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Sustainability @UGent

Education

Our sustainability vision emphasizes that we want to make students sufficiently familiar with social, ecological and economic sustainability issues and with possible solutions. A university-wide elective course ‘Sustainable Development’ is an important first step in this, but integrating sustainable development in the entire range of education should be the overall aim. Furthermore, with the ‘Community Service Learning’ strategic project, Ghent University wants to focus attention on the relevance of social engagement in academic education.

Eco-campus

Ghent University’s commitment to implementing sustainability in the business management and organisation is well advanced. In its GRI Sustainability Report the efforts inter alia regarding energy management, mobility, food, purchasing and resource management are well described. Furthermore tools are developed to make the general management structurally sustainable and effective in the long term, in addition to trial projects demonstrable in the short term and with the aim of making the university community more aware of the importance of sustainable development.

Research

The sustainability vision of Ghent University stresses research with a view to a socially just, ecologically and economically feasible sustainable future should be further stimulated. Hereby offering local and global scientifically supported services in terms of sustainability to wider society is important. The university is active in a number of large multidisciplinary research platforms with distinct sustainability themes of which the supporting EESD 2016 consortia.

Ghent University Sustainable Energy Technologies has existed for over five years now. SET is a unique contact point for companies confronted with multidisciplinary challenges in the energy domain. The SET has access to the expertise, knowledge or infrastructure of more than ten research groups, collates the knowledge and expertise of the various UGent researchers and works in close collaboration with specialists in their fields.

The Centre for Environmental Science and Technology is an interfaculty collaboration with the aim of overseeing education and research related to the environment and functions as a central contact point for external stakeholders. It has groups 22 research groups from six faculties performing research related to the environment.