Academics
Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and historic dedication to public service, the university’s academic community leads cutting-edge research and innovative teaching on the planet’s resources, stewardship, and challenges.
Central to Stanford’s approach to sustainability research and curricula is the belief that solutions to the world’s environmental problems require an interdisciplinary effort. Dozens of laboratories, research centers, and student organizations work together to solve the most urgent challenges facing humanity – from food security to clean water and energy.
Sustainability Principles
Sustaining life on Earth is one of the key university values, and all seven schools integrate this vision by providing a wide range of environmental and sustainability-related courses and research opportunities. Sustainability as a learning outcome for all students is one of the driving values at Stanford. The university has established the following core sustainability principles related to academia, planning, and operations.
Advance Sustainability Knowledge
- Ensure all Stanford graduates, regardless of degree received, understand how the work they do contributes to creating a sustainable world.
- Achieve excellence in research that can help solve the complex problems involved in creating a sustainable world.
Establish Sustainability as a Core Value
- Lead sustainability by example.
- Integrate environmental awareness into campus culture, and make sustainable practices part of everyday life.
- Incorporate considerations of sustainability into all aspects of campus purchases of products, services, and food.
Minimize Environmental Footprint and Preserve the Ecosystem
- Dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from campus operations by reducing energy use in existing buildings, minimizing energy use in new buildings, and greening our energy supply process and procurement.
- Use water resources efficiently, minimizing total water demand by continuing to implement water conservation measures and incorporating infrastructure for future water-saving measures into new facilities.
- Construct and renovate buildings to provide safe, productive indoor environments that use energy, water, and other natural resources efficiently.
- Reduce the number of drive-alone commuters, and avoid increasing the total number of trips taken during peak commuting hours.
- Conserve resources through reuse, recycling, source reduction and composting – moving towards a zero waste campus.
- Preserve and manage environmental resources to allow the functioning of natural ecosystems and the long-term persistence of native species.
- Preserve and manage heritage resources to retain their historical and archaeological value and maximize their usefulness for producing knowledge.
School of Sustainability
In September 2022, the university launched its first new school in more than 75 years, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which strives to advance scholarship critical to the long-term prosperity of the planet. The school has a distinctive three-part structure: multiple institutes and centers, various departments to round out the necessary interdisciplinary approach to solving climate problems (natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities), and a Sustainability Accelerator to drive technology and policy solutions at a global scale.
Course Collaborations
Academic course collaborations integrate students, faculty, staff, and real-world sustainability challenges, transforming theoretical knowledge into tangible solutions. Check out a selection of courses below that demonstrate opportunities for students to incorporate Stanford’s use of the campus as a living lab for sustainability in their academic journeys. If you are a faculty member interested in using coursework to advance your sustainability research, inquire here.
SUSTAIN 119/219
Living Laboratory for Sustainability at Stanford
Stanford functions as a dynamic urban system, with infrastructure and utilities that support daily life while advancing ambitious sustainability goals. Living Laboratory for Sustainability at Stanford offers an immersive exploration of these systems, providing students with a firsthand understanding of the energy, water, waste, land management, and food systems that shape campus operations. Through expert-led discussions, field-based learning, and direct engagement with Stanford’s infrastructure, the course examines both the challenges and opportunities of implementing sustainability at an institutional scale.
SUSTAIN 120
Leading Organizational Change for Sustainability
The course constitutes the academic component of the Living Lab Fellowship Program. This course will demonstrate why change fails, teach fellows to avoid common pitfalls, introduce powerful frameworks and strategic approaches for leading successful change, and provide fellows with tools that can be applied at any scale. Using the Stanford campus as a living laboratory where material from the course can be meaningfully applied, this course emphasizes learning through doing. By the end of this course, fellows will deepen their understanding of the challenges, techniques, and opportunities associated with leading change in organizations and will be equipped to continue to build their capacity to lead successful change and foster healthy, just, sustainable, and resilient organizations.
EARTHSYS 210A/B/P
Earth Systems Senior Capstone
The Earth Systems Senior Capstone and Reflection allows students to synthesize and reflect on their learning in the major. Students participate in guided career development and planning activities and initiate work on an independent or group capstone project related to an Earth Systems problem or question of interest. Students learn and apply principles of effective oral communication through developing and giving a formal presentation on their internship.
ME 206A
Design for Extreme Affordability
Design for Extreme Affordability (fondly called Extreme) is a two-quarter course offered by the d.school through the School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Business. This multidisciplinary project-based experience allows students to design products and services to change the lives of the world’s poorest citizens. Students work directly with course partners on real-world problems, the culmination of which is implementation and impact.
CEE 26
Life Cycle Assessment for Complex Systems
This course focuses on the life cycle modeling of products, industrial processes, and infrastructure/building systems; material and energy balances for large interdependent systems; environmental accounting; and life cycle costing. These methods, based on ISO 14000 standards, are used to examine emerging technologies, such as biobased products, building materials, building integrated photovoltaics, and alternative design strategies, such as remanufacturing, dematerialization, LEED, and Design for Environment: DfE. Student teams complete a life cycle assessment of a product or system.
BIO/EARTHSYS 105A/B
Ecology and Natural History of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve
This is a multidisciplinary field course conducted at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (‘Ootchamin ‘Ooyakma) during the winter and spring quarters. The course is designed to use the preserve as a “living laboratory” to learn ecology and natural history via expert lectures, discussions, and hands-on field experiences. During the spring quarter, students develop a place-based independent research project that contributes to the preserve with data-driven research, education, and/or outreach.
A Living Laboratory
Stanford’s campus serves as a dynamic testing ground for innovative ideas to solve operational challenges, drive sustainability innovation at the university and beyond, and develop the next generation of leaders to impact systems change – locally and globally.
A History of Sustainability in Academia
Stanford’s academic focus on the Earth and its resources dates back to the founding of the university in 1891, well before the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability was established.
