Development

The SSC development team represents the students opinions on what meeds to change at ETH and pushes for a more sustainability at the institutional level, through working groups with specific focus on Strategic Planning, Education, Mobility, Food, Divestment, and Energy, Infrastructure and Biodiversity.
We closely work together with the VSETH HoPo team (university politics team) and units at ETH, such as ETH Sustainability and Campus Services. Members of the development team hold several delegate positions of VSETH, which makes them the elected representative of students for their project.

Our Projects

Strategic Planning and NetZero2030

The Strategic Planning group just finished writing down our vision of a sustainable university in a document called “Vision 2030”. It is a document that describes our visions, the status quo and brings ideas how to move towards more sustainable practices and shows good examples of other universities. Hence, this group is collaborating closely with all other working groups. Now after publishing this document the goal is to create connections with the different bodies responsible for the respective topics and our other working groups.

Education

The Education team is focused on how to make teaching and curricula more sustainability oriented, so that all students of ETH learn how to apply their field of study to sustainability. So that we are ready for a working environment, which is changing fast and where the importance of sustainability is rising.

Mobility

This group is collaborating with ETH sustainability about the air travel project and with Service campus to promote a more sustainable mobility within ETH. ETH is also part of the Federal campaign “Exemplary Energy and Climate”. The Umweltkommission (UmK) has set “sustainable mobility” as the topic for 2023 and our SSC mobility group has been collaborating with Campus Services on an Action Week about Mobility in May 2023.

Food

The working group Food is pushing for more sustainable food options in the canteens and to remove financial barriers of a sustainable diet. Additionally, the group is working on establishing a small self-service shop, where people can buy local vegetables and other farm products on campus.

Divestment

Emissions caused through investment can be quite significant and it is important to only support businesses, where we can identify ourselves with. The Divestment team is dedicated to make ETHs investment more sustainable, both environmentally as well as socially, by divesting away from all fossil companies.

Energy, Infrastructure and Biodiversity

This group is focusing on more renewable energy supply like for example more solar energy on campus buildings. Another aspect is sustainability in new buildings, and to create more biodiversity on campus through several smaller projects.

A Look back at our Education Workshop

“How can we implement sustainability in all study programs at ETH Zürich?”

This was the leading question of our workshop moderated by Jan Linder and Emma Hilgenstock on the 2nd of March 2023. Together with representatives of six of our student associations, we discussed how we define sustainability, exchanged about our lighthouse projects/best practices and developed ideas for measures which we are going to realize in the coming semesters.

Since the ETH departments are responsible for implementing sustainability in their study programs, our first step is to create a working group with representatives of every student association to keep the exchange alive and make it easier to work on projects across the departments.

Subsequently, we are going to analyze every study program and find the subjects which match sustainability the best. In dialogue with the professors we will then try to either a) implement the topic in already existing lectures, b) make existing lectures available for other departments or c) create new lectures.

We are looking forward to working on these awesome projects together with them!

Thanks to the whole education team for this amazing work: Christian Rolli, Aude Champouillon, Johannes Dollinger