Started in the United States, campaigns with the same goal are now carried out all around the world, which is “reducing carbon emission from universities”. There are many ways to achieve the goal, by urging universities to use renewable energy on campus (either generating it on site and/or buying it), retrofitting school buildings, supporting locally made foods, and purchasing green products.

  We consist of approximately 60 members and are increasing rapidly. Members are mostly university students, but include young professionals working in the environmental field. We also have strong allies who support us such as LRQA Japan and Environmental Protection Association of Private Universities.

  Concerns about climate change have been becoming serious among Japanese youths, just as in other parts of the world. Japanese youths, mostly university students, have then stood up and started to claim the importance of sustainable energy use. University campus are places that we spend most of our time and are also large emitters, we decided to carry out the campaign learning from good practices of other countries. Because of the cultural and structural differences, things do not always go as other victories have gone. But we and our campaigns, gradually but certainly, are making progresses.

Young people in Japan are concerned about climate change, but it looks like some people do not know what to do about it. Most people do not know that they can actually purchase renewable energy and how much supporting it mitigates climate change (as well as how much economic benefits it will bring in the end). For that reasons, along with hardware side which is to ask universities to implement energy policy supporting renewable energy, we also work on educational campaigns. We hope that education and raising awareness will boost up our hardware side tasks.

  Right now, our major project is “university eco-report”. We made an environmental survey for universities including questions about their total emission, their energy policy and their intended environmental goals, which is to be sent out to approximately 300 universities very soon. Once they are collected, we assess them according to the specific criteria and return the result as “report cards” to universities. Universities with good environmental policies and activities will be published and awarded.

There are more to come. Please come back and check our activities!
Please contact us for more details.

≫ reference