Publications

Introduction

AASHE’s publications library is the leading repository of reports, journal articles, books, and student research on sustainability in higher education. Certain publication types are entered in the annual AASHE Awards Program.

At a Glance

3942
Total Resources
1903
Organizations
99
Countries
58
U.S. States & Territories
12
Canadian Provinces

Bars in graphs can be clicked to view resources that align with a particular category. Because a resource may be listed under multiple topics and disciplines, graph data may include higher total counts than what is indicated in total resources above.

3942 resources

Reducing Energy Waste via Occupant Behavior: The Role of the Individual in Climate Change Solutions

  • University of Colorado Boulder (CO)

This study aims to achieve energy waste reductions via the rewiring of human habits as opposed to using technology. In public spaces like university campuses, individuals often remove themselves from ...


An Economic Perspective on a Carbon Management Program at the University of Michigan

  • University of Michigan (MI)

The recent UN IPCC special report stated that, in order to stay at or below 1.5 degrees of warming, greenhouse gas emissions will need to be reduced by 45 ...


Associations Between Higher Education Sustainability and Alumni Giving

  • Harvard University (MA)

Remaking higher education campuses to meet climate commitments will have real and significant costs, yet many campuses are financially constrained. For most institutions, alumni giving is a significant, yet declining ...


An analysis of vehicular emissions at Kansas State University

  • California State University, Bakersfield (CA)
  • Kansas State University (KS)

There has been a wave of recent interest in understanding the dynamics of vehicular emissions in university towns. Using data from a recent survey of Kansas State University students, faculty ...


Quantifying the Offset of Greenhouse Gas Emissions at the University of North Alabama

  • University of North Alabama (AL)

This study quantified the discrete and areal carbon sequestration capacity of the University of North Alabama’s green infrastructure. USDA i-Tree was used to analyze and report on the carbon ...


An Assessment of Teaching and Learning about Sustainability Across the Higher Education Curriculum

  • Columbia University (NY)

Although the majority of scientists agree that we are facing unprecedented climate crises, higher education’s engagement with environmental and sustainability problems is lacking. While the role of human behavior ...


The Promotion of Indoor Drinking Water Fountains at UBC

  • University of British Columbia (BC)

The University of British Columbia (UBC), located in Vancouver, Canada, offers its students, staff and visitors free tap water through campus-wide drinking fountains (water fountains). However, there are currently no ...


Sustainable Development in Swedish and Canadian Campus Plans

  • KTH Royal Institute of Technology

The concept of sustainable development being integrated into strategic spatial plans has increased in recent years. University campus plans are examples of such spatial plans, and these form the focus ...


DiLoreto Initiative: Sustainability Decision Support System at Villanova

  • Villanova University (PA)

Colleges and universities throughout the world are not only significant consumers of energy and natural resources but also have the social, economic and political impacts of small cities. How can ...


Let's Get Sorted: The Path to Zero Waste at Pomona College

  • Pomona College (CA)

This senior thesis in environmental analysis explores the Zero Waste ideal and its practical application to a college campus. Given the growing global trash crisis and its grave environmental, social ...


Education for Sustainable Development: Business School Preparation of Student Social Entrepreneurs

  • University of Pennsylvania (PA)

The research examines the state of social entrepreneurship curricula, that is, programs that combine education for sustainable development and traditional business entrepreneurialism instruction, at leading business school MBA programs in ...


Developing, Piloting, and Factor Analysis of a Brief Survey Tool for Evaluating Food and Composting Behaviors: The Short Composting Survey

  • Central Washington University (WA)

Composting on a university campus may take a variety of forms. Sustainable approaches to waste management can be taught and supported through educational programs, peer-to-peer behavior modeling, and composting program ...


Solar PV as a mitigation strategy for the US education sector

  • Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (CA)

Solar photovoltaic (PV) is an important strategy to de-carbonize the energy sector in the United States and to reduce the health, environmental, and climate change damages associated with the production ...


The Fear of Not Flying: Achieving Sustainable Academic Plane Travel in Higher Education Based on Insights from South Australia

  • The University of Adelaide (SA)

Universities are both disseminators and producers of the climate knowledge needed to institute the social and cultural change required for climate adaptation and mitigation to occur. They also have the ...


Sustainability at SIT: a Look at the Past, a Plan for the Future

  • SIT School for International Training (VT)

Climate change threatens our world and way of life. Intelligent development and investment could mitigate the worst threats of climate change, while simultaneously providing continuous growth for the global economy ...


Management perspectives on campus sustainability in Hong Kong

  • University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)

This study explores administrative managers’ understanding of sustainability issues and perceptions of stakeholder salience in relation to campus environmental initiatives in the publicly-funded universities of Hong Kong. Universities in Hong ...


Sustainability in the higher education of interior designers

  • Royal Roads University (BC)

This thesis addresses the question: how comprehensive are principles of sustainability in the curricula of interior design degree programs in Canada? Key trends in literature regarding sustainability in higher education ...


The Rise of H2Ottawa

  • University of Ottawa (ON)

In 2010, the University of Ottawa (hereafter, UO) banned the sale of single-use water bottles. UO decided that the sale of this product ran contrary to their commitments to environmental ...


Putting Japanese Youth into Practice: Japanese Student Campus Practices and Sustainability

  • University of Sheffield

Practice theory has been increasingly employed to deepen understanding of how everyday life is conducted, including the question of how our daily activities might evolve in more sustainable directions (Shove ...


Mobilizing transdisciplinary collaborations: collective reflections on decentering academia in knowledge production

  • California State University, Long Beach (CA)
  • University of Calgary (AB)
  • Massey University
  • The Nature Conservancy (VA)

Global sustainability challenges and their impact on society have been well-documented in recent years, such as more intense extreme weather events, environmental degradation, as well as ecosystem and biodiversity loss ...


Envisioning green solutions for reducing the ecological footprint of a university campus

  • Politecnico di Torino

Purpose This paper aims to report strategies towards a green campus project at Politecnico di Torino University, a 33,000-students Italian higher education institution (HEI), and estimate the avoided ecological ...


A baseline assessment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within European Student Union web environments

  • National Union of Students
  • University of the West of England, Bristol

The world of student unions is under-researched, particularly relating to global issues and challenges, despite them holding a large proportion of the future workforce. At present, the European Students Union ...


Making Sustainability Personal: An Experiential Semester-Long Project to Enhance Students’ Understanding of Sustainability

  • University of Minnesota, Duluth (MN)

Students often naively assume that pursuing sustainability is necessarily costly and difficult. However, proponents of “weak” or “business-centered” sustainability argue that well-crafted sustainability initiatives may simultaneously reduce carbon footprint and ...


Climate change belief, sustainability education, and political values: Assessing the need for higher-education curriculum reform

  • Vanderbilt University (TN)

Educational attainment is generally a strong predictor of belief in climate change, but prior research indicates that for political conservatives a college education is not always associated with increased belief ...


Teaching Climate Science to Increase Understanding & Receptivity

  • Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Only about half of Americans are convinced that human activity is the major cause of climate change. This statistic highlights the increased need for high-quality climate science education but also ...


Design and Life Cycle Cost of a Vertical Ground Source Heat Exchange System for the Smith College Field House

  • Smith College (MA)

Committed to becoming a carbon neutral campus by 2030, Smith College is transitioning towards geothermal energy for campus heating and cooling. Energy consultants have been hired to conduct an economic ...


Sustainability awareness, attitudes and actions: A survey of pre-service teachers

  • Memorial University of Newfoundland (NL)
  • King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi

The purpose of this study was to survey the awareness, attitudes and actions of Thai, pre-service, industrial-education teachers (N=390) regarding economic, social and environmental sustainability. Survey items were derived ...


Education for Sustainability in Education: A Focus on Pedagogical Approaches for Effective Teaching and Learning

  • Michigan State University (MI)

Teaching and learning for sustainable development have become an important area of educational endeavour that educators are responsible for. Given the need to educate citizens about sustainable ways of living ...


How to motivate students to use green chemistry approaches in everyday research work: Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

  • Lomonosov Moscow State University

Teaching green chemistry to chemistry students is necessary in order to raise up a new generation of responsible scientists, highly motivated to implement sustainable development of the human race. This ...


Gender Equality and UN Sustainable Development Goals: Priorities and Correlations in the Top Business Schools’ Communication and Legitimation Strategies

  • Universitat Ramon Llull

Gender equality is still an issue in business schools, since women in MBAs classrooms, in faculty and in management teams have low representation. Challenges caused by lack of financial aids ...


Complexity in Education for Sustainable Consumption—An Educational Data Mining Approach using Mysteries

  • University of Kiel
  • University of Hamburg

Systems thinking is one of the skills necessary for sustainable behavior, especially regarding sustainable consumption. Students are faced with complexity and uncertainty while taking part in it and other daily ...


An Empirical Investigation on the Awareness and Practices of Higher Education Students in Green Information Technology: Implications for Sustainable Computing Practice, Education, and Policy

  • Technological Institute of the Philippines

Green IT is a resource efficient and effective consumption through the use of information technology with minimal or no impact to the environment. This study is an initial attempt to ...


Sustainability in finance teaching: evaluating levels of reflection and transformative learning

  • Mackenzie Presbyterian University

Purpose The purpose of this study is to argue for the need for more critical-reflective teaching-learning experiences in finance teaching, capable of promoting changes in students’ frames of reference toward ...


How freshmen perceive Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

  • University of Bayreuth

Concepts of 464 university freshmen towards Environmental Education (EE) and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) were analyzed. Responses were classified into seven main categories: ‘ecological aspects’, ‘ecological problems’, ‘economical aspects ...


Diagnosis of Sustainability in the Food Engineering Creation Program of the Polytechnic University of the State of Carchi (UPEC) in the Substantive Function “Teaching”

  • University of São Paulo
  • Universidad Politécnica Estatal del Carchi

As the world population grows, technologies are developed to improve food industrialization processes that are characterized by using large amounts of resources that modify social, economic, political and environmental systems ...


Creating Pedagogy to Integrate Sustainability and the Arts

  • Xavier University (OH)

The creation of a sustainable world urgently requires managers of organizations to consider large-scale changes in the practices and policies of social and economic institutions. Compelling scientific and economic information ...


Education for sustainable development – from students’ and geography teachers’ knowledge to educational activities

  • University of Warsaw

The paper presents the topic of academic education for sustainable development (ESD). A diagnostic survey was made in a form of a questionnaire in three groups of respondents: active geography ...


Didactic Strategies to Promote Competencies in Sustainability

  • Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Madrid)
  • Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
  • University of Cadiz
  • Universidad de Salamanca
  • Universidad de Sevilla

Higher education is a principal agent for addressing the sustainable development goals proposed by the 2030 Agenda, because of its key mission of knowledge generation, teaching and social innovation for ...


Environmental sustainability features in large university campuses: Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) as a model of green university

  • Jordan University of Science and Technology

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to describe the efforts undertaken to convert the large university campus of Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) into a green, resource-efficient ...


Reviewing University Community Gardens for Sustainability: taking stock, comparisons with urban community gardens and mapping research opportunities

  • Keele University

Community gardens (CGs) in university settings are faced with challenges associated with a transient and inexperienced population of student gardeners, but they also have the potential to have a lasting ...


Implementing Competence Orientation: Towards Constructively Aligned Education for Sustainable Development in University-Level Teaching-And-Learning

  • University of Bern

The call for integration of competences in tertiary education for sustainable development (ESD) has been heard. Helpful competence models for ESD are available but little exists about how to put ...


Assessment of knowledge and awareness of “sustainability” initiatives among college students

  • Lamar University (TX)

Campus sustainability is essential for any university. Campus sustainability denotes the potential of the university to develop new ideas regarding sustainability through research, teaching, and practices. It necessitates improved academic ...


Scaffolding Applied Learning and Sustainable Development Goals in the Furman University Sustainability Science Program

  • Furman University (SC)

The Furman University (Greenville, SC) Sustainability Science Bachelor of Science degree curriculum requires two introductory courses (Environmental Science, Sustainability Science), three intermediate courses (Human Systems, Social Systems, Dynamic Systems Modeling ...


Integrating education for sustainable development into a higher education institution: beginning the journey

  • Nottingham Trent University

Much of the current literature on integrating sustainability into HEIs is focussed on why HEIs should embrace sustainable development (SD) and what is still missing or hindering work and the ...


A Grounded Theory of Education for Sustainability in the Postsecondary Classroom

  • University of Louisville (KY)

The movement incorporating sustainability into the academic mission of higher education has grown quickly in the last few decades. At the same time, vast interpretations of sustainability exist as institutions ...


Prepared to Teach for Sustainable Development? Student Teachers’ Beliefs in Their Ability to Teach for Sustainable Development

  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology

The importance of embedding education for sustainable development has been emphasised over many years. At the same time, there has been a massive call for initial teacher education to provide ...


Interdisciplinary Responses to Climate Change in the University Classroom

  • Husson University (ME)

This case report describes a novel bridge course developed by the authors, entitled, What If They're Right? Individual Responses to Climate Change. The course challenges university students to experiment ...


Devising a Competence-Based Training Program for Educators of Sustainable Development: Lessons Learned

  • University of Gloucestershire (Gloucestershire)
  • Università degli Studi di Firenze - UniFI (Italy)
  • Tallinn University
  • Frederick University

Over recent decades, education policy has been preoccupied with economic growth while paying insufficient heed to global sustainability challenges. International initiatives to promote education for sustainable development (ESD) have been ...


Sustainability on campus: knowledge creation through social and environmental reporting

  • University of Edinburgh
  • Heriot-Watt University

This study contributes to the debate on sustainability in higher education through a project conducted in a single Scottish university that incorporated sustainability into undergraduate accounting education through the application ...


‘Student Switch Off!’: how do university students respond to a corporate-sponsored pro-environmental social marketing campaign?

  • University of York
  • University of Birmingham
  • Queen Mary University of London

Sponsorship in pro-environmental social marketing campaigns has received limited academic attention within a higher education (HEI) context. This study examines how multi-level variables, i.e. individual (general environmental attitudes), organisational ...