Measuring Progress: Developing Standard Campus Performance Metrics

While there are numerous successful campus ecology programs across the nation focusing upon implementation strategies and program coordination, such as energy conservation initiatives or recycling and waste minimization projects, there are fewer projects focused strictly on measuring environmental performance. The University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems (CSS), one of a handful of such programs, is working to advance these efforts by developing metrics to quantify and assess our environmental performance. The concept is simply, “what gets measured gets managed and what gets managed can be improved.”