Hamilton college earns gold for green initiatives

Mohawk College is sustainably golden.

The Hamilton college has been recognized as the sixth-top ranked college in its category and maintained its prestigious gold rating in the international 2024 Sustainable Campus Index, managed by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

The Sustainable Campus Index recognizes top-performing sustainable colleges and universities overall and in 17 impact areas, as measured by the STAR rating system. Mohawk College first received its gold STARS rating in 2019 and has maintained its 67.4 ranking score.

“We are honoured to receive this recognition from AASHE, which underscores Mohawk College’s commitment to climate leadership across the post-secondary sector,” said Mohawk College President Paul Armstrong. “We are excited to continue leading by example, as we execute an ambitious new Climate Action Plan and continue to foster a culture of sustainability within our college and the broader community.

Mohawk College unveiled a new Climate Action Plan last November that will see the college reach net-zero emissions in direct campus operations by the year 2035. The plan will also embed sustainability across the curriculum of all programs and will support research with community partners to develop more than 50 deployable solutions to the climate crisis by 2030.

The college also announced plans to create a new school of programs, the School of Climate Action, and has received a donor gift to establish a new Research Chair, Skilled Trades for the Green Economy – the first position of its kind at a Canadian college.

The college’s sustainability team manages more than 30 programs and initiatives each year that are dedicated to embedding sustainable practices into operations and programming (and providing learning opportunities) across all Mohawk College campuses. As well, the opening of The Joyce Centre for Partnership & Innovation in September 2018 introduced students to one of the largest zero-carbon institutional buildings in Canada, with no net greenhouse gas emissions associated with the building’s operations.

The STARS program is the most widely recognized framework in the world for publicly reporting sustainability performance and has 1,200 participants in 52 countries.