Mark Kauw

Name, position and organisation

My name is Mark Kauw and I have been working as a Sustainability project manager at Utrecht University’s Sustainability program for two years now. I originally studied geography and spent the first couple of years working in spatial planning. Sustainability is a theme I am increasingly concerned with. For example, I am vegetarian and no longer travel by plane. A few years ago, I decided that I would also like to dedicate my work to sustainability. At that time, I started working for ‘the hidden impact’ project. This is a book and a movement in which we also provide training, lectures and workshops. The project is about the concept that our collective behaviour has much more of an impact on the planet than we think. People do think about the extra CO₂ emissions caused by driving, for example, but not so much about the impact of the production of the car. Or if you eat a piece of meat, most people don’t think about deforestation and the water use in the Amazon. The fact that you can make a big impact on the environment with relatively small decisions is a train of thought that I still apply in my current job at the Sustainability program.

The Sustainability program was set up a few years ago to help make Utrecht University more sustainable. As a project manager, I get to carry out projects that contribute to this. Education, research and operational management are the two areas involved. So how do you connect them? We want to ensure that the Utrecht University as a whole contributes to sustainable transitions.

What does Utrecht Science Park mean to you?

Utrecht Science Park plays an important role in Utrecht University’s sustainability goals. The Sustainability program regards the area as a living lab. Utrecht University occupies a unique position: it is a public and independent institution that owns a total of 300 hectares of land. This creates opportunities and a kind of moral obligation to implement the sustainability transitions in your own area first: ‘practise what you teach’.

At the university, there is a great deal of teaching and research related to biodiversity, climate change and health. All these themes are also Sustainable Development Goals. Utrecht Science Park gives us the opportunity to test things and carry out experiments on a small scale, but in real life. So this is what we mean by a living lab: we invite our own students and researchers to use the area as a testing ground. If certain experiments succeed on a small scale, you can scale them up afterwards. You can also invite partners in the area and people from the city or region to participate and experience on a small scale what a sustainable world might look like in the future.

One example is Wilfried van Sark, a professor who specialises in solar panels, among other things. He has a number of test sites on roofs at Utrecht University, where he conducts research with students into the performance of solar panels and the effects of weather. The results of the research are then integrated directly into the solar panel system.

What is the impact of Utrecht Science Park on society? And what is your role in this?

Ultimately, as a university, you want to be able to implement the results of the various studies in everyday life, in mainstream society. This is the social impact you can have with the living lab as Utrecht University and Utrecht Science Park. For instance, Wilfried van Sark is also involved in projects at the Utrecht Sustainability Institute (USI). For example, a flat in Overvecht has now been renovated with the support of USI and made energy-neutral with solar panels on the roof. So this is the next step in the living lab project. You can start small, with just students and researchers. The next step is to bring in social partners. Then you can scale it up still further.

In my opinion, universities in general have an important contribution to make in the transition to a sustainable society. I regard myself as a small cog in the system. Ultimately, it’s about what the university does as a whole. However, at the Sustainability programme, we want to encourage and accelerate the process.

What is your personal dream with regard to your role? What would you like to achieve in the next five or ten years?

I have no concrete idea where I see myself in five or ten years. What currently drives me is the fact that through my work I can contribute to the transition to a sustainable world. Hopefully, this will still motivate me five or ten years from now. I don’t yet know what form this will take.

With regard to the Sustainability program and Utrecht University, I hope that by 2030 we will have been able to put the living lab concept into practice even more. And that we can connect science to education and business in all kinds of ways. I hope Utrecht University will play an exemplary role in this light. So that if people want to know something about the combination of solar panels and biodiversity, for example, they can come and see our test site. I also hope that Utrecht University’s 5000 graduates will go out into the world with enough knowledge to become sustainable leaders. That they will determine the new course of large companies and launch new start-ups that will help to create a sustainable world. I really believe that this is by far the biggest impact we can have: for our students to help shape a new sustainable world.

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