UBC Okanagan’s new bachelor of sustainability degree will welcome its inaugural cohort in September 2022.
The bachelor of sustainability degree will be the first Canadian program focused solely on the improvement and adoption of sustainable practices.
Students can enrol directly out of high school and will spend their four years studying several academic categories, including courses in English, Indigenous studies, sciences and design. Classroom education will be complemented by experience in community work and the degree will culminate in a final project.
Dr. Kevin Hanna, an associate professor of earth sciences at UBCO, will be the first director of the new program.
He says the main goal of this degree is to form students who have an “interdisciplinary perspective on how to address problems.”
“It's a program that really provides that sort of breadth of experience, and the breadth of ... exposure to different ideas, different disciplines … and [how to] bring them together for common problem solving.”
Both campuses of UBC have made commitments to more sustainable practices and buildings over the last several years. Hanna says these goals will be well complimented by offering this degree.
“...it fits nicely into our strategic vision and planning of the university and [our] focus on sustainability.”
There will be four specializations to choose from within the degree: data analytics, environmental conservation and management, environmental humanities and green chemistry. Unique and current content will be involved in these concentrations, meaning some of the material has yet to be finalized.
“Some of [the courses] are actually ... newly developed and [will be] offered by new faculty, too.” Hanna says.
Other unique aspects to the bachelor of sustainability include the high degree of freedom students will have in completing the fourth year capstone project. There will be options for research focuses and external organization collaboration, among many others.
Hanna also says this program will go beyond identifying what needs to be fixed, instead concentrating on how to create solutions and approach issues with inherent social and political difficulties.
“I think this is really going to be a focus of this [degree] at the end of it...how do you actually solve [problems] and how do you deal with a problem that has an engineering or technical or scientific foundation and potentially an engineering, technical or scientific solution, but you can't get to that or you can't implement it because there's political opposition, or willful ignorance out there or just people who don't want to hear it?”
For more details on the program, visit the sustainability degree section of UBCO’s website.