Talk:Green University in the Czech Republic

4 October 2012

You've provided an excellent summary of the carbon neutral programme at the University of Graz and have clearly paid close attention to the information provided by the presenters. One very small criticism is that you could have included something about the attempts to introduce the concept of sustainability to the various university curricula and the problems associated with that.

You list a very wide range of good ideas for establishing your Green University, although it's not clear if you intend to found a new university based on SD, target one existing university for greening, or whether your intention is to get all Czech universities to participate. It's admirable that you talk about both a bottom-up approach (surveying student attitudes) and top-down (asking for financial and moral support of university rectors), and certainly any such project would have to start off by establishing 'baseline' data, e.g. student and staff knowledge of and opinions of SD/carbon neutrality, current energy efficiency, current purchasing practices, etc, etc, in order to benchmark progress over the course of the project. You'll need a mitigation strategy to overcome potential barriers and risks, too. What about embedding the SD concept in the curricula - would that be an end goal as well? Do you think you'd need to cultivate wider political support also?

So the third section concentrates on practical measures that can be carried out by a 'green university', although there's a bit of overlap with the second section if the idea of the preceding text was to focus on a broad project design only. The impression in this final section is that you want to apply your project to all universities. Do you think that's feasible? Do you think it might be better to pilot a green or carbon neutral project at a specific university first in order to establish an examplar for other universities to follow? The final section also seems to be concentrating on practical steps for achieving carbon neutrality rather than achieving a paradigm change in university management and curricula toward sustainability. Is that correct?

In general, your article is very well written and the English is excellent. Your make some good arguments and applied the lessons learned from the University of Graz to the Czech context. You've made good use of references, although it's well over the word limit, it's enjoyable to read, so length is not a problem. A short introduction and conclusion would have been good, but that's a minor point. You've covered quite a large area despite the lack of time and resources and I congratulate you on your achievement. You will go far if you continue to write like this with more time at your disposal.

Overall assessment: Excellent

Andrew