Sustainability education becomes meaningful when students can identify a problem on their own campus, change an everyday habit and see the result, Prof (Dr) Kawal Gill said at the 5th Yuva Sustainability Conference, held online on 12 August 2026 to mark International Youth Day 2026. The conference, themed ‘Mainstreaming Sustainability in the Education Ecosystem’, was organised by Voices of Bharat: Yuva for Sustainability, an initiative of Sustainability Karma.
Gill, Principal of Sri Guru Gobind Singh College of Commerce, University of Delhi, argued that responsibility for sustainability cannot be confined to environmental science students or to a separate part of the curriculum. Commerce, humanities and other disciplines must participate because campus life itself creates daily choices about food, electricity, mobility, waste and the use of shared space.
Her message was practical: begin at the micro level. Ask students to look closely at their surroundings, identify where resources are being wasted and take charge of solutions that are within reach. Once those changes become visible and repeatable, institutions can exchange their best practices with other campuses and carry the learning into nearby communities.
“First, we have to start from our own campus,” Gill said. “Let the students take charge. Let the students be engaged.” The sequence matters because participation turns sustainability from an instruction delivered by adults into a responsibility understood through action.
A Little Book of Green Nudges becomes a campus experiment
Gill traced the college’s behavioural work to 2020, when classes had shifted online during the COVID-19 pandemic. She encountered the United Nations Environment Programme’s Little Book of Green Nudges, an initiative designed to help students make modest changes in behaviour that collectively support sustainability. The college ran a Green Nudges initiative for about two years and used ordinary campus situations as the starting point.
Food waste in the canteen provided one of the clearest examples. Instead of beginning with a broad lecture on responsible consumption, students were encouraged to choose smaller or moderate portions so that food taken on a plate would actually be eaten. The intervention was simple, but it made the connection between personal choice, institutional waste and resource use immediate.
That is the value of a green nudge: it lowers the distance between knowing and doing. A student may already agree that food should not be wasted, yet portion size, convenience and routine can still produce waste. Redesigning the choice makes the sustainable action easier to practise repeatedly, allowing behaviour to change without waiting for a large campaign or a new regulation.
From awareness to action: a five-step campus cycle
Taken together, Gill’s examples point to a five-step campus action cycle. It is not a formal model named in her address, but an editorial synthesis of the method she described: observe the campus, nudge everyday choices, improve systems, measure environmental outcomes and share learning beyond the institution. Each step gives students a different kind of responsibility.
1. Observe: See the campus before trying to solve the world
Gill said students were first asked to examine their own environment and identify the issues that needed remedies. This turns the campus into a field site. Lights left on in empty rooms, avoidable canteen waste, inefficient travel and unmanaged waste streams are no longer background details; they become evidence that students can document, discuss and act upon.
Observation also prevents sustainability education from becoming abstract. The problem is located in a place students know, and the people affected by it are classmates, teachers and staff. A campus audit therefore develops attention as well as knowledge: students learn to notice how infrastructure and behaviour interact.
2. Nudge: Make the better choice easier to repeat
Energy use offered a second set of behavioural changes. Gill described encouraging students to switch off fans and lights when leaving a room and to use only the number of tube lights actually required. Where daylight was available, there was little reason to keep every artificial light on. Repetition could turn these small decisions into a shared campus norm.
The approach does not depend on guilt. It asks what specific action can be taken at the moment a resource is being used. Whether the issue is food, electricity or transport, a nudge translates a large environmental concern into a manageable decision and makes responsibility visible in everyday routines.
3. Improve systems: Align behaviour with infrastructure
Behavioural advice has limits when a building or service works against it. Gill described how classroom windows had been covered with dark sheets to reduce heat, making rooms dependent on bright artificial lighting. The college later removed those coverings and used natural light, while rooftop solar panels helped meet energy requirements. The example shows why student behaviour and institutional infrastructure must be improved together.
Mobility created another opportunity. Students were encouraged to think about apps for sharing vehicles or pooling rides with others travelling from the same direction. Some also shifted from short rickshaw journeys to bicycles, supported by a bicycle station on campus. The lesson was not simply to tell students to travel sustainably, but to make shared and low-carbon choices more practical.
4. Measure: Connect green cover, temperature and biodiversity
Gill also led a campus sustainability project that assessed green cover at her college and other University of Delhi institutions using remote sensing. The analysis linked larger green areas with lower local temperatures. In practical terms, that relationship can reduce dependence on air conditioning while strengthening biodiversity and improving the quality of the campus environment.
Measurement gives students a way to test whether a sustainability intervention is working. Tree cover, surface temperature, energy demand, waste volumes and transport patterns can all become research questions. A campus then functions as a living laboratory in which environmental benefits are demonstrated rather than assumed.
Gill said the college also maintains a biodiversity area, segregates waste and is working towards zero-waste practices through several projects. These initiatives become educationally stronger when students can monitor them over time, compare results and identify where the institution still falls short.
5. Share: Carry campus learning into communities
The final step is collaboration. Gill urged campuses to share practices with one another rather than work in isolation. One institution may offer a successful model for energy management while another has stronger methods for biodiversity, transport or waste. Exchanging evidence allows colleges to learn faster and adapt ideas to their own conditions.
The same outward movement connects campus learning with society. Gill said the college has adopted five villages where students support community work, including waste segregation, financial literacy and digital literacy. Sustainability becomes part of this engagement when students listen to local needs and translate campus experience into useful, context-sensitive action.
Recognition matters, but culture is the real outcome
During the session, Gill said she had just received an email from the University of Delhi Registrar informing the college that it was among the university’s top 10 green and clean colleges. She presented the recognition as evidence of sustained effort: environmental performance improves when an institution puts energy, vision and student participation behind its commitments.
Rankings and recognition can motivate institutions, but Gill’s examples suggest that the deeper achievement is cultural. Students begin to associate sustainability with the way a canteen serves food, a classroom uses light, a campus plans mobility and a college relates to surrounding communities. Environmental responsibility becomes part of how the institution operates rather than an event observed once a year.
“If I improve my home, if I improve my college, I am also contributing to society at large,” Gill said. Her conclusion placed the campus between the individual and the wider world: small enough for students to influence, but connected enough for those changes to matter beyond its gates.