Sustainability Reporting Program

URL: http://www.sustreport.org

Canada’s sustainability report and York’s sustainability centre join forces

December 12, 2001—The Sustainability Reporting Program (SRP) Canada’s Internet-based sustainability report is joining forces with one of the country’s major centres of expertise on sustainable development.

On Friday, the SRP will affiliate with the York Centre for Applied Sustainability (YCAS), York University’s innovative research organization. The result will be a strengthened reporting system that will better inform Canadians on critical sustainability issues and trends that shape our common future.

The agreement formalizes long-standing ties. The SRP was created in 1998 to provide Canada with its first online sustainability report. This web-based report, http://www.sustreport.org, was started with the assistance of YCAS.

The YCAS mission is “to promote the application of the principles and practices of sustainability throughout society including in the public sector, the private sector, the civil sector, and in education.” The Centre is working to make the concept of sustainability a reality in the educational sector, communities, government, business, and people's everyday lives. When the Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy was disbanded in 1995, the Ontario Government bequeathed York University with the Round Table’s legacy, and YCAS has attempted to carry that legacy forward.

YCAS has worked in the areas of sustainability education, sustainable transportation, sustainable communities, voluntary measures, economic instruments, sustainability monitoring, and sustainability policy in Canada and internationally. YCAS has a university-wide mandate and has particularly close links with the Faculties of Environmental Studies, (in which it is administratively located) Arts, Education, Pure and Applied Science, and the Schulich School of Business (especially the Haub program on business and the environment.)

The SRP is an independent report supported by government, industry, the non-government and foundation sectors and by academe. Its steering and advisory committed bring knowledge from major sectors that affect sustainability, and from centres of expertise in sustainability information. At SRP we look forward to having a stronger organization as a result of the affiliation.

YCAS Director David Bell and SRP founder Michael Keating said this affiliation will combine the broad skills in sustainability knowledge found at the university with the communications skills of the reporting centre. The result will be an increased flow of sustainability information at a time when Canadians face critical decisions on subjects such as energy and transportation use, how to use natural resources and how to shape our growing and sprawling cities.

This is also a time in which Canada is preparing to go to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development to review what has been done to meet the promises of the Earth Summit of a decade ago.