STARS:a Campus-Wide Integrated Continuous Planning Opportunity: Measuring Sustainability Broadens Perspectives and Offers Opportunities

In a companion viewpoint article in this issue of Planning for Higher Education, Terry Calhoun looks at how the work that sustainability administrators are doing via STARS and the PCC may create new higher education planning models and develop leaders with unique understandings of the structure of their institutions. He also looks at how STARS may offer a "stealth" opportunity for planners to accustom an institution's diverse interests to thinking in terms of the horizontal alignment of institutional plans. It probably goes without saying that many campuses these days have some sort of operation dedicated to the idea of sustainability. Whether it's a single coordinator, an office, or a committee, most colleges and universities have something to point to when potential students ask who's in charge of "greening" the campus. The vast majority of these sustainability jobs were created in response to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (PCC), and so their initial focus has been on quantifying greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and developing a climate action plan to get those emissions down to net zero. Conducting a GHG inventory requires accessing a range of administrative records (utility bills, travel accounts, fuel records) and conducting some purpose-built surveys, most often on the topic of campus commuter behavior. A GHG inventory is a necessary measuring stick, because you can't manage what you don't measure. But the GHG inventory just tells you where you are in terms of emissions. It can't tell you why your campus is at that point, or what historical decisions got you there, or what management objectives have been served along the way. In a sense, a GHG inventory tells an institution what must change, while giving very little indication of how it needs to change or how hard change is likely to be. And, of course, there is much more to the triple bottom line of sustainability than just carbon reduction. One tool currently available to help a campus answer the "how" and "how hard" questions is the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System or "STARS" Created by AASHE (the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, one of the main organizations behind the PCC), STARS presents guidelines and suggestions (based on industry experience) for becoming more sustainable and allows colleges and universities to assess their own efforts. And because STARS is explicitly designed to evolve as experience increases, its range of best practices seems likely to become the de facto standard for how to achieve sustainability within higher education. By enabling the correlation of practices reported under STARS with actual GHG emission reductions reported under the PCC, AASHE is setting the stage for the creation of an empirical model of sustainable campus management. But more important from a campus sustainability planning perspective is the fact that participating in STARS forces sustainability administrators to engage in a far wider range of conversations than is necessary simply to complete a GHG inventory. The questions STARS asks can't be answered merely by consulting financial and administrative records. STARS asks about current practices, which can only be understood after a fair bit of conversation with the people actually involved. STARS asks such a wide range of questions (covering curriculum, research, operations, finance, planning, and coordination) that any sustainability administrator who understands even superficial answers to all of them can't help but form a high-level systems view of her or his institution. That integrated perspective, combined with more in-depth inquiries into areas that seem to offer the potential for energy (and hence emissions) savings, can be tremendously useful to colleges and universities that are serious about their climate action planning. This is because, while initial sustainability efforts on most campuses seem to emphasize efficiency initiatives under the control of some single department, most of the sizable potential improvements aren't evident through the lens of the current organizational structure. …