The Global Sustainability Summer School in Brunei was a fantastic experience. The event brought together a range of professionals and researchers from various countries and disciplines to discuss the difficult sustainability challenges of our time. The event featured several eminent speakerssuch as Dr. Michael K. Dorsey (a member of Obama’s energy and environment presidential campaign), Dr Jan Zika (a climate change and ocean scientist) and Dr Bert de Vries from the Netherlands (a leading Professor of global change and energy). My special thanks go to Deva Seetharam from IBM for organising GSSS 2011 and providing us all with this great learning experience.
The two week event provided a great platform for engagement and networking with other sustainability professionals from around the world. The trip to the rain forest was a really exciting and eye-opening experience. Around 50% of the Brunei land area is still covered by rain forest. Brunei is currently looking to diversify it’s economy from it’s reliance on oil and natural gas. Environmentalists worry that logging may increase once the offshore oil and gas reserves start to wane. My road trip to Malaysia highlighted the stark contrast between the two countries – as soon as we crossed the border there were no trees to be seen. This highlights the intrinsic complexity of some of the challenges of global sustainability.
During the two week event, the participants highlighted several important improvement opportunities for our hosts. For example, while it was 40 degrees Celsius outside – in the buildings the air conditioning was set by default to around 20 degrees.. This meant that many of the participants were left feeling cold, having not expected to need jumpers in a tropical country. On the last day of the event, I was given the opportunity to facilitate the development of a sustainability strategy for the University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD).
Developing a sustainability strategy for the University of Brunei (UBD)
We used the tools of my baseline assessment approach to understand the interests of interested stakeholders, the existing strengths and weakness, opportunities and threats, and the specific sustainability issues that were relevant to the university. The programme elements of the UBD-IBM sustainability strategy were established as: research, teaching, community, awareness, waste management, energy management, transport and stakeholder management. An ecoWheel was developed to communicate the existing performance of the university, and the road map to achieve the vision in each programme area.
One of the exciting results of the GSSS is that UBD will now have a committee made up of management, staff and students to progress the university on its path to more sustainable practices. We are beginning to see a trend in the uptake of formal sustainability programmes in universities around the world. In New Zealand, all the main universities have already established a presence in this area. One of the key challenges with universities is in the engagement of the staff and students from various faculties and departments. Unitec has begun using the ecoPortal as a tool to facilitate the collaboration and involvement of its 23,000 students and 1150 staff.