Stanford University
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Stanford's Sustainability Working Group (SWG) is a volunteer organization composed of staff, faculty, and students, that prepares sustainability policy and program recommendations to the administration. The group developed the definitions below for sustainability courses at Stanford: (1) SUSTAINABILITY-FOCUSED classes are solutions-focused and consider the problems, knowledge, tools, technologies, and approaches that will enable society to achieve the goal of sustainability (to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs). Sustainability-focused classes incorporate the interaction of human and environment or resource systems. (2) SUSTAINABILITY-RELATED classes incorporate aspects of sustainability into the course material, but do not need to focus on solutions and/or address all components of sustainability.

For many years, the Earth Systems Program within Stanford's School of Earth Sciences has compiled and published a list of environmental courses (http://pangea.stanford.edu/programs/esys/academics/undergraduate-program/undergrad-courses). This list served as the starting point for the sustainability course inventory. Staff went through each course on the existing list and determined whether it was sustainability-related, sustainability-focused, or neither. Next, staff audited the entire 2010-2011 course bulletin and identified (based on course descriptions), whether or not courses should be added to the sustainability course inventory. The new list, consisting of only sustainability-related and sustainability-focused courses has been uploaded to the Sustainable Stanford website.