Sustainability award for Green Office – University of Innsbruck
The first and so far only Green Office in Austria has been in place at the University of Innsbruck for almost a year. Yesterday, Monday, the student sustainability office received the Sustainability Award for outstanding sustainable projects at universities in Vienna. In addition, the climate-friendly travel guidelines and the course “Sustainability and Climate Change” of the cross-university network Aurora were also recognized.
Five students are currently working in the Green Office of the University of Innsbruck at Innrain 13. There they collect ideas and exchange ideas with the many volunteers who support the initiative. Since the beginning of the 2021/22 academic year, the five-person team has been working together on the vision of thinking about comprehensive sustainability at the University of Innsbruck as a fixed part of all decisions, research projects, teaching, ongoing operations and governance. “In the first year of our existence, it was important to us that we establish ourselves as the Green Office at the University of Innsbruck and that all students perceive us as a point of contact for sustainability issues, including those who have not previously dealt with this topic much. The term sustainability is not only limited to ecological aspects, economic and social issues also play an important role in our understanding,” says psychology student Daniel Immer.
The Green Office is based at the Vice Rectorate for Infrastructure at the University of Innsbruck. “More sustainability is a central goal in the university’s development plan. In order to achieve this goal, we naturally also want to involve the largest group of university members, the students. With the Green Office, we have succeeded in creating a low-threshold contact point for students that enables them to independently develop and implement sustainable ideas in the university context,” says Vice Rector Wolfgang Streicher.
Exchange as a central element
The Green Office team creates exchanges with fellow students through various events. “In March, for example, we organized the theme month of nutrition and sustainability. With current formats such as workshops, lectures, pop-up stands and an exhibition, we have examined the topic of sustainable nutrition from a wide variety of perspectives,” says geography student Lara Schumacher.
If students approach the team with their own ideas, they support them with their expertise, contacts and financial resources. And even though the Green Office is not an elected student body, it represents the interests of students on the University’s Sustainability Advisory Board. There, the five-person core team can contribute to the design of the sustainability strategy for the University of Innsbruck.
First Green Office in Austria
The idea of the Green Office came about more than 10 years ago. The first of its kind was founded in 2010 at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. After the model was founded in Maastricht, four early stage students founded a social enterprise called rootAbility (integrated into Students Organizing for Sustainability International since 2020) with the aim of spreading the Green Office model across Europe . This ultimately led to the development of the Green Office Movement. There are now 71 Green Offices in ten different countries. The idea for the first and so far only Green Office in Austria came about in Innsbruck as part of the “Lectures For Future” series of courses.
sustainability award
Since 2008 the sustainability award as an Austria-wide competition for universities, universities of applied sciences and universities of teacher education, announced every two years by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) and the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) for particularly innovative and sustainable university projects and forgive. The Green Office was awarded first prize in the administration and management category. In addition, the climate-friendly travel guidelines and the course “Sustainability and Climate Change” of the cross-university network Aurora were also recognized.