SCU's Sustainability Strategic Plan has a goal to expand sustainability across the curriculum. Two objectives related to this goal are:
- Increase the number of courses with a sustainability component to 33% by 2025
- Expose 100% of students to sustainability through their coursework
Each year, the Center for Sustainability inventories prior year course offerings to determine how many sections contained a sustainability component and how many students were enrolled in those sections. The percentage of overall sustainability-related course sections has doubled since we began an annual inventory in 2012.
Courses that "Include Sustainability"
Primarily focused on a topic other than sustainability, but include any of the following:
- a module on sustainability (e.g., environmental determinants of mental health in a Psychology course)
- a sustainability challenge addressing 2 or more pillars of sustainability (e.g., an assignment on financing sustainable energy in a Finance course)
- one or more sustainability activities (e.g., a simulation or field trip)
- sustainability issues integrated throughout course (e.g., in intro Biology or Chemistry labs, Calculus problem sets)
"Sustainability Course"
Courses primarily about any of:
- the concept of sustainability (e.g., “Sustainable Development”)
- the application of sustainability within a field (e.g., “Sustainable Agriculture” or “Environmental Communication”)
- a sustainability challenge addressing 2 or more pillars of sustainability (e.g., a course on climate change, global poverty and inequality, natural resource depletion, environmental degradation, or any targets in the UN SDGs)