Sustainability and Climate Change

There is growing interest in partnerships between universities and communities and how such collaborations can help address the wicked challenges facing the world today. This article traces the development of the institutional commitments at Portland State University (PSU) in its efforts to build sustainability-focused community–university partnerships. The Institute for Sustainable Solutions at PSU has served as a mechanism to catalyze and nurture such partnerships on and off campus. This article examines two cases under the Portland Climate Action Collaborative that illustrate how community–university partnerships have emerged, what impacts they have had on the community, and what factors contributed to their success. Interviews with university and community representatives throughout the Pacific Northwest on important considerations in the process of building effective, high-impact partnerships provide insights and some key takeaways that include: the value of having an institutional unit that can defray transaction costs and serve as a matchmaker and support structure for programs and projects; the importance of relationship building over time to help develop trust and organizational understanding; the impact that sustained funding, even in small amounts, can have in terms of providing student support and allowing faculty time to invest in project and programs; and the need to balance clarity of project scope with flexibility to allow projects and relationships to grow and evolve.

While federal action on climate change and renewable energy development has lagged in the United States, cities are undertaking ambitious sustainability initiatives. Motivation often flows from a resilience mindset—how cities can prepare for and be resilient to future shocks. The conflation of sustainability and resilience jeopardizes the success of sustainability efforts and limits their scope. Institutionalizing sustainability in city governments requires building capacity for city leadership to link sustainability and resilience objectives. This article builds on previous work in sustainability education to demonstrate how key competencies, or ways of thinking, in sustainability can be adapted for use with city leadership. The article introduces a novel board game entitled Future Shocks and City Resilience as a method for creating an interactive educational environment that facilitates learning while contributing to cultural change within a city administration. The game was played with leadership from the City of Tempe, Arizona. Results from analyzing the game play indicate that the game encourages participants to utilize sustainability in ways of thinking at a novice level. Recommendations include how cities can utilize this and other capacity-building tools to develop intermediate and advanced sustainability competence among their staffs.

Climate change presents one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. Opportunities for inter-sectoral collaboration to drive climate solutions are beginning to emerge and mature with the higher education sector taking an active role in forging new partnerships. This article explores how climate resilience is a topic that can create innovative, bidirectional campus and community relationships and programs. The Presidents' Climate Leadership Commitments, the Kresge-funded Climate Resilience in Urban Campuses and Communities (CRUX) project, and two campus case studies are cited as examples of how climate programs with a direct connection to surrounding communities—urban communities in particular—can open new pathways for engagement and accelerate climate solutions. A number of lessons drawn from these examples can help with new program design in the future. The lens of climate adaptation and resilience allows for the complementary strengths of higher education and surrounding communities to be utilized together, introduces new skill sets that are needed to drive climate action, and illustrates how alignment between the sectors could create more positive outcomes.

Nepal, one of the fastest urbanizing and most disaster-prone countries in the world, faces a looming urban water crisis due to rising temperatures, changing climate, and a rapidly growing population in its cities. Changes in rainfall patterns, growing industrial activity, changing lifestyle of the emerging middle class, unplanned urban development, and rapidly increasing urban populations are all contributing factors to the Himalayan cities becoming more water stressed. Limited water access, poor infrastructure development, inequitable distribution, inefficient water resource management, supply-demand mismatch, and institutional inefficiency are the key issues surrounding water insecurity. Multiple, fragmented, top-down institutional arrangements in water governance pose a challenge for effective, equitable, and decentralized water planning and management. This article presents a case study of the struggles over water scarcity and water management in one small and one midsized city in Nepal—Dhulikhel and Dharan. It examines the research, collaborative strategies, and policies for the codevelopment of innovative approaches to meet the rapidly increasing water demands.

This article describes a town-gown collaboration in the capital region of New York State between two academic institutions, Albany Law School and the University at Albany, and two city governments, those of the cities of Albany and Schenectady. Through this initiative, students and faculty from these institutions work closely with city government officials to develop and implement policy initiatives to help those cities combat blight in ways that are practical, feasible, scalable, and sustainable. Because blight is unquestionably a sustainability issue, strategies that can address, minimize, and even prevent blight can help communities address long-term environmental, economic, and cultural sustainability.

Recognizing the need to proactively prepare engaged citizens for the dynamic socioeconomic and environmental conditions of the 21st century, the Institute for Sustainable Development at California State University (CSU), Chico, launched a Resilient Cities Initiative, a concerted effort to scale-up place-based applied interdisciplinary research and teaching to address community sustainability needs throughout its Northern California service region. This initial effort, in collaboration with the City of Chico, is a two-phase study of the South Campus Neighborhood. The project focuses on a 42-square-block residential area immediately adjacent to the university and downtown Chico, with the ultimate goal of assisting in the development of a Neighborhood Improvement Plan. The first phase of the project has been focused on developing an Existing Conditions Report with seven principal components: Neighborhood History, Neighborhood Character, Urban Forest, Transportation & Circulation, Street Lighting, Criminal Activity, and Stakeholder Identification & Engagement. This phase has included participation of an interdisciplinary team of nine faculty members from seven departments across three academic colleges on campus, and has involved over 400 students actively applying classroom theory to real-world problems in their backyard. The South Campus Neighborhood Project represents a clear precedent for CSU, Chico, in terms of the scale of interdisciplinary faculty and student involvement on campus in a single community-focused and community-funded project. This collaboration with the City will have numerous benefits for city administration, community stakeholders, and in particular, university priorities to engage faculty and students in an applied interdisciplinary scholarship and to work regionally to promote community resilience.