With our current five-year Sustainability Action Plan concluding in 2024-2025, we are set to begin the next phase of our sustainability efforts. The University will develop a new plan that will guide us towards our 2050 sustainability objectives. This plan will address the needs of our tri-campus community and involve a range of partners in its creation.
DOUBLE SUSTAINABILITY ORIENTED RESEARCH PROJECTS BY 2025
Sustainability evolves at the intersection between society and the environment. Much of scientific research is aligned along this same interface, so a more refined attention to sustainability illuminates our thinking about how we engage in research. We start toward this Target simply by understanding these parallels through a comprehensive sustainability research inventory. We will also vigorously expand our work beyond the walls of academia, making our campuses and surrounding communities living laboratories that provide rich collaborations and shared positive outcomes.
Progress: No formal inventory was completed for sustainability research projects.
By-the-Numbers: UW is a global leader in research and innovation, supported by a vast network of laboratories and more than 280 research centers and institutes.
Status: Not Achieved. The target of doubling sustainability-oriented research could not be verified due to the lack of a system-wide baseline or tracking mechanism. It was also difficult to define what counted as “sustainability-oriented” research across disciplines.
This experience showed that focusing on outputs alone was not the correct approach for research- and academic-based targets. In our next plan, we are shifting from measuring research volume to creating more opportunities and ready-to-implement projects that students can join, with clear mechanisms for tracking and reporting their impacts.
