https://sustainability.lehigh.edu/sites/sustainability.lehigh.edu/files/accessible_LSPLAN_Final_0.pdf

Blog #4

1. Review the six focus areas in the Sustainability Strategic Plan 2030. Identify and describe in detail how your project aligns with one or more of the focus areas. Be sure to think outside of the box. Each project aligns with more than one focus area, although it might not be immediately obvious.
2. Identify the key Lehigh University-based and external stakeholders for your project. For each stakeholder:

• Describe what their interest in your project might be.
• What resources might they provide?
• How does your work further their goals?
• How might you engage with them?

1.  The six focus areas in the Sustainability Strategic Plan are climate action, educational experience, campus operations, culture & engagement, health & wellness, and focus leadership. While the Water & Energy Dashboard can definitely contribute to all of these, it aligns the most with educational experience and campus operations. The Water & Energy Dashboard aligns heavily with the educational experience of all of Lehigh University because it allows the unique opportunity for users to learn about energy consumption and units of energy consumption with our equivalencies feature. Our dashboard will make learning about sustainability and energy fun, encouraging education across campus. Additionally, it heavily affects campus operations because normally the entire campus has no idea how much energy each building is utilizing, but with successful implementation of our public dashboard, buildings will be held accountable for their energy usage and stakeholders will be informed of it for the first time.
2. External stakeholders are campuses nationwide. With UC Davis being the only college with a sustainability dashboard as of now, Lehigh can also be a trailblazer for energy consumption transparency for college campuses, which is very important because dashboards like these can hold colleges accountable to their big sustainability goals. Likewise, Lehigh’s Office of Sustainability can be held accountable through this dashboard and it will inform students, families, etc. of their progress. Internal stakeholders can be students who want to track the energy usages of their buildings, campus operations directors, and maintenance-people who can use this to examine and resolve energy spikes.