University of Saskatchewan
PRE-2: Points of Distinction

The international program, TRANSdisciplinary Education Collaboration for Transformations in Sustainability (TRANSECTS), offers flexible and accessible pathways for training, professional development, mentorship, and networking for the next generation of sustainability change-makers in Canada and internationally. Notably, the training will engage a diversity of scholars and practitioners from the Global North and Global South to deepen their understanding of sustainability challenges and build skills to tackle them by learning from one another.

TRANSECTS will train about 250 highly qualified personnel across Canada, Germany, and South Africa. Partners in the project will include representatives from academia, Indigenous and rural communities, UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, governing agencies, international networks, and private and civil society organizations and foundations. Intercultural learning about how to reconcile relations with one another and with the natural world is important, in order to address sustainability challenges.

TRANSECTS is led by Dr. Maureen Reed, assistant director, academic at USask's School of Environment and Sustainability (SENS) and UNESCO Co-Chair in Biocultural Diversity, Sustainability, Reconciliation, and Renewal. The program was made possible through a $2.5 million grant awarded over six years through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Training Grant.

In September 2021, the University of Saskatchewan and the City of Saskatoon signed a joint climate commitment to speed up the transition to a green community. The Climate Commitment and Call to Action—which progresses the goals of a first-of-its-kind 2017 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between a Canadian university and municipality—acknowledges the need to enhance sustainable and resilient practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt infrastructure, services, and programs for the future impacts of a changing climate. The commitment also recognizes the action that is needed to slow, and ultimately prevent, the rise in the global average temperature and aims to facilitate the transition to a clean energy economy.

The pledge to improve and accelerate equitable climate performance includes areas in collaboration; reconciliation, decolonization and Indigenization; equity, diversity and inclusion; buildings and energy efficiency; sustainable transportation; sustainable land use; solid waste reduction; renewable energy; water conservation; environmental protection and ecosystem stewardship; leadership; and accountability.

While both the city and the university have their own climate action plans, this additional commitment will provide common ground between the institution and municipality in order to make way for easier collaboration.

On April 24, 2021, the University of Saskatchewan's University Council, Board of Governors, and University Senate approved Critical Path Forward, the university's first comprehensive sustainability strategy to guide university actions from 2021-2030.

The inaugural sustainability plan commits USask to action on achieving the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) by 2030. Many of the SDGs align closely with USask’s signature areas of research, including food security, water security, and One Health.

Critical Path Forward is framed around five commitments, five goals and 17 actions geared to achieving the SDGs:

1. Commitment 1 is to be responsive to the university’s social, economic, environmental and cultural settings, and to influence and be influenced by them as solutions to sustainability challenges are created, mobilized, and shared.
2. Commitment 2 is to foster an entrepreneurial campus spirit, and use campus operations and community as a living laboratory to develop, scale up, and share sustainability solutions. The goal by 2030 is to reduce university greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels, leveraging USask’s research and cutting-edge discoveries to help develop energy-efficient solutions, and to reach net zero by 2050.
3. Commitment 3 is empowering action by supporting a generation of learners and achievers to shift mindsets and expand skillsets to accelerate action to achieve the SDGs. The goal is to create new forms of teaching and learning that produce engaged, enlightened, empathetic, ethical and empowered citizens.
4. Commitment 4 is to capitalize on strengths by bringing together the campus community to create knowledges focused on designing and implementing innovative and workable solutions to sustainability challenges.
5. Commitment 5 is to catalyze social change by promoting, engaging, and supporting the sharing of knowledge, expertise, and experiences to effect needed social changes.