Most University of Michigan faculty, students and staff say they are committed to sustainability, but new survey results indicate significant room for improvement in sustainability behaviors, awareness, engagement and accountability.
The survey findings are part of a U-M report that also provides a set of indicators for measuring and assessing changes and progress. It’s all part of the Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program, known as SCIP, a first-of-its-kind study by the Graham Sustainability Institute and the Institute for Social Research.
The program is tracking the “sustainability culture” on the university’s Ann Arbor campus over a six-year period, with particular focus on four campus sustainability goal areas: climate action, waste prevention, healthy environments and community awareness.
“The university is committed to ambitious sustainability goals — one of which is to pursue evaluation strategies toward a campuswide ethic of sustainability,” said John Callewaert, director of integrated assessment at the Graham Sustainability Institute and co-principal investigator of the SCIP project with Robert Marans, research professor at ISR. “SCIP is serving as the university’s primary community awareness evaluation tool. We’re excited to be sharing the first-year report.”
SCIP kicked off across campus a year ago by surveying more than 6,600 students, faculty and staff about their sustainability knowledge, beliefs and behaviors. The first-year report, titled “Monitoring the Culture of Sustainability at the University of Michigan: Fall 2012,” represents the tabulated results of that survey. The second annual survey will be distributed to a new sample of students, faculty and staff this month.
Key observations and notable findings are:
• There is considerable room for improvement with regard to the behaviors, levels of awareness, degrees of engagement and expressed commitment to sustainability among members of the university community.
• The behaviors of students are far more in tune with the goal of greenhouse gas reduction than the behaviors of staff and faculty. This is largely due to differences in the ways each group travels to and from campus. Students are also likely to know more about transportation options available to them and are more engaged than either staff or faculty in sustainability activities on campus.
• Compared to students and staff, faculty tend to act in a more sustainable manner with respect to conserving energy, preventing waste, purchasing food and, more generally, engaging in pro-environment activities outside the university.
• Students tend to be less knowledgeable than staff or faculty about protecting the environment, preventing waste and sustainable foods. But they are more aware than faculty about what is happening at the university with regard to sustainability. Nonetheless, members of the staff are most aware of the range of U-M sustainability initiatives.
According to Marans, index scores from the first-year survey are crucial because they serve as benchmarks against which findings in subsequent years will be compared, with 15 specific sustainability cultural indicators to be monitored annually.
Indicators cover awareness, dispositions and actions related to travel and transportation, waste prevention, conservation, the natural environment, climate, food and engagement. They also cover awareness and ratings of campus sustainability initiatives. Survey data are supplemented with geographic data covering campus buildings where respondents live, work and study.
“Findings covered in our first-year report are primarily descriptive, showing differential responses among U-M students, staff and faculty,” Marans said. “We anticipate doing additional data mining to test hypotheses and consider factors that may be associated with indicator scores.”
Using annual SCIP data as a gauge, the university hopes to see U-M’s sustainability culture improve each year as community members become increasingly aware of, and engaged in, campus sustainability initiatives, such as the Planet Blue Ambassador program and the annual Earthfest event.
Callewaert said the university intends to share the SCIP research methodology with other sustainability-minded organizations worldwide.
“The primary purpose of SCIP is to inform U-M officials and others responsible for day-to-day options at the university, including its academic programs,” he said. “However, we also hope to serve as a model demonstrating how behavioral research can be used to address critical environmental issues within academic institutions and other organizational settings. We are eager to see the program replicated elsewhere.”
Steven Levine
Re: UM Sustainability staffs earn high praise for this effort. Kudos to staff members Terry Alexander, director of the staff effort for UM sustainability, and to his mentor and boss Hank Baier, associate vp for many of the core facility ops at UM