For people and the planet: Q&A with SFU's central sustainability team

From co-founding Sustainable SFU (now Embark Sustainability) to becoming the executive director of SFU Sustainability, your sustainability and climate action journey spans nearly 20 years. Looking back, what stands out the most for you?

For me, ‘sustainability’ is not about ‘saving the planet’—it is about people—people designed today’s unsustainable and unjust systems and it is mostly political, cultural, and ideological clashes (people) getting in the way of designing new ones. Most of us want to live on a healthy planet with equal access to conditions to thrive, but the path to these goals is the source of much debate and conflicting ideas on the ‘right’ or ‘best’ approach to improve human and planetary health. I have seen this become a distraction when we try to convince others that there is one right and best way —conversely, when people come together across difference and discipline to achieve a goal, seemingly impossible progress emerges.

This is why I have been inspired by the diversity of champions within the SFU community who have helped us move the needle by addressing both individual and system change through cross- silo collaborations. Students, faculty, staff and senior leaders are stepping up in creative and energetic ways to redesign our operations, teaching, research, community engagement and global impact to align these areas with environmental and climate renewal and justice. We have nearly halved our energy footprint, eliminated plastic bottles, redesigned dining services with accessibility and carbon in mind, developed hundreds of sustainability and climate change courses, contributed to life-changing research that has transformed communities, and started listening to Host Nations and our Indigenous colleagues on how we might heal the land and ourselves based on hundreds of years of stewardship. If we can do all that, then I think we can do anything.

While all of us at SFU play a role in advancing sustainability and climate action, there is a passionate and diverse team guiding our efforts. Tell us about the central sustainability team.

I am fortunate to collaborate with some of the most hard-working, dedicated, resilient, kind and creative people I have ever met. The central sustainability team works passionately to support faculty, staff, students, senior leaders and external community partners in their sustainability and climate action work, research, teaching, and learning. The team includes: Kayla Blok (global sustainability); Lindsay Bunce (strategic operations and development); Melissa Fiorucci (administration); Marina Van Driel (community engagement); Kilim Park (research sustainability); Rita Steele (operations sustainability); Maria Spiliotopoulou (learning and teaching sustainability); Kim Thee (climate and sustainability justice); Asad Nayani (intelligence, data, reporting); and Erin Travers (fundraising).

Every area of the university contributes to sustainability and climate action now—this is so wonderful to see. The university recently shared What’s Next: The SFU Strategy, which includes “resilience and sustainability” as one of its core values. Our team’s role is to be the central service hub for strategic planning, community engagement, data collection, evaluation, reporting, education and training and communications. We help set the sustainability north star for SFU and convene people for problem-solving, solutions development and collaboration. We also work to change university systems, processes and practices to remove structural barriers and create pathways for all people at SFU to engage in sustainability and climate action work.

These days, we are challenged by diminishing resources, overlapping global and local crises, competing priorities and the need to do more despite these challenges. Tell us about the Embedding Sustainability and Climate Action approach and how it addresses these challenges.

From my perspective, a key challenge involves balancing the urgency of climate change with the need to slow down, act intentionally and bring people along with us. Scholar and writer Bayo Akomolafe encourages us to slow down in these urgent times to avoid rushing into old patterns, ways of thinking and further harm. We need to listen to each other, practice care and compassion and shift our mindsets and ways of knowing and doing. We need to ensure everyone is at the table with an equal voice. Adopting this approach requires us to slow down and pay attention— but it produces better, more equitable and lasting results. Integrating justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) and truth, reconciliation and decolonizing practices into our environmental work has helped us see the importance of this approach. Sustainability and climate action practitioners have—and can still—cause significant harm when they move forward with good intentions but with carelessness in their speed and direction.

One way we are moving with intentionality is the Embedding Sustainability and Climate Action (ESCA) approach. Not a project or a program, ESCA is a process and way of approaching SFU’s sustainability and climate action work with a people perspective. ESCA moves us from rigid project management to collaborative design and adaptive flow. The focus of ESCA is on embedding sustainability and climate action learning, innovation and practice across the university in ways that make sense and work for each area. At SFU, we have now created an ESCA community of practice to support, collaborate, listen and learn from one another while we develop co-beneficial solutions and practices. It includes representatives from each of SFU’s vice-president senior leadership teams and their respective communicators.