Sustainability Master Plan

In 2013 CSUN launched our campus Sustainability Plan that guided our sustainability journey for the past 10 years. In this time, we have made significant progress including achieving AASHE STARS Gold twice, a recognized leader in the CSU, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 23% since the launch of our Climate Commitment and more recently our advances in sustainability education through the newly formed Master’s program. It is now time we look forward to our next 10 years and we have begun the planning process for CSUN’s next 10-year Sustainability Plan.

CSUN has partnered with Glumac and Gensler, to help us develop the new plan. Their work will include a comprehensive review of the university’s progress to-date on its existing plans, development of a gap analysis and recommendations to close gaps, stakeholder engagement and priority setting and finally translating all of the above into the new sustainability plan for the university.

The end result of this process will be an actionable living sustainability plan for the university, which will look beyond carbon neutrality to a range of organizational and ecosystem functions (water, food, procurement, social justice, academics, resiliency, etc.). The new Sustainability Plan will not be a static document, rather it will be a Sustainability Roadmap for the next 10 years as well as a Tracking System (Dashboard/Annual Report Card, etc.). The Sustainability Roadmap and Tracking System will together be a living plan to set goals and track progress towards a more sustainable CSUN.

The plan development process will take nearly a full year to complete and will be done in four phases.

Understanding Progress To-Date and Further the Define Scope of Work

Critical review of plans, methods, progress, and lessons learned; Peer benchmarking; Brief stakeholder engagement survey to gather initial feedback for progress to-date and future planning; Executive summary highlighting/celebrating successes, identifying areas for improvement, and detailing results of peer benchmarking; High-level goal-setting meeting with CSUN Sustainability team.

GAP Analysis

Review Impacts, Data, and Identify Gaps; Conduct Analysis to close Gaps & Increase Accuracy across impacts; Evaluate frameworks and reporting systems to align with and utilize (STARS, Science Based Targets, Sustainable Development Goals, etc.)

Stakeholder Engagement

Engage stakeholders (in-person, zoom, surveys, etc), increase fluency on CSUN’s prior efforts and challenges, identify new opportunities and challenges, and create work group identities to contribute to creation and ongoing life of sustainability plan.

Living Sustainability Plan

Facilitate work groups in development of goals, timelines, strategies, and Key Performance Indicators to put into Roadmap; Produce Roadmap & Tracking System in collaboration with CSUN sustainability team.