On May 4 and 5, Stanford hosted the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium for its annual summit. The consortium is made up of sustainability officers from the eight Ivy League universities and six additional peer universities. It shares best practices and leverages its collective leadership and resources to drive sustainability solutions.

The summit focused on the progress of the consortium’s five-year strategic plan, developed in 2014. The plan outlines the following four high-level goals, supported by specific action items:

  1. Create and nourish a trusted and collaborative network of peers
  2. Provide university leaders with research and priorities needed to demonstrate leadership in sustainability
  3. Embed sustainability within institutional priorities
  4. Advance the global sustainability conversation

Progress towards these goals includes aligning metrics reporting protocols to be able to compare key sustainability performance indicators across universities; providing recommendations for improvement of the Sustainability Tracking, Assessments, and Rating System, the national sustainability benchmarking tool developed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education; and compiling an inventory of each university’s top global sustainability initiatives.

At the summit, consortium members also received an in-depth tour of Stanford’s new Central Energy Facility. This tour spurred interest among other Ivy Plus schools in implementing similar energy efficiency and climate mitigation strategies.