Greening campus experience: moving towards living laboratory action plan

Abstract

Sustainability is a growing priority for higher education institutions around the world. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) through UTM Campus Sustainability Office ready to transform the campus as platform to inculcate the sustainability mind set of young people through education and empowering them to continue living the values in the future as stated in Transformasi Nasional 2050 (TN50) development plan. In 2010, among the first institution supporting UI GreenMetric auditing, UTM was positioned at rank 85, and then gradually improving the performance to position ourself to rank 66 in 2017. To boost this effort, sustainability elements have been implemented in Universiti Global Plan III (2018-2020) and UTM Master Plan 2017-2037. One of the main strength of UTM in UI GreenMetric evaluation components is Setting and Infrastructure that incorporates environmental and social considerations in addition to the traditional cost, time and quality. Improvement through transnational researches which is under Water and Energy Nexus projects such as biomass utilization and groundwater projects are escalating the efforts. For developing more robust approach, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) has been incorporated in to six Living Labs (LL) initiatives. Positioning in global branding, integration across campus and regional level networking was aimed to leverage currents assets into further opportunities for research, teaching and institutional development.