The engineering profession has a responsibility for practicing in a way that cares for the environment and human life – in short, to be thoughtful practitioners capable of integrating different dimensions of sustainability in their work. This study develops and evaluates a procedure for assessing the sustainability content in engineering curriculum, and then applies this workflow to the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Toronto. The study achieves this goal by first developing a framework to define sustainability for engineering and then using that framework to analyse curriculum respectively via course descriptions, course syllabi, and instructor surveys to triangulate results across modes. The University of Toronto is chosen as it is regularly ranked as (or among) the top Engineering programs in Canada and is among the largest undergraduate engineering student enrollments across the country.

The meaning of sustainability continues to evolve and as such, it is challenging to define in general and even more so within engineering. A commonly cited definition for sustainability is from the 1987 Brundtland Report: “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. To help operationalize this definition, the United Nations outlined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015. While these SDGs are guiding sustainability efforts, they are not sufficiently specific to engineering. Several prior studies analyze sustainability within the curriculum both in general and specifically for engineering. However, there is no single framework that captured all engineering concepts for sustainability, and minimal prior comparison of different approaches (i.e., source documents) for analyzing curriculum.

This study developed a new framework and codebook to define sustainability, starting with the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Then, more specific sustainability themes were collected from the SDGs, the Principles of Sustainable Engineering (PSE), the Sustainability Tool for Assessing Universities’ Curricula Holistically (STAUNCH), themes found in the literature that focused on sustainability in engineering and other local/national frameworks such as the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges (CEGC) and Canadian studies on engineering and SDGs. These themes were classified into the pillars of sustainability, with a detailed list of topics being provided for each theme. A fourth pillar of professional responsibility was added and include additional themes that did not map onto the three pillars. The framework was reviewed by experts in the field of sustainability before being finalized with 20 themes under the four pillars of sustainability.

The framework was used to qualitatively analyse the undergraduate engineering curriculum in stages, going progressively deeper, by starting with the course descriptions, then syllabi and finally faculty perspective. The results indicate that the environmental pillar is most prevalent in the curriculum, followed by economic and social, with increasing sustainability content being identified as the study progressed from descriptions to syllabi to faculty surveys. The civil engineering discipline had the highest sustainability content while electrical and computer engineering had the lowest. The results also indicate that sustainability tend to be taught by pillar rather than connecting the pillars to one another in a holistic manner. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks from using different modes (descriptions, syllabi surveys) for assessing curriculum, and advice for conducting similar studies at other universities.

Engineering education for sustainability requires pedagogical approaches that help resolve complex global problems. A possible pedagogical approach is transformational learning. Transformational learning can include many aspects such as holistic approaches, specific skills, competencies, attitudes and transdisciplinary work. A common thread among these aspects is reflective practice and critical thinking working together. Reflective practice encourages deeper thinking, considers personal/professional experiences, assesses biases, and questions the decision-making process. Reflective practice in education is common in many fields like medicine and management but is less common in engineering. This study explored whether reflective practice changed sustainability perceptions in engineering students after exposure to a sustainability course focusing on life cycle assessment (LCA). This study is a pre-post qualitative analysis covering engineering, sustainability and reflective practice, which does seem not to be previously done.

In this study, undergraduate engineering students taking the LCA course received an assignment, as part of the course, where they were asked to reflect on sustainable development, environmental stewardship, and engagement, at the beginning of the course and then again at the end of the course. The students were asked to participate in this study by giving permission to use their statements. A total of 86 statements, 43 pairs, representing ~22% of the class, were analysed qualitatively, both deductively and inductively. The deductive coding was completed using a sustainability in engineering framework, followed by inductive coding to glean emerging themes. The coding was then compared between the beginning and end of the course.

For the deductive coding, the sustainability in engineering framework comprised four pillars: environment, social, economic and professional responsibility. Themes in the environment pillar were the most prevalent compared to the other three pillars and overall, themes increased from the beginning of the course to the end of the course in all four pillars, with professional responsibility showing the largest increase. For the inductive coding, there were similar themes emerging like prioritizing cost, advocacy, greenwashing. However, some themes that emerged from the statements at the end of the course included the limitations of the LCA process itself, nature of the industry and difficulty in creating change, lack of confidence by students regarding their ability to advance sustainability change as new engineers, and internal conflicts about needing to earn money to live versus practicing engineering in sustainability fields where opportunities are considered less lucrative. These are promising results for integrating reflective practice within engineering education for sustainability due to the increasing depth and nuance of reflection and advancing critical thinking about sustainability from the beginning to the end of course.

Canadians have one of the highest annual per capita emissions compared to other regions around the world at ~15 tCO2e. This carbon footprint is due in part to activities like using private fossil fuel cars, taking long haul flights, personal diets that include substantial meat and dairy products consumption and personal residence heating/cooling. Global average annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions need to be reduced to ~2.8 tCO2e by 2030 to help maintain global warming below 1.5°C pre-industrial levels (Ivanova et al. 2020). While technological advancement is important in reducing the per capita emissions, humans could also take responsibility in reducing their personal carbon footprint, especially in countries like Canada where the per capita emissions are larger than the global target. Prior work has shown that there are misconceptions about the personal actions that contribute significantly to GHG emissions. Uncertainty also exists about whether knowledge (literacy) about these high impact actions affects human pro-environmental behaviour.

This present study is investigating the relationship between carbon literacy (knowledge) and pro-environmental behaviour (operationalized through a carbon footprint estimation) among students at the University of Toronto (UofT). This study builds on a past study that measured this relationship among undergraduate engineering students at the UofT in 2021. The choice of students in Toronto seems apt given that Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and reducing per capita emission in Toronto could have an overall reduction in Canada’s emissions.

In the original study and this current study, the students’ carbon literacy and carbon footprints data were estimated using an instrument designed to collect information about their personal actions (high, moderate or low impact) and their view on how impactful these actions are. Carbon literacy was calculated based on the participants’ accuracy in identifying the high, moderate and low impact actions. The students’ carbon footprint was estimated using a life cycle assessment approach (LCA) with emissions being augmented by upstream factors and manufacturing. The instrument from the original study was enhanced to include additional items like expenditure and readministered to all UofT students.

In the original study, the average carbon footprint (among the survey items included) was ~4.8 tCO2 which was lower than average for Toronto residents, Ontario and Canada overall but still higher than the target of ~2.8 tCO2. Carbon literacy was generally more accurate for higher impact actions, with more misconceptions appearing in relation to the moderate and low impact actions. The overall relationship between pro-environmental action and carbon literacy was weak. The relationship between pro-environmental action and carbon literacy showed that for high impact actions, there was a slight positive correlation in carbon literacy and pro-environmental actions whereas for moderate and low impact actions, there was a negative correlation. This study will illuminate what differences exist (if any) among the students in different departments at UofT or between graduate and undergraduate students and can recommend future actions to reduce per capita emissions.

Sustainable Project Management (SPM) has been defined (Silvius and Schipper, 2014, p.79) and is recognized as an emerging school of thought in the field of project management. Despite recognition of the importance of integrating sustainability and project management, there remains a lack of understanding on how to operationalize sustainability in practice and apply it to specific projects. The goals of this study are to explore 1) the role of project managers in promoting and implementing sustainability initiatives within their organizations, 2) how project managers learn about sustainability and its practical application to project management, 3) the barriers project managers experience in the implementation of SPM, and 4) the tool(s) project managers need to effectively implement sustainable practices into the projects that they manage. This presentation provides an analysis of survey and focus group data from project managers from a local PMI Chapter and an opportunity to engage and discuss tools, techniques, and methodologies for sustainable project management. The results of the analysis suggest four main themes: 1) There appears to be a drive to implement sustainability into practice by project managers, but the knowledge, training, and tools do not seem readily available. There is a need to incorporate sustainability competencies, tools, and methodologies into project management educational processes through curriculum development in university project management courses, accreditation training, and training workshops offered by the PMO or wider organization. 2) Most participants indicated that they practice sustainable project management and view themselves as sustainability change agents however there also seems to be limiting constraints such as a knowledge gap, formal training, and the availability of sustainability tools as well as the constraints of organizational culture and leadership. How then are the project managers engaging with sustainability within their projects? 3) Working within an organization with a sustainability focus appears to result in a higher percentage of project managers implementing SPM, however, does not completely guarantee SPM. Additionally, one can work at an organization with no public facing information about sustainability and still practice SPM. What are the other constraining factors involved? 4) An obstacle to implementing SPM may lie within the ambiguity of the term ‘sustainability’ for each individual project manager. Additionally, each industry may define, practice, and assess sustainability in different ways, suggesting the development of a toolkit resembling a resources guide that instructs best practices for the adoption of SPM to be much needed in practice.

The word sustainability includes many aspects related to human wellbeing, status of ecosystem health, policy and economics. Preference for one aspect over another often stems from personal ethical perspectives due to our experiences. Researchers and students in science, technology, engineering and mathematical (STEM) programs rarely have open discussion about what sustainability means to them nor ethical perspectives related to sustainability. Addressing this gap is critical for all sustainability researchers, but agricultural and food systems raise even more complexity about what ought to be done. To fill this gap, I created a 15-hour graduate seminar titled ‘Representing Sustainability in Agroecology and Industrial Ecology Research’ and shared a 90-minute conference workshop at ISSST 2023, both attended mostly by STEM sustainability researchers. The content of these offerings centered on environmental ethics and readings from agroecology and industrial ecology that touched on the ethical perspectives documented in these research fields. Both offerings began with an exercise on defining our positionality and articulating origin stories of interest in sustainability research, followed by a review of environmental ethics and group discussions about what aspect of sustainability our research addresses and from what ethical argument. Participants expressed little to no prior exposure to environmental ethics and that it helped them to consider the unspoken underpinnings of what defines and justifies their pursuit sustainability. Participants indicated that these activities helped to facilitate conversation among small groups about their commonalities and differences about what sustainability ought to achieve. There was also agreement that these discussions would help teams communicate better toward common goals.