U of T Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS)

The President’s Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS) was created in 2017. CECCS operates on the principle that sustainability is more than a subject-area or discipline. It is a cross-cutting framework, ethic, and key component of the University of Toronto (U of T) identity. Its goals are: to make sustainability a key component of the U of T identity, to achieve local and international leadership in the integration of operational and academic sustainability, and to recognize, share and aggregate good sustainability practices across the university. The Committee is co-chaired by Professor John Robinson and Ron Saporta. The collaborative leadership between the two co-chairs signifies the unique and important connection the Committee has achieved between academic and operational activities. The 4 cross-cutting themes of the CECCS are: • Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) involves addressing operational sustainability issues by connecting students, faculty, staff, and potentially external partners, on CLL projects. CLL works to create opportunities for students to use the campus as a test bed for sustainability by connecting academic and operational activities. • University as Agent of Change (AOC) involves building partnerships off-campus with organizations in the public, private, and civil society sectors, and with other universities. Through these partnerships, AOC works to contribute to the societal transitions for sustainable futures. • United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which CECCS uses (i) to orient our understanding, across all of our activities, of the many dimensions of sustainability across the campus, and (ii) to develop all of our sustainability inventories. • Student Leadership reflects our view that students are agents of change in the university and in the world after graduation. The CECCS aims to engage students in sustainability governance, research and publications, and living lab project