The UNFPA’s State of World Population 2007 report detailed the growing challenges associated with our rapidly urbanizing planet:

“The battle for a sustainable environmental future is being waged primarily in the world’s cities. Right now, cities draw together many of Earth’s major environmental problems: population growth, pollution, resource degradation and waste generation. Paradoxically, cities also hold our best chance for a sustainable future.”

The report also offers this: “Urban issues offer unique opportunities to translate scientific research into concrete policies.”

I would extract from that a call to action for our nation’s universities, particularly our urban and metropolitan institutions whose missions so closely align with their surrounding communities.

Many urban and metropolitan universities have already begun to address this challenge, evidenced in part by those who’ve joined the more than 600 signatories to the “American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment,” which states in part that, “We believe colleges and universities must exercise leadership in their communities and throughout society by modeling ways to minimize global warming emissions, and by providing the knowledge and the educated graduates to achieve climate neutrality.”

But to exercise this leadership means changing the way we approach our own work as universities. For years, we’ve provided leadership and engagement in the individual components that comprise the sustainability triple bottom line: economic development, social equity, and environmental action.

Our institutions provide economic stimulus through jobs and workforce development, by spurring urban renewal and mixed-use development projects, and through purchasing policies that support local business.

We’ve helped to usher in an age in which the average citizen is at least nominally aware of and responsive to environmental issues such as global warming. We’ve begun to deal with our own institutional impact on the environment, and we have an increasing amount of teaching and research related to environmental issues

And, our universities have mobilized awareness around social equity issues, following our students and faculty into the communities, where they train and work as service providers for the aged, the infirmed, the down-and-out—populations with whom we sometimes awkwardly share our urban locales.

Now we have to find ways of bringing these efforts together. These disparate economic, environmental, and social equity activities, balkanized by departments and disciplines, have too often operated at odds or oblivious to one another. The success of the economic comes at the expense of the social. What’s been good for the environment gets pilloried as bad for business.

At Portland State University we’ve begun to realize the benefits of implementing a more sustainable approach to the mission-centered work we’ve always done. It’s not been easy, but we’ve benefited in no small part by our location in the nation’s most sustainable city (2008 SustainLane U.S. City Rankings), creating even more powerful opportunities for partnerships and innovation.

We also had the good fortune this past fall to receive a $25 million challenge grant from the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation that, when matched over the next decade, will become a $50 million investment in sustainability programs at PSU.

That’s enabled us to foster the widespread enthusiasm for sustainability on our campus. A pair of RFPs that we issued for student and faculty projects generated almost 150 proposals, 30 of which received funding to address topics ranging from “The Humanities Sustainability Research Project” to “Sustainable High Performance Computing: Integrating Power and Cooling Data with Application and System Performance for Linux Clusters.”

We’ve also seen formation of 21 volunteer “Green Teams,” comprised of faculty and staff, tackling sustainability issues in departments and offices, while sustainability-related student groups continue to expand in number and membership.

Creating a living laboratory for sustainable practices doesn’t just benefit students, faculty and staff—it creates measurable benefits for the community. Consider The Broadway, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified mixed-use facility at Portland State University, that blends housing with academic space and ground-floor retail. Perched at the top of this ten-story structure is one of Portland’s largest eco-roofs—and more importantly, the city’s most studied eco-roof.

Evaluating green roofs for performance has become a major research activity at PSU, leading to the formation of a green building research laboratory that will bring together faculty from different disciplines and universities throughout our region, educate students about cutting-edge technology in building science and sustainability, and support a critical industry cluster as well as green building efforts in Portland and beyond. And it’s only one example of how the urban locale facilitates university innovation in sustainability.

The unprecedented challenges that face our cities, and our planet, can be met. It falls to the urban and metropolitan universities of this nation to lead us in finding these solutions.

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