Join the sustainability assessment of York University. The Campus Sustainability Assessment Framework (CSAF) is an audit tool with over 130 different sustainable campus indicators that interested students, staff and faculty at York University will begin to use in January 2006. To learn more about the CSAF visit the Sierra Youth Coalition website. If you would like to undertake this hands-on, applied initiative with a class, contact the student coordinator of the Sustainable Campus Coalition at York. Visit the links to the left regularly for updates on audit results of each of the dimensions as they become available.
More on the CSAF
Any model of sustainability, for any context, serves only to visually represent and simplify a highly complex issue in order to aid our understanding of it. The figure below represents the "egg of sustainability" associated with the CSAF. It shows the supportive function of the ecosystem which houses the people subsystem. In order for the entire system to be healthy, both people and the ecosystem need to be healthy. Within each of these systems are five "dimensions," representing key campus sustainability issues. The ecosystem dimensions are air, water, land, materials, and energy. The people dimensions are knowledge, community, economy and wealth, governance, and health and wellbeing. Each dimension is then further broken down into "elements" and "sub elements" until the organizational level of indicators is reached. Sustainability is a complex, interdependent, and long-term state that is currently ill defined, and very difficult to accurately divide into smaller parts. Humans are one part of the larger ecosystem, and the larger universe in which we live. Every living and non-living part of this earth has an essential role to play in the function of our world, and a right to continued existence. A model can only describe the complexity of these relationships in a very simplistic way. This model - the egg of sustainability - is meant to help with understanding and describing the wide range of campus sustainability issues included in the CSAF. 1
