Marc Couture’s leadership in sustainability recognized with Clean16 award
The University of Toronto is at the forefront of sustainability and energy-management practices on North American campuses—with a long-term commitment to a sustainable future and initiatives headed by award-winning sustainability leaders.
Marc Couture, director, sustainability and energy management, has received both the Canada’s Clean 16 Award recipients and a Clean 50 honouree—both prestigious accolades in the Canadian sustainability field.
These awards recognize his leadership in the development of U of T’s climate positive campus strategy and the implementation of a tri-campus energy modelling & utility performance standard.
The campus climate positive strategy, led by Couture and Ron Saporta, acting vice-president, operations, details the university’s commitment and path to surpass emission–reduction goals by going beyond net zero—in other words, to offset more emissions than generated by the campus.
The catalyst for climate positivity
“The absence of a unified, cohesive and long-term sustainability commitment for the university became apparent when we assessed the university’s many existing sustainability policies, standards and plans,” says Couture.
The climate positive strategy weaves together and expands upon current initiatives.
These initiatives include the Utilities Master Plan, which outlines the renewal of campus utilities infrastructure; the Deep Retrofit Program and the 2019-2024 Low Carbon Action Plan, an existing five-year strategy to reduce carbon.
Another crucial component of the climate positive strategy is the Utility Performance Standard, which mandates high energy efficiency and low emissions for all new and renovated campus buildings.
This standard can be seen in action through the installation of more energy-efficient heating and cooling systems and has been applied to over 80 campus projects—so far. This has resulted in an incremental avoidance of over 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide since 2020—equivalent to the average annual emission of 870 passenger vehicles.
A giant leap forward
“After launching the climate positive strategy, our next step was to develop actionable projects to fulfill our commitment,” says Couture. “The first of these is Project Leap.”
Project Leap aims to cut campus carbon emissions in half by 2027—a giant leap towards becoming climate positive.
The primary focus of Project Leap is to electrify the heating systems in campus buildings, recover heat waste, and reduce fossil fuel consumption on the St. George campus.
Shaping the future
The university is committed to becoming climate positive by 2050.
“We are making efforts to turn our physical campus into a carbon sink,” says Couture. “This means that the campus is going beyond carbon neutral by offsetting more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases at a regional level.”
“The Clean 16 award is validation of the work that we are collectively carrying out at U of T to aggressively accelerate the decarbonization of our campus”, says Marc, adding that “the award also indicates that we are leaders in the decarbonization space.”
Following the early successes of Project Leap, the university is already looking ahead to further sustainability objectives, aiming to enhance energy efficiency in more campus buildings and continue the university’s accelerated decarbonization.