Regional Dialogues on Green Campus

India is desperately seeking solutions to several environmental challenges that have undermined overall health and wellbeing. These challenges are related to contamination of air, water and soil, vulnerability of regions to climate change and extreme weather events, overconsumption of resources, resource inefficiency, wastefulness, and erosion of local biodiversity.

What can be a better laboratory for experimenting, incubating and demonstrating this change than the microcosm of institutional campuses that are complete ecosystems? There are a large number of educational campuses of varying shapes and sizes—universities, colleges, etc. which have adopted a hands on approach to environmental sustainability by promoting environmentally responsible practices and behaviour, experimenting with innovative solutions, combining learning and practical application, and adding educational values.

CSE launched its Green Campus Initiative in 2017. This initiative transforms educational campuses into low carbon habitats that are resource prudent and less wasteful. In more than three years of this initiative, Green Campus Initiative encourages and helps campuses to organize, measure and keep track of their efforts. CSE with its publications, trainings and regional workshops enables educational institutions to record, monitor and report consumption patterns and waste generation in their campuses to benchmark their environmental performance.

CSE organised two webinars to engage north and north-east regional educational institutions in India on World Environment Day. The webinars discussed the five themes of CSE's Green Campus Initiative and the basics of green campus audit. The webinars were organised jointly with Guru Nanak Dev University and Assam Don Bosco University, who have been working with CSE under this initiative. The university representatives shared their first hand experience in planning for and implementing measures for sustainability in the campus. With this, the educators across both the regions of India learned directly from the implementers of these green measures.