Key ingredients for university leadership in fostering climate action

Abstract

British Columbia has been badly hit by the effects of the climate crisis over the past year. This makes examining university climate policies especially timely. In what follows, the policies of three universities are singled out for examination – Royal Roads University, University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University – based on the leadership roles they have undertaken to date. The paper analyzes the factors that have facilitated this leadership. This is then contrasted with the performance of the author’s home institution, Vancouver Island University. It offers a brief profile of each institution and summarizes the results in a table towards the end of the paper that compares their performance and their respective strengths and weaknesses.