridge’s board. CBC News found that Enbridge had the right to stop funding the centre at any time, sought influence over staffing and student awards, and negotiated opportunities for its executives and clients to meet university researchers. When UC faculty objected, administrators defended the company’s right “to use this investment as a way to make amends and possibly receive some positive PR.”

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The researchers also surfaced confidential documents that prove that businesses work deliberately to alter academic outcomes. One study quoted a 1978 lobbying manual for industries under pressure: “Regulatory policy is increasingly made with the participation of experts, especially academics. A regulated firm or industry should be prepared whenever possible to co-opt these experts. This is most effectively done by identifying the leading experts in each relevant field and hiring them as consultants or advisors, or giving them research grants and the like.” A leaked 1998 memo from the American Petroleum Institute advised its members to “build a case against precipitous action on climate change” by establishing “cooperative relationships with all major scientists whose research in this field supports our position.”

Worst of all, the paper says that many researchers over the years have asked universities to release data on private sponsorship of their energy-related research centres. Nearly all refused, hindering attempts to track these conflicts of interest.

These trends are particularly troubling given universities’ key role in studying complex societal challenges in the public interest. If universities, with their tenured professors and idealistic grad students, aren’t holding industry’s feet to the fire, who will?

To overcome these problems, the authors urge scholars to “engage urgently” in research into the prevalence of fossil fuel–university partnerships and the consequences of such partnerships. And they call on universities around the world to fully disclose their financial and contractual ties with fossil fuel companies. The authors say that “it is critical to better understand how pervasive industry involvement is in higher education, and how it is changing over time.”

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It was a major reversal for Bacow, who has dodged protesters’ demands that Harvard’s US$40-billion worth of endowment funds divest all traces of oil, gas and coal investments. By the end of 2020, Harvard Management Co. (HMC), custodian of the world’s largest endowment, had actually reduced fossil fuel investments from 11% of its portfolio in 2008 to 2%. But as Bacow, a one-time environmental studies professor, wrote in an article for the independent Harvard Magazine, “I, like my predecessors, believe that engaging with industry to confront the challenge of climate change is ultimately a sounder and more effective approach.”

That familiar brush-off was finally retired on September 9, when Bacow announced that HMC no longer directly owns any fossil fuel investments and “does not intend to make such investments in the future.” He conceded that HMC retains some “legacy investments” through limited partnerships but said those activities “are in runoff mode and will end as these partnerships are liquidated.” Looking ahead, he promised, “HMC is building a portfolio of investments in funds that support the transition to a green economy.”

The announcement came just two days after the nine-year-old Divest Harvard movement held a climate rally for returning students. Against the backdrop of floods, forest fires and hurricanes then devastating American communities, the students carried a massive blue banner symbolizing the rising ocean tides that they said are coming to Harvard’s door.

Activist students hailed Bacow’s reversal. “It’s a massive victory for our community, the climate movement, and the world – and a strike against the power of the fossil fuel industry,” Divest Harvard reported.

The organization framed Bacow’s statement as a milestone in the climate wars. “From the beginning, Harvard has sought to duck, dodge, and deny: claiming that fossil fuel stocks were necessary for profit, claiming that the endowment shouldn’t play a role in fighting climate change, and even claiming that fossil fuel companies are part of the solution. And the fossil fuel companies have loved this, constantly holding up Harvard’s embrace of the industry as a vindication of the industry’s unjust and unsustainable vision for the future.”

Author Bill McKibben, a Harvard grad who founded the climate campaign group 350.org, said he thought Harvard would never divest. “That it finally did is an enormous tribute to generations of Harvard students who have never let up, and to faculty and alumni who backed them up.” Still, McKibben believes Harvard’s “obstinance” in refusing to divest has cost the university prestige and money.

Spoiling the party was John S. Rosenberg, editor-in-chief of Harvard Magazine. He pointed out that Bacow’s statement never actually used the term “divestment” and that 60% of Harvard’s endowment is entrusted to private equity and hedge funds – independent investors who may have different investment strategies. If Harvard has instructed any such partners to avoid all investments that support the fossil fuel industry, Rosenberg wrote, “it has not said so.”

Later, Harvard prof Naomi Oreskes and Sofia Andrade of Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard penned an op-ed in The New York Times that clarified things somewhat. America’s oldest university will divest an estimated $838 million of its $42-billion endowment from fossil fuels, which they called “the first step toward a just transition to a greener future.”

Also this fall, Boston University and the University of Minnesota joined more than 1,300 schools and institutions that have divested, at least in part, from the fossil fuel industry.

Some will dismiss divestment as symbolic, said Oreskes and Andrade. Regardless, symbols matter, they wrote: “Harvard’s divestment is a signal to other investors that as the planet burns, finance must not stand with the arsonists.”

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“Movement is happening, but it is all about accelerating change,” says John Robinson, the University of Toronto’s presidential advisor on the environment, climate change and sustainability, emphasizing the urgency of the moment. A sustainability scholar who heads a university committee of senior administrators, faculty, students and staff, Robinson warns that “the longer we take, the worse the consequences.”

U of T embodies both the progress and the unfinished agenda to date. The university promises a net-zero-emissions campus by 2050 and a 40% reduction in the carbon footprint of its investment portfolio by 2030. Nudged by Robinson’s committee, the campus serves as a “living lab” for upper-year students to work on real problems identified by university departments. So far, 100 students participate, with 1,000 students a year expected over time. U of T is also constructing a new 14-storey timber-framed academic tower and a 750-bed residence built to “passive house” standards that limit energy demand to a fraction of what is used in a conventional building.

In academic innovation, Robinson’s committee and university departments are creating curricular and co-curricular pathways for any student to earn sustainability credentials in or outside the classroom.

“We are trying to make sustainability a defining characteristic of U of T,” Robinson says.

Equally ambitious is the University of British Columbia, which in 2020 placed first in Canada and seventh globally in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings of commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In a 2019 victory for student activists, UBC committed to full divestment of fossil fuel endowment investments “as soon as possible,” promised carbon neutrality by 2050, and declared a climate emergency. Last June, UBC president Santa Ono was named to lead the University Climate Change Coalition – with 22 research universities in Canada, the United States and Mexico promising accelerated efforts.

“There is so much work to do and so much [information] to share; competition only gets you so far,” Ono says. “The enormity of the climate change threat to humanity is so large that the sooner we can get away from that to open sharing of information and very strategic collaboration – the sooner we get there the better.”

He views students as allies. “We have learned from them, not only regarding the urgency of divestment but also how they view the world, what they would like to see in the curriculum and what kinds of projects they would like to work on.”

Michelle Marcus, a fourth-year environmental science student and divestment lead with Climate Justice UBC (formerly UBCC350), says that “student leadership has been critical to getting UBC to the place it is at, so continuing to empower and support students is going to be critical.” For example, Climate Hub was introduced in 2018 for university-funded, student-driven projects (for which they receive pay or course credits) on environmental and social justice issues.

Sustainability increasingly looms large in the curriculum. Montreal’s Concordia University, which aims to end fossil fuel endowment investments by 2025, last year joined the UN’s Decade of Action campaign to achieve the 17 SDGs by 2030. The university estimates that 82% of departments now offer sustainability content, up from 65% five years ago. Meanwhile, Concordia’s John Molson School of Business (JMSB) plans to add social and environmental responsibility to its core undergraduate curriculum starting this fall.

“We have learned from students, not only regarding the urgency of divestment but also how they see the world.”
– UBC president Santa Ono

“Right now, what is missing is student understanding about the core importance of sustainability issues,” says Jooseop Lim, associate dean of undergraduate programs. The goal, says JMSB dean Anne-Marie Croteau, is to develop “a reflex among students and faculty to think about sustainability issues and to be mindful of it.”

Kamloops university earns platinum for going green

As of September, all students at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., must choose a course (from a menu of more than 5O) tied to citizenship, one of eight university learning outcomes. They learn about ethical decision-making “by considering the social, economic and ecological side effects of everyday actions,” according to a TRU spokeswoman.

One of two Canadian universities with platinum ranking from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, TRU aspires to be carbon neutral, without offsets, by 2030. In 2022, the university will break ground on a 10-year campus electrification project to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90%. TRU hopes to divert 95% of campus waste from landfill in five years, up from 71% currently, with single-use items like coffee cups eliminated by 2025.

“As a society we have made convenience too important, and we have finally come to the realization that it is just a huge waste issue,” says TRU manager of sustainability programs James Gordon. “We are going to start turning that clock back.”

Colleges are eager to be change-makers too

In 2020, Ontario’s Mohawk College and seven other climate-conscious institutions staked out a national role to train graduates for a sustainable, post-pandemic recovery. “Now is the time … to make sure that it is a resilient recovery and that there is a move to a low-carbon, circular and socially inclusive economy,” says Mohawk president Ron McKerlie, of the mandate of the Canadian Colleges for a Resilient Recovery (CCRR). “There is no point putting billions into infrastructure without at the same time fixing some of the issues we have around climate change.”
CCRR takes its cue from the independent Task Force for a Resilient Recovery that last year urged federal government and industry support for building retrofits, clean energy, cleantech and zero-emission vehicles.

“This is too big an issue for us to tackle on our own,” McKerlie says. Each institution plays to its strength – Mohawk’s Centre for Climate Change Management is a hub for regional emission reduction – while sharing relevant curricula for a post-pandemic recovery. The City School, a successful Mohawk pilot project that retrains unemployed welfare recipients, will soon roll out nationally with other colleges.

“This is our chance to make a meaningful difference to the Canadian economy,” says McKerlie, who predicts that 50,000 workers could be retrained in a couple of years. “If we get the colleges involved, and there is some funding to go with it, we can increase this number significantly.”

College campuses are also test beds for sustainability.

Ontario’s Sheridan College is ahead of schedule to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030. Over the past decade, Sheridan has cut energy use per student by 35% and, since committing to zero waste in 2014, has slashed the volume of waste going to landfill by 54%.

Sheridan is one of the first North American institutions to set European-style energy-performance specifications for new buildings, says sustainability director Herb Sinnock. “At the time, we were looking at German building ratings for [low] annual energy consumption, and we felt if Germany and Austria can do it, we can too,” he says. In 2017, a second wing added to a campus building in Mississauga recorded 50% higher energy efficiency compared to the first wing built six years earlier.

Still, experts say the necessary heavy lifting is just beginning.

“We are definitely seeing a lot of effort, there is no doubt of that,” says Livia Bizikova, the lead for monitoring and governance at the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development. “The challenge is that there are so many things to do, and the question is more ‘Is the effort enough to get to the path to improve sustainability significantly?’”

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