Humans are at the center of global climate change: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are igniting sustainability with proactive, global, social goals, moving us away from the Brundtland paradigm ‘do nothing today to compromise tomorrows generation’. This promotes a regenerative shift in the sustainability concept, no longer only considering resources and energy, but also significant human-centric attributes. Despite this, precise ecological and sustainable attitudes have little prognostic value regarding final related individual human behavior. The global cultural challenge, dominated by technological innovations and business imperatives, alongside the mirroring technological fallacy and lack of ethical reasoning, makes the role of small actions, at individual and at academic scale even harder. This paper outlines the context in which universities can collaborate and contribute to triggering sustainability values, attitudes, and behavior within future regenerative societies. This contribution consists in three main areas: the first analyzes the issue of sustainability transitions at the individual scale, where influencing factors and value–behavior links are presented as reviewed from a number of multi and transdisciplinary scholars’ works. The second part enlarges the picture to the global dimension, tracing the ideological steps of our current environmental crisis, from the differences in prevailing western and eastern values, tradition, and perspectives, to the technological fallacy and the power of the narratives of changes. Finally, the task of our role as academics in the emerging ‘integrative humanities’ science is outlined with education promoted as an essential driver in moving from sustainability to regenerative paradigms.

Campus greening is often the first step universities take towards sustainability. However, the diffusion of sustainability reporting methodologies and rankings is still at an early stage, and is biased in mainly measuring energy efficiency indicators while omitting basic features enabling meaningful comparisons among centers or addressing social (users) aspects related to long term sustainability transitions. This paper aims to introduce a critical perspective on sustainability university frameworks through: (i) a review of current Campus Sustainability Assessments (CSAs); (ii) performing and comparing the results obtained from the application of two internationally recognized CSAs (namely, Green Metric and ISCN) to two case studies (the Politecnico di Torino, in Italy, and the Hokkaido University, In Japan) and, finally, (iii) proposing a new CSA approach that encompasses clusters of homogeneous campus typologies for meaningful comparisons and university rankings. The proposed clusters regard universities’ morphological structures (campuses nested within city centers versus outside of a city compact ones), climatic zones and functions. At the micro scale, the paper introduces the need for indicators beyond measuring pure energy efficiency, but which are attentive to local and societal constraints and provide long-term tracking of outcomes. This, better than a sheer record of sustainability priority actions, can help in building homogenous university case studies to find similar and scalable success strategies and practices, and also in self-monitoring progress toward achieving truly sustainable university campuses.

Universities play a crucial role in the short-term implementation of education for sustainable development goals (SDGs). The fourth SDG aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. Indeed, SDG4 is not intended as a goal in itself, but rather, a tool to achieve different goals and explore the best practices, via deductive-theoretical or inductive-experiential methods. Still, current literature on education for SDGs does not always consider the infrastructural and practical factors affecting the success or the failure of the practices mentioned above. The main purpose of this paper is to organize and describe a set of ongoing education for sustainability strategies that took place from 2016 to 2019 in Italian universities. Eighteen best practices have been collected after a national call by the Italian Network of Sustainable Universities (RUS), that aimed to map the current landscape of SDGs-related actions. Data have been analyzed based on the qualitative description provided by each university, according to four criteria: trigger, course type, approach (top-down/bottom-up) and declared mission. Results are depicted as a map of the current Italian higher education system, where a predominant mission (teaching) and a prevalent driver (top-down) have been found as the frequent features of SDGs educational initiatives. Further developments highlight the value of this first country-wide mapping of the Italian Higher Education Institutions implementing SDGs in their activities, that can avoid the isolation of individual experiences and, most importantly, can suggest some comparability and transferability criteria for similar cases.

Purpose: This paper aims to report strategies towards a green campus project at Politecnico di Torino University, a 33,000-students Italian higher education institution (HEI), and estimate the avoided ecological footprint (EF) of different scenarios accounted for open spaces. Design/methodology/approach: A consumption-based study has been developed to analyse the current EF of the main campus site. Data were collected from different departments and administrative units to identify the measure of the pressure exerted by the campus activities on the ecosystem. Then, possible scenarios were accounted for open spaces along five different design layers: energy, water, landscape, food and mobility. Acting on the spaces by means of biophilic design and user-driven design requires complex considerations on university’s anticipated future needs and a wide-ranging evaluation of the most appropriate pathways forward according to all university stakeholders, far beyond the mere accounting of avoided EF. Findings: A reduction of the 21 per cent of the current EF can be achieved through the solutions envisaged in the green campus project along the open space layers. Moreover, universities have the opportunity to not only improve the sustainability of their facilities but also demonstrate how the built environment can be designed to benefit both the environment and the occupants. Research limitations/implications: The acknowledgement of predicted behavioural change effects is a question left open to further researchers on methods and indicators for social impact accounting and reporting in truly sustainable university campuses. Originality/value: This is the first research that estimates the EF of an Italian HEI. The research represents also an innovative approach integrating the EF reduction scenarios in the design process of the new masterplan of open spaces, trying to identify the connection between environmental impact reduction and improvement in users’ perception.