Over the course of 2019, Property and Facilities’ Sustainability team has consulted across the UQ community seeking input into the new UQ Sustainability Strategy 2021–2025, which will guide the sustainability efforts of UQ over the coming years.
All UQ students and staff were invited to contribute to the development of the strategy through workshops or an online survey for those who were unable to attend in person.
Since February, UQ Sustainability has hosted multiple workshops, three of which were run for students, by students. Workshops included awareness sessions on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Sustainability Tracking Assessment & Rating System (STARS) to measure performance and the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings. Of workshop attendees, 80 per cent were students and 30 per cent were staff (some participants were both students and staff), indicating that the content of the Strategy has a large student-led component.
From the workshops and the online survey:
- 1942 individual inputs were collected
- 502 unique ideas were collated
- the top three areas of priority for the UQ community were identified.
From this information, the Sustainability team has drafted the content of the strategy around the four key STARS categories: academics, engagement, operations and planning and administration. Actions in the draft strategy align to relevant SDGs and implementation will be measured via UQ’s participation in the STARS system.
As well as feeding into the development of the strategy, the data collected will be used for research purposes and is available to inform Action Plans.
The draft strategy is currently seeking final input from across UQ in preparation for seeking endorsement.
