Victoria broadens climate focus to embrace sustainability

The University of Victoria in Canada’s temperate rain forest zone, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, has blazed a trail in integrating education for sustainable development with an expansive range of courses and activities, deepening its sustainability research and learning impact.

This year the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings rated the university fifth in the world for supporting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13 on climate action. It was ranked fourth for helping to promote SDG 11 on developing sustainable cities and communities and was joint 13th overall worldwide for positively impacting all of the SDGs.

For decades the University of Victoria (UVic) has been focused on climate issues. It has been monitoring ocean climates for more than 30 years, for instance via acoustic assessments investigating how underwater noise in busy sea lanes affects marine life such as orcas, humpback whales, seals and salmon.



Professor Kevin Hall is president and vice-chancellor of the university, a civil engineer known for his commitment to sustainability, innovation and community engagement. He told University World News that when he joined UVic, he wanted to broaden that climate commitment across the university and into society, locally and internationally.

“We have seen that swing slightly in the past four years,” he said, with more focus on the social and governance implications of climate and on other aspects of sustainability.

Two initiatives especially helped catalyse this shift.

Catalysing the shift

One was the creation of the UVic International Training Centre for Authorities and Leaders (CIFAL), which provides UN-accredited training programmes building regional and global capacity and leadership.

CIFAL Victoria delivers training and research that builds on its commitments to the SDGs and Indigenous people’s rights, its website says. “It connects the region with the global community and supports international knowledge-sharing and partnerships, as well as gathering and measuring data on our impact in advancing the SDGs.”

Mirroring Hall’s experience of establishing a CIFAL at the University of Newcastle, in his native Australia, he recalled: “People got excited about the opportunity to have a UN brand. It was a perfect relationship for the university to have because of its commitment to climate in the past,” he said.

“There was a whole group doing research on social justice but not focused on climate, and a strong governance and indigenous governance programme, but these clusters were working independently. What brought them together was the SDGs because that’s the perfect marriage between climate and its impact on people and on shared prosperity globally.”

Second, Hall pushed the university to take rankings more seriously, especially the Times Higher Education (THE) sustainability rankings, which allowed UVic to play to its strengths: “Whether we like it or not or whether we believe in rankings, they impact your ability to recruit international students; to attract high quality faculty and staff.”

He said that UVic, like many Canadian universities, had not really focused on rankings; it is in the 351 to 400 band in the THE rankings overall. “My job was to increase rankings so you had to understand how the system works and what you can do to drive the rankings.”

The result was that UVic moved from the 101 to 200 group in the 2021 THE Impact Rankings on SDG impact to 13th today: “We spent a lot of effort making sure our stories and research around civil and sustainable development goals were accessible to people through the website, through publications and getting out to the community and talking.

That was a game-changer for us.”

Reaping rewards

“The importance of having both the United Nations training centre and the rankings to focus upon was that it allowed us to let others know of the great work going on at UVic,” Hall told University World News.

That effort has also improved work at the university: “It generates lots of great ideas: ‘I didn't realise you were doing that in civil engineering; I’m in fine arts, maybe we can do this together with the community and then solve this problem or that problem’.”

Hall argued that integrating people and their expertise can boost success. Many granting agencies are looking for multidisciplinary projects that include social aspects.

“It’s that synergy of working together that gets creative and which has lifted our boat at UVic. We’ve had four years of increasing research productivity across the campus, and not just the engineers and the scientists,” he said.

A good example of such creative (and remunerative) work is UVic leading a CA$83.6 million (US$62 million) Accelerating Community Energy Transformation programme, managed by its Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, which works with industrial partners to test full-scale prototype green power systems and devices.

Hall noted that in working with other Canadian universities, this was “a great example of where we pull together”, with the project focused on small communities of 50,000 people or fewer looking to switch to renewable or lower carbon energy systems, away from diesel power for example.

The project can help untangle technical challenges such as grid systems not accepting renewables transmission, or political problems impeding the installation of workable systems, “particularly in remote rural indigenous communities but also smaller cities and municipalities that desire to have a better energy source”.

The university also hosts a UVic Renewable Energy Club of students tackling inefficiencies in renewable energy and sustainability. They, for example, participate in the United States government’s Solar Decathlon Building Design Challenge for sustainable buildings.

This kind of collaborative outreach work can help academics hone their effectiveness, said Hall: “There’s lots of good work that goes on at a university, but nobody hears about it because we often don’t speak the language of the public.” Looking at this public framework and wanting to create an impact in the local community “tells you the importance of being able to translate the results of what you’re saying in the research”.

That counts double when keeping applications in mind from the outset: “If you do your research in isolation in your lab or on the bench in the university, you struggle more to think ‘How do I make an impact, how do I get industry to take up these results’. It’s much better to do it right up front from this perspective, having multi-disciplinary, multi-talented teams from different sectors to start with, because then you translate right away.”

As for its climate traditions, UVic is home to 12 centres of learning and research dedicated to reducing and mitigating climate change. These include the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, which it shares with the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and the University of Northern British Columbia, to develop and deliver climate solutions research and programming.

Linking local to international

The University of Victoria’s work is also international. Hall encourages the development of links with Asia, given that Victoria is very much part of the Asia-Pacific region.

UVic hosts a Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, for example. It facilitates international conferences, events and research projects for faculty, as well as learning opportunities for students, such as a planned trip to Bhutan this autumn.

The university is aided in delivering such knowledge to the wider community and world through its extensive Co-op Program, which sees 6,000 students undertaking work experience annually, out of the university’s more than 20,000 students overall.

The result is commercially informed students, for instance, helping the UVic purchasing department source from indigenous Canadian suppliers or assessing the environmental impact of buying materials and technologies.

That can help the university have a positive local impact – 5% of Victoria’s Vancouver Island population of 864,000 are Indigenous Canadians: “We are becoming very island-centric in our work, in reconciliation,” for example, said Hall.

“It's a delicate balance between making sure that when we make decisions at the university, we think about what impact that’s going to have on the citizens of Victoria, the Indigenous nations around Victoria, the youth in Victoria. Let’s have that lens on major decisions we make around programming, research and the facilities.”

The university has developed a strategic plan that takes all these considerations into account, said Hall: “It says we are inspired by place,” on the warm south-western tip of Canada, by the Pacific Ocean.

“We’re here in Victoria; we’re on Lekwungen territories; we’re on Vancouver Island; we’re in British Columbia; and that inspires us. But we want to be globally connected too, and we want to transform ideas into impact.”