Resource Library

Considering the alarming health and economic burden caused by sugar sweetened beverage consumption, one of the goals of UBC Wellbeing is to increase tap water consumption and decrease sugary beverage consumption among UBC Community members. The objective of this project was to engage the UBC community of staff, students and faculty in developing an evidence-informed strategy to promote water consumption and reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages on campus to be rolled out in the summer of 2018. Feedback from the UBC community was obtained through an online survey and a series of engagement meetings.

Partner: UBC Wellbeing
Keywords: social sustainability, food systems

This document details contributions to the LiteFarm application project. LiteFarm is a multifunctional web app that aims to help farmers make day-to-day decisions, and encourage them to farm more sustainably. The feature set in LiteFarm was created based on a farmer participatory design process, including iterative user experience and user interface testing. 

Update May, 2020
Craig's foundational work in 2018 helped the UBC Farm build and refine the LiteFarm application. LiteFarm is now the world’s first community-led, not-for-profit, digital platform joining farmers and scientists together for participatory assessment of social, environmental and economic outputs of farming systems. 

You can see the tool at www.litefarm.org and read updated documentation on Github.

Partner: UBC Farm
Keywords: ecological systems, food systems, sustainable development & green economy

This report summarizes the activities undertaken by the International Sustainable Campus Network (ISCN) Charter working group in the development of the ISCN Sustainable Campus Charter. It is designed to serve as a knowledge translation tool; the purpose is to create a document that will prove useful for other organizations who endeavour to lead a charter development process.

Partner: USI
Keywords: leadership & behaviour change, social sustainability, sustainability in education

Since 2011, the City of North Vancouver has had energy targets and guidelines in place to ensure that all new developments in the city meet progressive energy targets. This Sustainability Scholars project sought to analyse the trove of data created through the Energy Efficient Buildings Initiative to identify the tradeoffs being identified by builders in the area who are looking to meet and exceed the energy targets. The analysis of the building data will provide an opportunity for local builders to meet and exceed the future energy standards that are required through the BC Step Code.

Partner: City of North Vancouver
Keywords: green buildings, leadership & behaviour change

Currently, there are more than 500 public electric vehicle (EV) charging stations located throughout MEtro Vancouver. The use of these charging stations is increasing, but it is not yet clear the degree to which they are relied upon compared to residential charging. This project was developed to better understand the impact that public charging infrastructure has on EV adoption, trip behaviour and lifestyles in Metro Vancouver.

Partner: Fraser Basin Council
Keywords: transportation

The aim of this project is to help inform City staff on preferred planning policy and regulatory options specific to what is sometimes referred to in BC’s Lower Mainland as ‘missing middle’ housing. That is, policies relevant to ground-oriented wood-frame multi-residential buildings such as townhomes, row homes, duplexes, triplexes and quadraplexes, as well as multi-residential housing forms such as stacked townhomes and 4- to 6-storey mid-rise apartment buildings. 

Partner: City of New West
Keywords: green buildings

The City of Surrey aims to achieve 80 percent reduction in GHG emissions per capita by 2050 (below 2007 levels). Currently, several leading cities across the world are implementing innovative and effective policies and programs. This study aims to further develop a “policy ecosystem framework” that the City of Surrey can use to systematically reduce GHG emissions from the existing building stock by summarizing the multi-pronged strategies these leading cities are taking through the market transformation lens.

Partner: City of Surrey
Keywords: green buildings, sustainable development & green economy

Over the past years, the Engineering Department of the Township of Langley has expended considerable effort to evaluate the latest advancements in LED street lighting technology. Recent studies have determined that the latest LED street lighting fixtures outperform existing HPS lighting fixtures and can be directly retrofitted on existing freestanding steel poles, without pole modifications. This report draws on an analysis of the Township’s current street lighting inventory to develop an LED conversion plan that maximizes both performance and value.

Partner: Township of Langley
Keywords: green buildings

This paper reviews the current science on preponderance of legionella risk with direct load operations in demand response management. The findings reveal that demand response events in a thermally-stratified or stagnated electric hot water system can provide conditions for greater culturability of legionella and colonization of the water storage tank. These may be associated with two forms of legionellosis.

Partner: BC Hydro
Keywords: green buildings, water