Why Sustainability Is a Big Opportunity for Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, one of the co-hosts for the conversation today, and I'm a content marketing and program manager with EDUCAUSE.

Jenay Robert: I'm Jenay Robert. I am the other co-host and I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE.

Sophie White: Great. And we are so excited today to be talking about sustainability in higher education with two special guests with us, we have Karen Costa. Karen is a faculty development facilitator, adjunct faculty and author who supports educators with weaving climate action into their teaching and work across all disciplines. You can learn about her [email protected]. And Kristen Gay is an EDUCAUSE researcher and experienced educator dedicated to advancing learning through data-driven insights with an emphasis on student needs and engagement.

As a researcher at EDUCAUSE, Kristen leverages her expertise to explore emerging trends in technology and higher education. So thank you Kristen and Karen for joining us today in our virtual studio.

Karen Costa: Thanks for having us.

Sophie White: Awesome. So we'll dive right in. I'm so excited to talk about this subject. I think I personally feel like I try to do individual actions to promote sustainability. I am always bringing my reusable mug around and composting and all of those things, but there's so much that has to do with sustainability that we can talk about, I think at a systemic level in higher ed. So I'm thrilled to have both of you here today to chat about it.

Sophie White: Awesome. I think it might make sense to dive in with the QuickPoll that EDUCAUSE has just released. So at the end of February, 2025, Kristen authored a QuickPoll, which is we use a research instrument at EDUCAUSE to survey the community on specific issues and then create a writeup about what we've learned from the findings. And Kristen just authored one related to sustainability in higher ed. So if you want to kick us off, Kristen, I'm curious just to hear a little bit about that QuickPoll and if there are any insights that really stood out to you.

Kristen Gay: Absolutely. So yeah, this QuickPoll, I think the inspiration behind it was a few recent Horizon Reports that emphasized that institutions were facing increased pressure to really invest in sustainable solutions and to make that a priority. And from what we were gathering, that pressure was really driven by students. And so we were curious to see has this translated into specific goals and practices that are emerging on different campuses and how much of a priority is this to individuals within the institution? And so it was kind of interesting. I think that my biggest takeaway was that people are really driving the focus on sustainability. And so I had mentioned students previously that continued to be a really significant driver of sustainability efforts for many institutions, but also faculty leadership, even community investment and sustainability was a really key driver. And so I thought that was kind of inspiring and exciting to see that dedicated individuals who are really passionate and have a lot of concern about climate change and about institutions as really heavy users of resources can make a significant impact.

And so I thought that was really exciting. I would also say though, that there were some findings that indicated that this might still be an emerging priority for some institutions, or that there may not be enough communication happening between leadership and other institutional members. So across questions, we found that many respondents were not aware of their institution's goals surrounding sustainability. They weren't maybe aware of how generative AI was factoring in how were their institutions managing the tensions between scaling generative AI technologies and sustainability practices and goals that they might also be pursuing. There seemed to be a lot of uncertainty there. And so that was also kind of an area that I found interesting and hopefully something that we can talk a little more about today.

Sophie White: Yeah, I agree. I think that's so important. And obviously at EDUCAUSE, cause we're looking at higher ed through the lens of technology, AI just keeps coming up over and over again. Jenay has been traveling all over the world talking about ai, but that's kind of the underlying question is how are we going to balance these innovations with the high energy usage of ai? And I'm glad that you looked at that in the QuickPoll and it feels like it's an issue that will evolve over time. Karen, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on this based on your work.

Karen Costa: Well, Kristen, I agree with everything you said. I think in the name of strong climate communications, which that was one of the key takeaways I had from this report as well. There was this sort of nebulous on knowing in the data, I think this is a priority, but I'm not sure what it is. But I heard the word sustainability. I think it's a priority. I'm not sure. I think maybe some things are being done, but I'm not sure what those are or who's doing them or who's supposed to be doing them. So that is a great place to start because it's where we are. So it's the only place we can start. So I think it might benefit listeners for me to take a minute and define what I mean by sustainability. So I use two models that I think will be helpful and I'm hoping we can link to things in the show notes.

The first is the model of donut economics, which is Kate Ray Worth's model, and you can just picture a donut. The bottom edge of it is that we're making sure that we're meeting all human needs. So sustainability means all human needs, basic needs are getting met. The outer edge of the donut is living within our planet's limitations and inside of that area. So human needs are met and we're living within our planet's. Inherent limitations are the donut or sustainability. So that's one model that I think can be helpful when we are overshooting planetary limitations and failing to meet humans' basic needs we are, which is generally speaking, across various domains where we are now, we are impacting the likelihood of our species long-term survival and increasing the likelihood of human suffering in the meantime. Another model that I must mention, Kate Rewar and others, other folks who are working on sustainability, all of our work is grounded in tribal and indigenous cultures who have never stopped incorporating these concepts of harmony with the natural environment of which we are a part that has been a core part of their culture and laws and daily lived experiences.

So if folks want to read more about that, so Kate Raworth has a book called Donut Economics, A great place to start with the tribal and indigenous wisdom on climate change and sustainability is Robin Kim's work, Braiding Sweetgrass. It was a huge bestseller.

Sophie White: It's one of my favorite books ever.

Karen Costa: Yeah. Yay. Yay. Great. She has a new book out too. I haven't had time to get to that yet. So I think that's a place where we can start. And Higher Ed unfortunately was not built on that model of sustainability. It was built on the model of capitalism and extraction and unlimited growth. Once you name that, you see it everywhere. And once you name that, you realize how preposterous that is because where does that end? And we're on the verge of finding out exactly where it doesn't. So that might be helpful, and I think it's really important when we are having these conversations to start with, what is sustainability? What does that mean to you? What are we talking about when we talk about climate change and climate action and getting some shared language around it? I think this quick pull was fantastic. I love the model of getting just in time research.

I think it's fantastic. And I think moving forward across institutional research and beyond institutional research, we all got to do a good job of making sure that we're on the same page and that we know what sustainability is. Because if we don't know what it is, how you see that kind of sense of wondering in the results, like, ooh, I don't know, because I don't really actually know what that is. It's just something I've heard and talked about a lot. So I think that was one of the things that came out to me. One of my goals in the work I do, I want a basic fundamental understanding of what sustainability is, how we got into this mess, how we can get ourselves out. A basic understanding that you don't have to be a climate scientist to understand across all of higher education. So a lot of my work is as a non-scientist who's also like, what the heck does that mean? Is meeting people at that space of, I don't really know what that means, and establishing a baseline of understanding because from there we can start to actually take meaningful actions, design strategies to address some of these things and change some of these mindsets.

Jenay Robert: I have a curiosity, and this might be a Karen question. It might be an everybody question, but I'm kind of thinking. So if I'm listening to this or watching this on YouTube or something, and I'm a staff member at an institution, I work in IT or in instructional design or wherever I am at the institution, and I think, okay, yeah, I'm on board. Yep. Sustainability is important. I recycle my water bottles if I have them. I try not to. I use reusable things. If I can, I do some things, but what's my next step? What do I need to do? I kind of am aware I care, I know it matters. I do little things. But now, so I'm curious what you all think is the next step from there.

Karen Costa: Kristen, I'm going to yap on this one quite a bit, so I'll let you start. It's hard.

Kristen Gay: Well, I would just point to something that I found interesting as maybe a starting point for some institutions. I don't know, Jana, if you were kind of more focused on the personal ways in which we can take action and pursuit of sustainability, but for institutions, one of our in the QuickPoll was that only 1% of respondents said that sustainability influenced technology purchasing decisions. And I thought that was really interesting. Technology is such a huge way in which we deplete natural resources and to not really have sustainability as a critical factor in those decisions, I thought was really important. So I would say that is one starting point to really have more conversations on our campuses and be really mindful of how if we have this interest and this concern about the future of our planet and all of the people in it, what can we do as we're making decisions about technologies that we want to use and purchase? How can we align that with our sustainability goals better? But Karen Love that bridge.

Jenay Robert: Well, Karen, I will let you go on for the rest of the session of she's like, thank you. I would love that. Careful, careful what you wish. Careful what you wish for. But I did just want to say Kristen, I really appreciate that point because I think before I worked at Ed cause and I was a researcher at an institution, I never thought about the technology, the way technology impacts the environment. It's such an invisible thing. A water bottle is so tangible. So you can actually hold it in your hand and think about what it looks like in a landfill and what it's going to look like for the rest of eternity. But when you're typing away on a laptop, you don't really think about where did these metals come from? Where is the processing power coming from or what resources do we need to cool our computers when there's some cloud storage somewhere that I don't even know about or think about what even is a cloud? So I really appreciate that and I think that's such a great first step is to at least understand how does computing, how does technology impact the environment? So thanks for bringing that up. Hey Carrie, take it away.

Karen Costa: Yeah, so I want to talk to that IT director or assistant director or frontline staff who might be listening to this. And that 1 percent number was in my notes as well. What I want to emphasize there is that I think what that represents to me is not that these folks on the front lines don't care about these things, but that they are not being charged with prioritizing sustainability in their job descriptions and in their hiring and promotion decisions. So that to me points to a systems level. On one hand, from the point of the donut, we can say, I wrote down failure from the perspective of extraction unlimited growth at all costs in that system. It's a success. So I think I kind of want to name that. I didn't see that 1% number and say, oh, these jerks in it aren't paying attention. I said, we've got a system that's designed to reward people for getting the fanciest, coolest new tool and not stopping to think what are the many downstream impacts of this including but not limited to sustainability.

So if you are a person in that role and you're thinking, I want to change that system, I want to get in the donor and I want to change people's mindsets, I think there's a couple ways you can go about it. You might have executive leadership who you can work with some people that does exist. I want to say that I've seen it, it does exist. I've experienced it. And if you do, you can start that conversation. You can send them this report and here's what I would say. I would say I have a win for you because I think you need a win right now in higher ed because we are all in it. We are just taking it on the jaw repeatedly every day, right? Here's a win: 1 percent of people in this poll considered sustainability in their purchasing decisions. We've got nowhere to go but up.

You can do this and it can really be a cool thing that can be advertised. It can be part of our marketing plans, you can talk about it at your conferences. We can put you in the Chronicle and inside higher ed as a change maker. So this is an easy win because we're starting at 1%. If you don't have leadership who wants to have this conversation and that is going to apply to a lot of people listening, please don't keep knocking on doors and they keep slamming 'em. Don't waste your energy that way. What I want you to do is to find one other soul on campus who you can talk to about this and start what's called Adrian Marie Brown calls a critical connection. So Brown writes about prioritizing critical connections over critical mass. So find another person. They might be faculty, they might be the student climate group.

They might be somebody in your department and say, I am really concerned about the fact that we're not considering this in IT purchasing. I need to talk about this with somebody. Trust that that conversation will lead you to the next conversation, the next email, the next meeting. You follow the breadcrumbs and you trust that you're going to go from something very small and all those small actions, small as all that's also Adrian Marie Brown, we'll build up and you will start to gather momentum. You will start to gather, strike the numbers and then you will be able to actually make an impact regardless of whether your executive leadership is on board with this or not. I think there's, and the last thing I want to say is one of the mottos from the climate action world is all jobs are climate jobs. I've tried to find out who originally said this and I haven't been able to find a specific attribution.

So I say the climate action folks who came before me, all jobs are climate jobs. So the three of you here today might not think I have a climate job, but you are engaging with this report and this conversation is an example of how you make your job a climate job. I'm not a climate scientist. I didn't know very much beyond the obvious about climate change when I started doing this work a few years ago. But I said, I'm faculty development and writer and speaker that I can do with my eyes closed. That is my wheelhouse. I can do that. So what would it look like for me to bring climate into that thing I can do with my eyes closed? So if you're an IT professional, I know your tech and I know all your fancy bells and whistles, what would it look like to bring the environment and sustainability and climate action into that? You don't have to become a climate scientist. You just ask that question, what would this job look like if it became a climate job? And you go from there.

Kristen Gay: I love that. Going back to Jenay's question too about what can I do? And I think it can be a little overwhelming when we look at an institution and all of the different opportunities to invest in more sustainable solutions and be more mindful of how our practices might be hurting the environment. But I love what you're saying because sustainability cuts across every silo at an institution. It's something that affects every single person on the staff. Doesn't matter what department you're in or what role you hold. And I think that's kind of exciting that no matter what your role is, what your area of expertise is, you can do something in your area. And I think that's also exciting as something we can show students that if we are modeling how to work together across the institution and find, I'm sorry you said small is all. I think I loved that as well. If we can show them we can take these small actions and we can find like-minded people within the institution who want to work with us to make a positive change. I think that's a great thing to show students because we know that sustainability is really important to them, even as a factor that influences where they choose to enroll. And I think that's an exciting way that we can model what we'd like to see them do in the future.

Karen Costa: And I just want to comment on a couple things. Kristen said, you said, what can I do? And that's a really important simple but important question. We get really stuck in what we can't do. My goodness, there's a lot of things I wish I had the power to do in this moment in history, but a lot of them are outside of my control so I can get lost in those. As many of us, we can get lost in the chaos and the noise of things that are outside of our control. So one of the best questions you can ask yourself is what can I do? And it's not a rhetorical question, actually take some time to answer that. And you also talked about getting students involved. I teach a couple different climate action and climate leadership courses. Students are hungry for this. I cannot tell you how hungry they are. They are not resistant. They are not thinking. This is like, Ooh, is this controversial to talk about this?

Not even a glimmer of that. They're hungry to talk about it. They've been wanting to talk about it, they want to learn more. They know it's an issue. So there is massive energy there and opportunity for us to capitalize on. And the last thing I want to say is when we're talking about people who might need some additional nudging, a lot of the data out of the climate communications field is that we got to focus not on what we're going to take from people and not on the negative framing, but what we can give people and what we're going to offer them. So being mindful that this is not just about stopping the environment, it's about starting getting ourselves free, starting having water that all children can drink, starting to have air that all people can breathe. There's an article that we will link to in the show notes. I hope I get this right. It's a little bleak, but it says no research on a dead planet. So this is how we allow people to live and do their work and to watch their children live and play and to keep our institutions healthy and vibrant so that we can continue to do this work of teaching and learning. This is not about what we're taking away from people. This is about what we're going to give to each other. So that generative framing I think is really important to keep in mind as well.

Sophie White: I love that. I think we could look at this 1% metric from the quick pull as discouraging or I love how you reframed it as this is an opportunity as we can only go up from here. And I think I'm going to tie back to the book you mentioned just because I love Braiding Sweetgrass, but I think at the beginning of that book, Robin Will Kimer, I remember asked a question of a college class that she was teaching. So she has a background in indigenous plant studies, but she also is trained in the academy and has a scientific background too. So the book's really fascinating. She kind of talks about how those can both work together even though they seem separate sometimes. But at the beginning she asked her students to raise their hands if it was something like, if you think humans are good for the environment and no one raised their hands, but then talks about, well starting from this place of feeling like humans are inherently bad and there's this inherent conflict between us and the environment and sustainability, we're going to get nowhere. So we have to look at how can we make ourselves better and also support the earth at the same time. So I love that framing of it.

Karen Costa: I have to tell y'all something, I went to an arts and climate change symposium this past weekend at my closest public university, Fitchburg State University in central Massachusetts. And it was about how art and climate change can support each other. And one of the artists is sort of like a textual colleges. So he had found the definition of nature in he collects Oxford dictionaries, and I forget exactly what year it was sometime I believe in the 1990s, prior to the 1990s, the definition of nature included human beings after the 1990s. It specifically refers to basically all the stuff out there, plants and animals other than humans. So it was this very specific break and the idea that we used to be considered a part of nature in the 1990s. We are now separate from nature. I've talked a couple of times about mindset here, and this is the work of Kimer and other tribal and indigenous educators and ecologists.

There is a oneness with nature because we don't exist without it. We don't exist without plants and animals. Our air is coming from plants and trees all around us. So that mindset of I always am saying we can learn from the natural world of which we are a part. And higher ed unfortunately is ground zero for that divide. And a big part of my work increasingly is about naming. We are animals, we are part of nature, we are integrated with nature and there's no us without nature. So higher ed has a lot of work to do because I think and suspect that a lot of that divide that we are separate from nature, we have dominion over it. It is ours to do with however we is driven unfortunately a lot by higher ed. So I'm one of many people who's looking to sort of turn that around, move it in different directions. And I love that you mentioned that kimer is an academics. So for folks who are listening who are in the academy and maybe they're saying what Kim is speaking the language, not only of her people but of higher education. So it's a great starting point to move from reading to action.

Sophie White: That's a fascinating example of the dictionary and I think speaks volumes to where we are. So thank you for sharing that. I was trying to think about framing this in terms of actionable items that higher education can do. I think for our IT community looking at purchasing decisions, we already have review processes for things like cybersecurity, which we talk about a lot on this podcast, very important to consider cybersecurity data practices, but where can we add in sustainability and value and prioritize and reward considering that, I'm curious if you all have any examples of institutions that you think are doing a good job at this or specific projects that you could point to for schools who want to focus on sustainability and reward focus on sustainability more.

Karen Costa: I can point folks to a great organization called A-E-S-H-E, and I am the world's worst person for acronym remembering what acronyms actually stand for, but we'll link it in the show notes. It's a sustainability education organization. And my forgetting their full name is not an indication of how I feel about them because I love achy. I discovered it and their work about 18 months ago, and I've gone fully immersed myself in bothering everyone at Achy. They have amazing programming. They have a stars framework that allows institutions to self-assess and to get different star ratings. So this is all on the issue website. So that's a great place that folks can go and find out not only institutions that are doing this work, but I think what's also important is finding institutions like yours that are doing this work. Because if you want to tell me that Harvard's doing this work and I'm a community college educator, I'm going to say yeah, they're doing it with a 53 billion endowment.

So a C will allow you to look for institution types that are more closely aligned with your own mission and circumstances. They also have a members online community forum where you can go in and post. If you don't find it in the first example I gave, you can go in and say, I'm this person doing this work at this institution type. And there is an incredibly generous group of educators who will flood in and support you and point you in the right direction. So it's really important, especially if you're somebody who's going to be doing this kind of without a lot of institutional support at first. Because if you're listening and thinking you want to try this, you're going to be, let's put a positive frame on this. You're going to be a leader, you're going to be a trailblazer.

It can be lonely to be the leader and the trailblazer. So I want to really encourage you to get right from the start to get into community. That's another lesson from Adrian Marie Brown's work to get into loving community as you do the small actions, because if not, you can get burned out so quickly because you're alone and doing it. There's nobody to cheer you on. So get into community. ASHE has a June conference I'll be attending. There's great folks, there's great ideas and I would highly recommend that conference. It's pretty affordable, fully virtual, and that would be a great place for folks to start.

Sophie White: I googled them while you were talking and it's association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Karen Costa: Thank you. See, that's what I mean about getting into community because you can't remember all the higher ed acronyms alone, but your community can. Thank you.

Kristen Gay: And I don't have any specific examples, but as I was preparing for this conversation, I saw that some institutions have created learning labs where they're testing different things like solar panels and getting students involved in some of that research again, I think is really critical. And so that was exciting to me as well, to see that institutions aren't just bringing sustainability considerations into decisions that they're making, but they're engaging in some of that research themselves.

Karen Costa: Campus as lab is a growing movement. I love it. Ahe does a lot with that. The other thing about ASHE is they have a weekly newsletter that they send out as many people do. It is one of the only ones I get that I actually read, no offense to anybody else, but what I love about it, they list all the good news and they break it up by academics, physical plants, technology, student services. Those probably aren't the exact categories, but they break it up across the different campus services and they're linking to what institutions are doing those great things. And I try to take five minutes. This was one of my New Year's resolutions. I try to take five minutes and read through that email and click on the links and share at least one on Blue Sky and LinkedIn because we are bombarded with the terrible news.

But part of the work is sharing all the good work that's being done. There are millions of people working to turn around the climate crisis, millions of smart caring people who are working to turn around the climate crisis. There are communities where they never stopped doing that work. So there is good work being done, and all jobs are climate jobs, all courses are climate courses. So come join that work if you're not a part of it already. And Jenay, I just saw your dog walk by so I can't function anymore. Please let this I, oh, what's your dog's name? It's Delilah.

Jenay Robert: Oh, she already, hi Delilah. Hi. Everyone wants to see you.

Karen Costa: What is bigger the better part of online learning and Zoom learning than getting to see each other's pets?

Jenay Robert: Yeah, that's the best part. We value that a lot at EDUCAUSE. We always have our pets join us on our calls and we have a pets channel in our slack. We share our pets pictures and birthdays and adoptive bursaries and all the things.

Karen Costa: I love that. That's maybe a key takeaway from this session as well, because no joke, we've got to work with our nervous systems through these times that we live in. And there's a lot of good data that our pets are very positive for our nervous systems. So as you're doing climate work, as you're thinking about sustainability, you might feel your blood pressure going up a little bit. Take a good pet, your dog break and it will come back down and then you can return to the work.

Sophie White: Yeah, I love that. My cat sleeping behind me also agrees. Oh, hi kitty. What's Kitty's name? Her name is Rudabega or Rudy, and she is the best. She naps while I'm on Zoom all day. Awesome.

Jenay Robert: This is a reminder to people who listen that if you're able to and you want to see our pets, if you check out the video version of this on YouTube and on our website, you'll get to see occasional drop-ins from the pets.

Karen Costa: I'm going to tell Rocky that he missed his, he's on, I have some videos up on YouTube and he, he's starred some of them, but he's seven now. The vet said he's a senior, so he sleeps about 18 hours a day. We've decided. So he's taken one of his naps.

Sophie White: Jenay, we should consider introducing the pets at the beginning of each episode. Should we ask that for a gassy high out?

Jenay Robert: Yeah. Well, the problem with that is getting on her calendar.

Karen Costa: Oh, yeah.

Jenay Robert: She has a lot to do with monitoring the front door for any Amazon drop off. She's got to pay attention to that. She's looking out the back for the squirrels and between that, there's very little time in the day. She needs her sleep.

Kristen Gay: Understand.

Sophie White: I understand.

Jenay Robert: It's a tough.

Sophie White: Plus. Yeah. Awesome.

Jenay Robert: But back to our climate topic, and I just actually just want to kind of reiterate the resource, Karen, because you turned me onto this author. I don't know, maybe a couple months ago I'd seen you posting about Adrian Marie Brown and had never read her work, but I download immediately when I saw you post about her work. I downloaded one of the audio books and couldn't stop listening for an hour and a half. I just want to reiterate to people who feel not just with climate, but with any of what we're kind of handling these days in higher ed, if you're feeling frustrated, nervous, scared, disconnected, that work, and there's a large body of work there, right? Karen? I think there's many.

Karen Costa: Oh, goodness. Yes. So a lot of folks start with Brown spoke emergent strategy. I think I read it for the first time in 2021. I have long been a huge fan of Octavia Butler. I was lucky to have a college professor in a literature course, introduced me to Octavia Butler's science fiction. So let me make a plug for Octavia Butler's science fiction and all of her fiction as well. Adrian Marie Brown draws heavily upon Octavia Butler's work. And emergent strategy is a place a lot of people start. And I summarize emergent strategy with Brown's phrase. Small is all the largest, is a reflection of the small. So that's a great place to start. She also has a great podcast episode that I read Emergent Strategy and didn't fully integrate it into my being until I listened to this podcast. And it's with Jonathan Van Ness who was on the Queer Eye Show on Netflix and JVN and JVN has a podcast, and Adrian Marie Brown was a guest, I want to say in 2022.

And Adrian Marie Brown talks about emergent strategy, just it's you can really get it in that hour and she explains it in such a lovely way. And JVN introduces lots of laughter into the conversation. So it's a great use of an hour. I think you will feel inspired to take action and hopeful, and it's like taking a deep breath to listen to that. Holding change is another one of Arienne Marie Brown's books that goes into a little bit more detail pleasure activism, and she has a new book out Loving Corrections that I need to read. So yeah, you can go down the Adrian Marie Brown Rabbit Hole. She's got lots of great free resources on her website. But definitely that one of the foundational teachings that I use through all of my work in higher education and beyond. And we don't always feel like we have a lot going for us, but I say to myself, I live in the same timeline as Arienne Marie Brown, and that is not nothing. So definitely recommend you check out her work.

Sophie White: Great. We'll link all of this in the YouTube show notes so people can check out the resources. I feel like I have so much reading and listening.

Karen Costa: No, no, no. One thing, I give people lots of resources, but you're not going to be overwhelmed by them. So just pick the one that zings and trust that the zing is leading you to your next best step.

Jenay Robert: That's a good way to look at it. That's really good advice for a lot of things.

Kristen Gay: Yeah, I have a question about going back to that communication gap at institutions. I feel like we've had a great conversation about what individuals can do and how they can build community around sustainability, but I wonder about that communication gap between maybe leadership who are setting some of the priorities at institutions and specific goals around sustainability, or maybe not yet, maybe that's still emerging for them. And then respondents to our survey who said, I don't know what we're doing, or I don't know if this is really a priority for my institution. And again, not to say that anyone doesn't care about this. I think there are a lot of competing priorities. We've kind of talked a little bit about that, that institutions are facing right now. And communication gaps I think always exist in large institutions and certainly higher ed is no exception. But I wonder if anyone has advice for either leaders or some of their respondents who said, I don't know what my institution's doing. I don't know what the goals are. Or maybe my institution's not doing enough. Because we also saw that in some cases they weren't satisfied with what their institution was currently doing around sustainability.

Karen Costa: I think folks need more support with climate communications and climate communications is a growing field. There is a great resource, the Yale Program for Climate Communications, YPCC, I think I got that acronym right that I would direct folks to. They run a meet, they do webinars, they send out newsletters, and I think there is work being done, but I think folks need some more support in how to communicate that across their campuses. There's a great book called, sorry, more book recommendations. It's called, don't Even Think About It. And it's about climate psychology. And one of the things we know is that this is a big nebulous issue. And the timeframe is that it seems like it's in, we used to say distant future now. I think people might be willing to say, okay, it's not in the distant future, it's in the near future, but it's in the future.

I got a today problem. I got plenty of today problems as do the leaders at our institutions, they've got today problems. So there's a couple things that go on. One, because they identify it as a future problem there, it makes it easier to put it off, but also the, it's an existential terror to think about some of the worst implications of climate change. And because our nervous systems are already so dysregulated, what we do is we go into self-protective mode and we don't even the title of the book, don't even think about it. I can't talk about that. I can't think about that. I don't want to talk about, I don't want to upset my staff by talking about this terrible thing that's going to be happening or that already is happening. So I'm just not going to talk about it at all. And that was present for me when I read the report that there is a lot of that combination of I'm dealing with today problems and this doesn't feel like a today problem.

And also that self-protection of putting off these scary things. And I think that it is a today problem in many ways. We could argue that it is the most pressing today problem because we're seeing the numbers are not good, that we're seeing the 1.5 degree of warming that has been used as a number. We passed that where we were warned that that would result in catastrophic climate effects, and we passed it in this past year. So we're in really, then they kind of modified that and said, okay, two degrees, 2.0 degrees, we're not moving in the right direction and there's so much that we could do to start moving the right direction. And it is a today problem. And that generative framing that I mentioned before. So this is not about what you're all going to stop doing on campus. This is not about what you have to give up.

This is about what you're going to get. You're going to get that feeling of doing something about this problem that is in the backs of all of our minds, if not the front of all of our minds. Action is an antidote to despair. The feeling and the freedom that you will get by taking action for yourself, your communities, your children, and our children's children is going to give you so much. We're not taking anything away from you. We're giving you freedom, we're giving you clean air. We're giving you meaning and purpose in your work. So I think that college presidents and leaders need to do a little bit of reading on climate communications and check out the Yale program. That's a great place to start. I'm not going to start. People's book piles are now tumbling over, but there's a lot of great, if you search up for climate communications, there's a lot of great books that have come out in the past year that are talking to how to do this.

Kristen Gay: Jenay and I both live in Florida. So what you're saying about this is a today problem feels especially significant.

Karen Costa: Yeah. And Kristen, you asked a question and you inspired me. I wanted to ask the three of you a question. So I was really, really pleased to see this report. And I've mentioned all jobs are climate jobs. I vaguely recall that I might have flamed somebody at Ed cause a couple months ago about a report that I didn't feel acknowledged climate change on social media. So I was really pleased to see this report come out. And it was certainly done with love and with the energy of this is something that we've got, I always criticize because I believe in people and believe in the work that we can do. But I would love to see this frame of sustainability applied in all of your reports and all of your communications because all of the work that we do is climate work and all of our jobs are climate jobs.

So I guess my question is, especially with, we haven't talked a lot about the AI tension, but that is, I think of AI as the gorilla that broke the camel's back. It's not the only gorilla on the camel's back. So that's not accurate. There's a lot of things we've got to change, but it is one of the gorillas on the camel's back. So I would love to see the sustainability frame and this report referenced in future reports. I would love to see a follow up to this to see if we can move the needle on that 1 percent. I would love to hear from that person who was the 1 percent. So I guess that's just a plea to you all. Maybe not a question, but a plea and any thoughts you have on how folks can support you in integrating that into future EDUCAUSE work.

Jenay Robert: And just to address the AI question, I'll point to the 2025 AI landscape study that we just published a couple of weeks ago, and actually this report wasn't published yet, but then I do verbally reference Kristen's work because in that report I found something similar, which is that climate is not necessarily considered, the impacts of AI on climate is not necessarily considered by those survey respondents either. So certainly a smaller piece of that report because it's a landscape study, but we can cross reference to that. I don't remember the specific details of the statistical response, but I think that those two points hand in hand. So now as I'm traveling and talking about this topic, I do try to call that out that this was one of the lowest ranked elements of strategic operations when it comes to AI is environmental impact. And then we see this kind of partner shocking statistic from Kristen's quick pull report.

So this is something to kind of really verbally emphasize as much as possible when we're talking about those results as well. So I appreciate you bringing in that AI perspective, which is really important. But in terms of how folks can help us continue to integrate that work, I think it's exactly what you're doing. You and I are connected on social media and I'm paying attention to that. I think people talking about their work, making it visible for others, talking about the challenges at their institutions, talking about their wins, I love that you frame it in that way of we can talk about the positive things that are going on too is so important. And then those things will work their way into the research. And then the only other thing that I would say to people listening is we love having conversations with members. It's one of the best parts of my job. So if you're sitting at an institution thinking, I have these challenges around sustainability, or I have these wins around sustainability and I really want to talk to someone at EDUCAUSE about that and see that manifest in their work, that's an email away or it's a LinkedIn message away. So connect with us on LinkedIn, connect with us via email, whatever it is that works for you. And I love integrating that into the work.

Sophie White: I agree with that. And we do what we do at EDUCAUSE for all of our institutional members. So we want the criticism, we want the feedback, we want the advice on what we should focus on to represent institutions and the needs that they have. So thank you, Karen, for exemplifying that and challenging us to look at this issue differently. Appreciate it.

Karen Costa: And I think that these sort of beyond institution organizations like EDUCAUSE with the recent political climate are in a very unique space to gather people into community and to say, you're not the only institution who's dealing with this or facing this issue or who doesn't know what to do, and getting people into a shared space, whether it's in person or online, synchronous, online asynchronous, because their strength in numbers and places like EDUCAUSE have a lot of power to support people and get people in community. And I would just again, implore y'all to use all the good work that you've already done to help us and to help us help you through this coming era. And I want to emphasize what you said, Jenay, about sending an email. As I mentioned before, small is all critical connections. Don't underestimate the power of emailing a random stranger because I do it at least once a week and maybe 33% of the time they respond. But seriously, just opening up a conversation over email or social media and putting feelers out there can lead to amazing collaborations and progress, and you never know where that will take you. So trusting those critical connections is really important.

Jenay Robert: It's really powerful. And for anyone else who's kind of looking for those resources from us that already exist, apart from what I'm sure we're going to develop on the heels of conversations like this, take also a look at our Horizon Reports always have an environmental section in them. There's two Horizon Reports that come out every year, and this is information from a panel of experts around the world actually. And we always talk about environmental trends and what we can expect coming up in the next few years with that. So that's another piece that I would say for folks to reach out for.

Sophie White: I agree. And yeah, email us. My email is [email protected], so send that and I will get it to the right people if I can't answer that question or idea that you have, I think we could talk forever about this subject and I want to be respectful of everyone's time. So I think we should wrap it up here. But this was a really fascinating and inspiring conversation. I love knowing that this work is being done. We have so far to go, but I think that we're making progress in the right direction. So thank you, Karen. Thank you, Kristen, for being with us today and doing all the great work that you're doing.

Karen Costa: And I want to thank you for hosting us, Jenay and Sophie and Kristen, I really want to thank you for this report. Really, as I said before, I love this model of just in time research, and you did a really great job with it. And it's a great example of all jobs are climate jobs. So I want to thank you for the contribution you made. It is important, it is meaningful. It's going to lead to meaningful change and keep doing it. Keep going. You're doing great work.

Kristen Gay: Thank you very much. And thank you for all of the insights you shared today too. I feel like I have a new newly expanded to be read pile, which I cannot wait to dig into. It's actually a gift that you're giving us. You think you were kind of framing it as a burden, but it's a gift. So thank you.

Karen Costa: I'm old, I'm a librarian in an alternate timeline, but not this one.

Sophie White: We have bookworms on this call, so…

Kristen Gay: Yes, yes. But I really appreciate that and your insight that this is about thriving, not just surviving. That is kind of maybe a silly way to frame it, but it's actually kind of encouraging to me to think about what's at stake, but also the opportunities that exist for all of us. So thank you for that. And thank you for having us, Sophie and Jenay.