Process & timeline
Sustainability has been in our DNA from the very beginning and we have made a long-term commitment to be a leading higher education institution.
We want to stimulate innovation, raise awareness and ensure effective participation in the implementation of sustainability at all levels.
Missed the launch of the Sustainability Action Plan?
Our accomplishments so far
The university’s first-ever assessment of sustainability was called the Concordia Campus Sustainability Assessment (CCSA) and was launched in 2003 by Sustainable Concordia, which went on to become and has remained a student fee-levy group.
The Sustainability Action Fund is a student fee-levy group that has been funding student sustainability projects at Concordia since 2007.
Concordia phased out the sale of plastic water bottles at all university-controlled campus restaurants and vending machines in 2011. Learn about other waste efforts being led by Zero Waste Concordia.
In 2017, Concordia achieved a STARS Gold Rating from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
A group of students, faculty and staff came together to plant 185 new trees — all of which are biologically meaningful native species — at Loyola Campus in 2019.
Concordia’s Office of Sustainability was created in 2019. There are five full-time staff positions across different departments whose primary mandate includes furthering sustainability at the university.
In 2019, Concordia joined nine other Quebec universities in declaring a climate emergency and went on to commit to fully sustainable investments by 2025.
On October 8, 2020, Concordia signed on to the University Global Compact demonstrating our commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, Concordia has over 20 student initiatives focusing on social, environmental and economic sustainability.
The Sustainability Ambassadors Program is an initiative linking sustainability-minded students, faculty and staff with opportunities to provide peer-to-peer sustainability education with participating groups or departments.
Collaboratively developing the Sustainability Action Plan
In our sustainability policy, we committed to the following goals:
- Adopt sustainability as a core value through strategic planning, commitments, actions and communications.
- In consultation with our community, develop long-term sustainability plans with sustainability goals and measurable indicators as part of our organizational planning.
- Work with our various academic and non-academic sectors to create implementation plans with specific key performance indicators to achieve viable sustainability goals.
- Support the implementation of sustainability in its activities with appropriate resources from the university administration.
2017: Stream topics
Our community consultation in 2017 led to the identification of five streams as areas of focus:
- Food
- Waste
- Climate change
- Research
- Curriculum
2018: Committees’ draft plans
- Multi-stakeholder committees were created to draft targets and strategies for each stream
- Student groups, faculty members, administration and staff were all represented
- A committee chair was named for each stream
2019: Community consultations
- We held a community consultation to ensure that we are on the right track, identify priority strategies for implementation, and plan for the best way to collaborate with our community going forward.
- Draft plans were shared publicly and with key stakeholders in March 2019
- Over 100 community members participated in community consultations, in person and online
- The stream committees incorporated community feedback and submitted their final draft plans in June 2019
2019-20: Unit-level planning
The draft plans were shared with the following units and departments prior to their implementation:
- Student groups
- Academic cabinet
- Indigenous Directions
- Office of the Chief Communications Officer
- Office of the Chief Financial Officer
- Office of Community Engagement
- Office of the Provost and Vice-President, Academic
- Office of the Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies
- School of Graduate Studies
- Office of the Vice-President, Services and Sustainability
We finalized planning for our five streams:
- We prioritized strategies on the basis of impact, ease of implementation and leadership, and we made adjustments to the remaining strategies according to unit feedback
- We developed a five-year budget and began the process of unit-level planning for the strategies
