Good Campus Overview

A good campus today provides all the expected features of higher education to a high standard, and also meets the challenge of sustainable development. It therefore needs to be very resource efficient and supportive of ecosystems, and minimise travel for staff and students. It's a good neighbour and socially inclusive and responsible too. And, perhaps most important of all, it's influencing the views and behaviour of its students so that they are sustainability champions in the longer term.

This site is part of a broader project by Professor Peter James and Dr. Peter Hopkinson, both of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford, to develop this vision by:

Highlighting and disseminating best practice through events, guidance tools and other means;
Building, maintaining and supporting practitioner networks;
Stimulating improvement through benchmarking, evidence-based reports and other means; and
Contributing to the development of UK higher education as a sustainability leader, compared both to the same sector in other countries, and other sectors within the UK economy.

Good Campus builds on, and incorporates, the work of the Higher Education Environmental Performance Improvement (HEEPI) project, which is co-directed by the two Peters. For almost a decade, and largely thanks to the financial support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), this has supported operational improvement in areas such as buildings, energy and water efficiency, environmental management systems, transport, and waste. The mechanisms for this have included:

Around 70 events, with well over 3000 delegates;
Energy benchmarking of over 300 sector buildings;
Publication of over 100 cases, guidance documents, reports, tools and other outputs; and
Establishing (with partners), and organising, the Green Gown Awards.

The very positive development of sector capacity in these areas in recent years means that others can do some of HEEPI's past tasks more effectively. Hence, we are now focusing on three difficult areas which require technical understanding and the ability to facilitate interaction between different specialists, and stakeholders, and where we feel that we can make a difference:

High performance buildings (HiPerBuild);
Sustainable information and communication technologies (SusteIT); and
Sustainable laboratories (S-Lab).

As a result, we've now handed on some activities, especially the organisation of the Green Gown Awards, which is in the safe hands of the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC). (Peter James retains an interest as Chair of the Steering Group).

The transmutation of HEEPI into Good Campus also reflects the broader interests of its founders, including:

Education for sustainable development, especially in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects - reflecting Peter Hopkinson's recent role as Director of Ecoversity, the HEFCE-funded flagship project at the University of Bradford to create a sustainable student experience (see http://www.brad.ac.uk/ecoversity);
Sustainability and and environmental performance assessment and management in all areas of the economy - Peter James has, for example, helped set up online assessment tools for three Regional Development Agencies; and
Sustainable technology, especially ICT - an area which has been Peter James' main research focus in recent years, and a topic he been advising the European Commision on through his membership of Expert Groups on Environmental Technology and ICT and Energy Efficiency.

We hope to bring more content from these activities into the site in coming months.