Northwestern University Strategic Sustainability Plan

Evanston, Illinois, USA

Northwestern University, one of the USA’s leading teaching and research institutions, is committed to developing sustainable solutions for people and the planet.

The University, which is based in Evanston, Illinois, with an additional campus in Chicago, engaged Buro Happold to assess its current sustainability performance, define a five-year Strategic Sustainability Plan and support that plan with an Implementation Roadmap that would provide tools and resources for the day-to-day execution of the plan.

Northwestern University, in Illinois, engaged Buro Happold to guide its development of a strategic sustainability plan.

The institution has already won awards for its sustainability efforts, but was keen to drive decarbonization on the campus forward.

The project required our team to define sustainability focus areas that will endure in a fast-changing environment and identify ESG topics that matter most to stakeholders.

Buro Happold worked with the client over 18 months, delivering a robust strategy and implementation roadmap.

Challenge

Buro Happold was invited to respond to a brief to enable Northwestern to remain at the forefront of a quickly evolving field and build on the university’s successes. Its recent achievements included being the first university to receive the EPA’s highest honor for leadership in energy efficiency (the prestigious ENERGY STAR Sustained Excellence award) and also being designated a 2022 U.S. Department of Education Green Ribbon School Postsecondary Sustainability Awardee.

This project would be a continuation of Northwestern’s sustainability journey. Our role was to evaluate the university’s existing strategy and set the course for the next five years to expand its potential impact. Northwestern had a range of objectives as part of its brief. These included integrating best practice, relevant trends, meaningful stakeholder engagement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) considerations. The project also required our team to define sustainability focus areas that will endure in a fast-changing environment and identify ESG topics that matter most to the University and its stakeholders.

A common thread throughout each of these activities was the requirement for comprehensive stakeholder engagement. Our team would need to engage stakeholders both within and outside the university to align on sustainability priorities, activities, and the plan for implementation in the years to come.

The project was an opportunity to leverage local and global sustainability expertise, to expand university understanding of key issues and inform future areas of focus and levels of ambition. The process would also allow the University to leverage external, multi-disciplinary perspectives that seek to enhance the way Northwestern creates shared value. As part of the process, the Buro Happold team would need to support goal setting, metrics reporting, and KPIs to allow for meaningful decision-making, particularly within the context of Northwestern’s operations and future energy, utility, and infrastructure systems.

Solution

Buro Happold worked with the client on these objectives over 18 months, delivering a strategy and implementation roadmap to achieve the agreed ESG aspirations.

We engaged with multiple stakeholder teams at Northwestern to co-create a plan representative of stakeholder priorities. Our team worked primarily with sustainNU, a university-wide program that engages students, faculty, and staff in reducing Northwestern’s impact on the environment, leading the way towards a more sustainable future. This team would be ultimately responsible for implementing plan activities and delivering on targets.

In addition to sustainNU, numerous individuals were involved from across the university. These individuals represented academics, facilities, student, and leadership perspectives and were organised into various groups to facilitate engagement. In addition, the project was guided by a university steering committee, to ensure alignment amongst leadership throughout the plan development. Engagement methods included focus groups, surveys, and interviews alongside ongoing conversations between sustainNU, university leadership, and other key constituents.

Throughout the project, we navigated the engagement of multiple stakeholder groups with diverse perspectives on what needed to be achieved through the plan. From students, to leadership, to academic faculty, to facilities teams, the plan had to consider multiple perspectives on the opportunities and challenges those groups faced when it came to implementing sustainability measures.

Furthermore, we needed to balance both innovation and feasibility. As a leading academic institution, Northwestern stakeholders desired ambitious action, but we also had to consider what would be achievable within set timelines and resources. Ultimately this led us to deliver an ambitious but balanced plan for sustainability. We started work on the project in 2021, with a thorough assessment of Northwestern’s sustainability performance as well as a review of peer activity and overall industry trends in sustainability. This led us to identify critical topics that may be of priority. We then conducted an alignment workshop to ensure leadership and those responsible for plan execution were aligned on sustainability priorities. We explored targets and timeframes for sustainability commitments, using market trends, scientific research, and peer activity to inform our target setting process.

We brought an outside perspective, guiding Northwestern on potential commitments and actions that would align with not only their peers but emerging trends and the latest science. In addition to considering environmental sustainability, the plan needed to align with Northwestern’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and therefore considering DEI and issues around environmental justice was an essential component of plan development.

This approach allowed us to co-create a Strategic Sustainability Plan with Northwestern that would deliver environmental and social benefits to the campus community and beyond. We helped determine intent, priority and goals across key topic areas, such as energy, transportation, communications, waste and water. We focused on setting appropriate quantitative goals to achieve measurable impact.

After developing an initial list of actions, we re-evaluated them with the potential for social impact, we wanted to define opportunities for Northwestern to provide both environmental and social benefits through the actions in the plan, especially given the inherent connection between environmental sustainability and human health, wellbeing, and equity.

Kirsten Melling, Sustainability Consultant, Buro Happold

Value

Buro Happold’s team of sustainability experts not only helped Northwestern define the Strategic Sustainability Plan, but also prepared them for implementation. We developed an Implementation Roadmap that would support the day-to-day execution of the Strategic Sustainability Plan. This often missed, but critical step, can make a significant difference when it comes to achieving sustainable outcomes.

We focused our implementation plan on defining workplans for individual actions as well as the annual planning, budgeting, and stakeholder engagement process for plan execution. Further, we included recommendations around required roles and responsibilities, an analysis of required full time employees, and cost analysis for sustainability initiatives as defined in the plan. Overall, defining these governance items set Northwestern up for a successful implementation of plan activities. 

This Strategic Sustainability Plan provides us with a framework to move towards a more ambitious agenda for the coming years, ensuring that sustainability can be integrated into the University’s operations, educational engagement, and community endeavours.

Northwestern University