Universities can play a central role in creating a more sustainable way of life, not only by nurturing innovators and educating the next generation in sustainability concepts and technologies, but also by modeling sustainable systems on campus.

Most of the universities we’ve talked with recognize this, and are taking meaningful steps in those areas. They often don’t communicate well about their efforts, however—we’ve reviewed quite a few campus sustainability sites in the course of our university work (for an example of that, see our Stanford project profile), and found many a poor stepchild or filing cabinet.  We’ve also found some that do it right. In honor of graduation season, here are the hallmarks of excellent sustainability sites:

• Achievements are foremost
• School policies, goals, and strategy are front and center
• Reports and facts are easily accessed
• News is prominent and current
• Content is deep, with overviews for people who want the basics and details for those who want to dig in
• Organization is logical for external audiences
• There are easy ways to take action or access action info in top navigation
• Language is clear, direct, and free from jargon and insider terms
• Users are sent off the site as little as possible

Sites that hit these marks are most likely to engage the campus community and impress prospective students and faculty. We’ll address them in more detail in future posts.

Big numbers without context are rife in discussions about climate change (not to mention the state of the nation’s economy). I find it annoying: if you say you will eliminate XX tons of CO2 but don’t provide context or state it as a percentage of what’s possible, it isn’t informative.

But providing context often isn’t easy, as Natalie Angier points out in a N.Y. Times article about Fermi problems. 

Fermi problems (named for the physicist, who used them as brain refreshers with his atom bomb team), take a big question and break it down to smaller components to get an estimated answer. One question the article posits is, if you take all the miles Americans drive in a year, how far into space would it go? What’s revealed in the process can be as revealing as the answer itself. Unraveling the question flexes the brain with news ways of thinking, and gives communicators new ways to get the point across, too. It can tell a story of sorts, and make the abstract real.

In answering the miles question, you find out how many miles the average person drives (per Angier’s mechanic, it’s about 12,000). Say there is one car for every two Americans, that’s 150 million times 12,000, or 2 trillion miles. Then note that Pluto, the unplanet, is only 3 billion miles from here, and you’ve got a nice way to make the staggering concept of all those miles driven more concrete.

Angier also looks at a topical problem: how much cropland is needed if we decide to fuel our cars solely with corn-based ethanol? Lawrence Weinstein, co-author of a book* on Fermi problems, uses calories consumed as the starting point. There are 30,000 calories in a gallon of gas, and the average car uses a gallon or two a day. Since a person needs only 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day, Weinstein says, we’d need “20 times more farmland, so this could be a bad idea.”

You can also help people comprehend amorphous figures by translating them into everyday concepts. For instance, to show how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million, you could point out that 1 million seconds equals 10 days, and 1 billion seconds runs to about 32 years. Neat.

If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to know if anyone has ideas for relating carbon equivalents. I want to see an alternative to “the equivalent of taking XXX cars off the road.” Just how much CO2 does a car produce? Taking it off the road for how long? It muddies the issue, provides no simple, concrete image, and says nothing about the amount of pollution relative to the problem.

*Guesstimation: Solving the Worlds Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin, by John A. Adam and Lawrence Weinstein. We have to love this, given how Thinkshift got started.

Well, Earth Hour 2009 came and went, and it was a huge opportunity lost. Sure, it rallied more than 4,000 cities in 88 countries, and Googling it brought up over 49 million results. But, like Joel Makower and countless green bloggers, I wonder why there wasn’t communication from event organizers about what people can do during the other 8,759 hours of the year.

Watching the lights of San Francisco’s city hall and the Bay Bridge wink out from a darkened flat in the Mission district was a bit anticlimactic: the city still looked too well lit. Prior to the event, “Mean Clean Tech” posted on Treehugger, “I will probably have everything off except the TV (ncaa tourney). Like others said, an hour is great but many of us try to reduce our use of energy on a daily basis 24/7 365.”

MCT’s post points up a critical dichotomy: people only change their behavior if it’s convenient, yet they want to be able to save energy all the time. That means, among other things, that communications should inspire action, show people what’s possible, and provide concrete actions.

One company, Toronto Hydro, had a great idea for Earth Hour with its “How Low Can We Go T.O.?” contest. But as of today, there’s zip on the website about who won or how much Toronto saved during Earth Hour—and nothing about what consumers can do every day to save energy or how to extrapolate the Earth Hour savings to sustained results. Ikea, famed for its sustainability practices despite its big-box business operations, participated in Europe, but had nothing going on the United States. Why not? Even the sponsoring organization, the World Wildlife Fund, doesn’t have much about the event results yet. 

Maybe next year?