McGill’s Sustainability Park is redefining what a university can be in the 21st century: an institution that not only generates knowledge, but actively co-creates solutions with society.
The challenge
Addressing urgent sustainability challenges – from climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water insecurity, to deepening social inequality and emerging threats to human health – requires a new way of working. The traditional university model with researchers working in disciplinary isolation, and knowledge and solutions moving slowly, can no longer serve a world defined by urgent, interconnected challenges.
We need a new approach, one that produces sound knowledge in close collaboration with non-academic partners, and solutions for people who need them today. We need a way to train big picture thinkers and move ideas quickly, from research to policy and practice.
This is not a retreat from academic excellence, but an evolution of purpose and a call to take on urgent, real-world problems with intellectual depth.
Our approach
To better serve society, McGill’s Sustainability Park is rethinking how a university works. Our approach is to align research, education and engagement around shared challenges, instead of disciplinary fields. To engage non-academic partners from the start as collaborators, rather than end‑users. We are working to build the institutional capacity it takes to move knowledge into action, all while upholding academic depth and independence.
Turning ideas into action
Engagement and entrepreneurship are not separate streams of activity at the Park. They guide our teaching and research, keeping our work connected to the communities it serves.
Engagement brings the world's most pressing sustainability challenges, and the people closest to them, into the Park. Entrepreneurship helps push solutions back out as ventures, policy interventions, community-led initiatives and institutional change. That exchange comes through:
- Supporting experimentation across disciplines, from new ventures to policy entrepreneurship and social innovation
- Building the infrastructure and support that lets ideas mature into action
- Expanding pathways for McGill’s research to reach the world, and for the world's challenges to reach McGill
Preparing students for complexity
Like research, the teaching and learning that takes place at the Park will be transformational. More than just transmitting technical knowledge, we are preparing students for:
- Collaboration
- Systems thinking
- Ethical engagement in complex environments
Working on real‑world challenges with non-academic partners, students will learn how to meaningfully and confidently lead in an increasingly complex world.
Faculty members at the Park will be encouraged and supported in re-imagining how their teaching practices can evolve in line with these ambitious goals.
Rethinking how research serves society
Sustainability challenges can’t be solved by technological advances alone. That’s why we are reorienting research towards society’s most pressing challenges, not by limiting our curiosity, but by strengthening pathways for rigorous scholarship to inform decisions, policy, and practice. This means:
- Engaging non-academic partners to co-design research and generate questions
- Encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to projects from the start
- Maintaining strong foundations in academic excellence
Our goal is to increase research output that is usable, relevant, and impactful, with findings that benefit the world today.
At the heart of this model are REACT Hubs – agile, interdisciplinary research clusters co‑designed with non-academic partners to:
- Solve real‑world sustainability challenges
- Integrate diverse knowledge systems and lived experience
- Co‑develop policies, practices and solutions with measurable impact