UC Berkeley Living Labs (LL) Program Development Pilot

MBA Students touring Chou Hall

The Living Lab will create a thriving ecosystem of climate-focused projects that use campus as a testbed for research and support experiential education opportunities for students.

As the number one public university in the country, UC Berkeley has long been a testbed for campus-facing research and experiential learning projects.  Despite this successful history, however, such projects have often been ad-hoc, without central programmatic infrastructure to support their continuation or to connect them to higher-level campus priorities. The Living Lab Program Pilot will seek to address these issues by building a formalized, strategic program focused on achieving UC Berkeley’s fossil-free goals, particularly the Berkeley Clean Energy Campus (BCEC) transition and the Climate Action Plan.

The Living Lab Program will break down institutional siloes by facilitating connections between faculty and operational staff; developing or supporting project calls that serve both campus and researchers’ priorities; actively engaging and managing student fellows and participants; and communicating widely about the program to build buy-in and generate a consistent flow of projects in future years. 

UC Berkeley Campus Sustainability Plan and the Living Lab:

The Living Lab Program serves as the vital bridge between the aspirational targets of the Climate Sustainability Plan (CSP) and the tangible implementation required to achieve them.

  • Energy and decarbonization strategies
  • Transportation
  • Food Systems
  • Waste and Circular Economy
  • Climate Resilience and Risk
  • Built Environment
  • Bio Diversity

Climate Justice is integral to our Living Lab Program 

In alignment with UC Berkeley’s core mission of research and public service, the Living Lab Pilot Program embraces the intersectionality of sustainability and Environmental Justice. In partnership with the Student Environmental Resource Center (SERC), the Living Lab Program will develop comprehensive, justice-centered approaches to decarbonization, ensuring that our transition to a fossil-free campus dismantles social disparities and fosters a resilient environment for all students, faculty, and staff.

Thank you to the Global Climate Leadership Council

The Living Lab Program Pilot is generously supported by a grant from the Global Climate Leadership Council at the University of California Office of the President. 

Background

The Pathways to a Fossil Free UC Task Force (“Task Force”) identified that approaching campus decarbonization through a “campus as a living laboratory” (“living lab”) lens will be essential to achieving UC’s climate action goals. The Task Force conducted a sprint on fossil free living labs that found that all UC campuses have incorporated campus decarbonization into courses, research demonstrations, co-curricular programming and more. However, the sprint also found that such projects have been ad hoc and one-off, meaning that each project must start from scratch, thus missing the opportunity to collectively and strategically advance climate education, research, co-curricular programming, and operational practices. Many of UC’s peer universities have filled this gap and need with a formal living lab program and staffing to support it. UC Berkeley’s Living Lab Program Development Pilot project will leverage living lab best practices from peer universities, pilot living lab program development for other UC campuses to learn from and potentially emulate, and represent UC in the University Climate Change Coalition’s new Living Lab Community of Practice.