IARU Campus Sustainability Officers’ Meeting 2014

Date of activity: March 26, 2014 - March 28, 2014

Through its membership in the international university alliance IARU*, the University of Tokyo is furthering collaboration with other alliance members in a wide range of areas such as joint research projects, faculty exchanges and student exchanges. Ten IARU member universities gathered at the University of Tokyo to hold an Officers’ Meeting regarding one of these joint research projects, the Sustainable Campus Project.

The universities participating in this meeting were the University of Tokyo, Australian National University, Singapore National University, Peking University, ETH Zurich, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Yale University and the University of Copenhagen.

The meeting principally focused on each university’s reports on the activities it has carried out with the aim of creating a sustainable campus, as well as the activities it plans to put into practice in the future. The University of Tokyo recognizes this meeting as a vital opportunity to understand the efforts that these universities have made to improve their campus environments and to ascertain in what directions their future activities are trending towards. The participants also visited the 21 Komaba Center for Educational Excellence (a zero-energy building) on the UTokyo Komaba Campus, where the University was able to introduce its advanced efforts toward achieving sustainability. This meeting proved to be a valuable event which enabled participating universities to convey information about their activities to the world.

While the sustainable campus initiatives undertaken by universities around the world vary due to their environments, they all have organizations similar to UTokyo’s TSCP (Todai Sustainable Campus Project) in which they are actively engaged. Through continued joint research and student exchanges, the University expects the pioneering initiatives implemented by IARU to be further put into practice in other areas while the University itself will also make continued efforts in future sustainability initiatives.

* The IARU (International Alliance of Research Universities) is an association comprised of ten world-class research universities that strive to nurture future global leaders. The alliance was established in January 2006 with the intention of forming various collaborations in the areas of research and education.