University of California, Santa Barbara
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

With the University of California’s ambitious goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2025, the Cool Campus Challenge was designed to engage the campus community in the initiative and to get them thinking about how their actions influence UC’s Carbon Footprint. The Cool Campus Challenge online competition between UC campuses ran from October 6 to December 10, 2015. Through the competition students, faculty, and staff were motivated to take steps to reduce their carbon footprints and help the UC system reach Carbon Neutrality by 2025.

More than 10,000 people joined the Challenge in its first two weeks, and over 19,000 (over 1,400 from UCSB) people participated by the time the Challenge ended in December 2015. Together participants throughout the UC system pledged to take steps that will save over 20 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions annually. The challenge included 37 different pledges, targeting actions anyone can take on an everyday basis to reduce their energy and carbon footprint from lighting, computer use, purchasing, heating and cooling, and transportation.

LabSYNC aims to help campus labs assess and document their sustainable laboratory practices and achieve recognition for the steps that they have taken to be environmentally conscious while conducting their research. During the LabSYNC process, a team of student interns and a professional staff member from the LabRATS Program interview the lab manager or defacto lab manager, complete a tour of the lab, perform an energy audit, and develop a set of recommendations. The recommendations will come in the form of a report, a presentation to be given at a lab group meeting, and a scoring sheet showing which actions are already occurring and which actions could be considered for the future. After the initial data collection, lab occupants are informed of which measures could easily be implemented before the end of the assessment, allowing the lab to get a higher score immediately. After any initial steps that the lab chooses to implement are put into action, the final report is developed, including potential future actions and resources to implement those actions.

The impact of the LabSYNC assessment changes with each department because we tailor our recommendations each time. That said, our best practices website catalogs the impact of each action included in our standard recommendations: http://www.sustainability.ucsb.edu/labrats-best-practices/ Simply select any topic area, and then choose an action of interest. For each action, a page will appear that describes the problem, solution (including references to useful resources), benefits, and costs. We have found that by having several achievement levels, we can incentivize the labs we work with to take immediate action before the final report is even finished. Since launching this revision of our program, every lab that we have worked with has implemented at least two new measures.