Interview: Linda Nowlan

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

The UBC Sustainability Hub is a staff unit within the Provost’s office focused on academic sustainability.  We run curricular development and co-curricular experiential programs for students and faculty and engage in public education on sustainability and climate action for the UBC community and broader regional audiences. We act as a hub for sustainability education and initiatives across the university spectrum. A key role for our staff is to form new networks and partnerships to accelerate sustainability and climate action at UBC and beyond.

We are the lead on amplifying sustainability at UBC and produce reports such as the Annual Sustainability Report, as well as a comprehensive monthly newsletter and a range of social media communications.

A new responsibility is to convene and coordinate work on the climate emergency at UBC, in response to UBC’s 2019 Declaration and 2021 Task Force report. We released the first Climate Emergency Progress Report in October 2022, making claims that highlight developments in climate justice across research, teaching and learning, Indigenous engagement, and community partnerships.

What are some of the different ways that your unit can support on-ground research on campus?

One of our main roles is to manage the Campus as a Living Lab (CLL) program. We run the CLL Fund Competition which provides seed funding for joint faculty-operational staff-led projects on the Vancouver campus.

The CLL program also offers connection to cutting-edge research and the multiple elements of UBC’s education ecosystem, including:

• Knowledge collection and capture in sustain— documenting project processes and innovations.
• Knowledge transformation and dissemination — creating educational and outreach materials to share lessons learned from the project at different stages.
• Forming a UBC research team, including a faculty lead or leads, graduate students and USI staff for research management.
• Conduct applied and peer research/learning from universities, municipalities, and other organizations with similar projects.
• Assisting with the public outreach activities conducted by project proponents.

Our unit also offers grants for faculty collaborations that can result in new research through the Sustainability Fellows program, and place UBC graduate students in paid applied research internships through the Sustainability Scholars Program.

What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?

We are excited about a number of opportunities, especially those that combine research on UBC’s priorities of climate action and Indigenous human rights. We are also excited about the research that combines work on the twin biodiversity and climate crises such as the Fraser Estuary Research Collaborative, which centres on Indigenous-led governance, and our partnership with UBC’s Learning Exchange on “Making Climate Justice Research Accessible”.

Research that addresses BC’s significant climate change events such as heat domes, wildfire, flooding, and related community displacements that disproportionately affect Indigenous communities, the elderly, people with life with a disability and those living in poverty is also a priority. Accelerating the economic transition and social transformation to a zero-carbon future is another broad area for more research.

The most desirable CLL projects result in a change in policy or practice, and we’re constantly looking for pilots that can be tested on campus and then scaled up and applied for even greater impact in multiple settings off campus.

What are some of the unit's operational constraints in incubating on-ground research?

Program management of the CLL Program is complex and involves many parts of UBC. We aim to create networks to achieve demonstrable impacts on sustainability on and off campus. One of our roles is to connect the academic side of UBC with operational staff, and a constraint is enticing busy faculty into research collaborations with operational staff.

At the same time, connecting people on campus to work on projects that provide both research opportunities and operational benefits, are led by a faculty and staff team, demonstrate innovation, and respond to a sustainability challenge is a complex undertaking.

Achieving greater visibility for the CLL program amidst the torrent of information about UBC events and news is another challenge that we’re trying to overcome with the new website, livinglabs.ubc.ca. This website also provides us with an opportunity to explore inventive ways to communicate and display information, such as the 3D virtual tour of the Bioenergy Demonstration Research Facility.

Are there any examples of past research collaborations or projects you would like to highlight?

We have close collaborations with many local and provincial organizations such as the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS). One of our most recent collaborations was sharing the UBC Living Lab model through the PICS Campus as a Living Lab Climate “Solutions Showcase” last spring. UBC and PICS, through the Universities, Collaborate on Climate initiative, will continue to explore how to support and scale up Living Lab projects (including those involving the social sciences and humanities) and provide resources for engagement and partnerships to assist in responding to climate change on campus and beyond.

The Zero Emission Building Exchange (ZEBx) is a channel for knowledge dissemination and outreach to the building industry around energy consumption and GHG emissions reduction which has resulted in several case studies on low-energy and near-zero emission buildings in BC published on the ZEBx website and most recently in this Playbook.   

In terms of projects, Brock Commons Tallwood House an 18-storey, LEED Gold certified, 404-bed student residence building proved using mass timber in high-rise buildings was both possible and beneficial and was influential in enabling policy-makers to change the Vancouver Bylaw and B.C. Building Codes to allow mass timber in more buildings. USI produced an extensive library of reports to disseminate the research results.

Vienna House is the first off-campus UBC living lab research project focused on climate, affordability and social equity. It will help BC Housing evaluate innovative building materials and designs aimed at tackling affordability, inclusion and climate change. The role of UBC researchers is to capture and document the knowledge that will emanate from this project and support the dissemination of this knowledge. 

The Embodied Carbon Pilot, funded by the BC Forestry Innovation Investment, was a collaborative project with the Athena Institute, UBC Campus + Community Planning, the City of Vancouver and the National Research Council Canada (NRC) to review and inform the practice of conducting whole-building life cycle assessments (LCA) in order to reduce embodied carbon emission in the built environment, a significant contributor to global climate change.