The project was inspired by the SATLE call theme 3 ‘Education for Sustainable Development’, the need to take stock of what UCD is currently doing to promote sustainability within campus, and the opportunity to raise awareness and encourage student/staff engagement with such initiatives. The power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to spatially gather and visualise data as well as to develop interactive online maps shaped the project idea further. Overall, these considerations contributed to the aim of the project: developing an interactive GIS-based online dashboard that brings together information on available campus infrastructure, activities and services, thus providing curricular innovation for sustainability and informed citizenship.

This project aimed to deliver a comprehensive, interactive and user-friendly online dashboard mapping UCD infrastructure, activities and initiatives that have a sustainability remit. The dashboard is intended to provide a robust teaching and learning platform for undergraduate and graduate students across a range of disciplines. Through the co-creation, updating and direct use of the tool, the project contributes to pathways for individual and group student agency in local sustainability.

This project was envisioned as a student-staff collaboration from the outset. The project proposal was co-developed with six undergraduate and postgraduate students. These students were contacted again when funding was awarded, and several of them confirmed their availability and willingness to remain engaged in the project. Additional students were contacted at project inception to replace those students who could no longer engage; the aim was to ensure a robust student team to support the development of the dashboard. Also, two other BSc Sustainability students contacted the project lead separately and offered to contribute voluntarily; they joined the project team, and their time was covered financially by funding external to this project. Ultimately, seven students from the BSc Sustainability, BSc Social Sciences and MSc Risk, Resilience and Sustainability programmes formed the core research team in this project, driving the data collection, curation and mapping tasks. The wider UCD student community was also given the opportunity to contribute to the project through a campus-wide survey. 815 students responded through this survey, and their feedback on the types of information they would find useful to be mapped for UCD, and key functionalities required of the dashboard shaped its development.

Results

There are two main deliverables from this project:

• A publicly available, accessible, interactive online dashboard for the main UCD campus structured around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The dashboard provides an inventory of sustainability across UCD and serves as an educational tool to support teaching and learning across a range of disciplines. It also informs the work of both the UCD Sustainability Unit and UCD Estates and Services. The dashboard can be directly accessed online through the new UCD Sustainability website: https://cms.ucd.ie/sustainability/resources/.
• A report presenting the findings of a campus-wide student and staff survey on mapping sustainability, containing feedback from 1,369 respondents. It contributes to better understanding sustainability information needs across UCD. The report can be found in the dashboard itself.

The project was formally launched to the UCD community on 15^th October and presented to the Sustainability Society on 13^th November 2024.

Short-term impacts of the dashboard include student and staff awareness-raising on sustainability infrastructure, activities and initiatives within UCD. Anecdotally, some students have already indicated that the dashboard has promoted engagement and inspired research ideas. Anticipated long-term impacts include enhanced teaching and learning through user-friendly, real-life and meaningful data and tools, and improved understanding of and engagement with sustainability infrastructure, activities and initiatives towards more sustainable behaviours within campus and beyond.

Resources

The dashboard includes a comprehensive inventory of UCD’s policies, strategies and web resources that have a sustainability remit. These have been compiled and organised according to their links to each SDG and can be found behind each SDG card on the dashboards landing page.

UCD sustainable infrastructure, activities and initiatives have been geographically mapped and curated to include relevant information (e.g. contact details for societies and institutes, energy ratings for buildings, location details for segregation bins and water fountains, etc.). These have also been organised and presented in a set of web maps, one for each SDG.

A video demonstrating how to use the dashboard has been developed and included in the dashboard, as well as an inventory of the datasets, mostly collected by the students working in the project.

The official launch of the dashboard took place on the 15^th of November 2024, and user testimonials are available in this video.