Shell Center Mission, Objectives & Strategies
Rice University and Shell Oil Company launched the Shell Center for Sustainability in 2002. The Center is affiliated with the School of Social Sciences and collaborates with Rice's Environmental & Energy Systems Institute as well as with other schools and organizations within the Rice campus forging interdiscilplinary partnerships.
The Center's mission is to create an interdisciplinary program of research, outreach, and education to address actions that can be taken to ensure the sustainable development of living standards, interpreted broadly, to encompass all factors affecting the quality of life, including environmental resources.
Our objectives are to:
1. Stimulate an interdisciplinary program of research to identify threats to sustainable development and ways to address them through scientific, technological, social and political and institutional innovations.
2. Research and publicize market-based mechanisms, such as marketable permits that can enhance sustainability by ensuring that private sector decisions about resource use take account of all costs including the costs of environmental degradation.
3. Provide society with broadly educated experts to inform decision-makers about possible threats to the sustainable development of living standards and how those threats might be addressed.
4. Identify threats to the sustainable development of the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area, and solutions to those threats that could then be used as examples to be applied elsewhere. The intention is not to limit the focus of the Center to local problems and solutions. Rather, such problems are likely to be more familiar to Rice faculty, as well as being easier and less expensive to research, and are likely to be more effective as vehicles for communicating the work of the Center to the local community.
5. Assist in adding new content to courses to educate a new generation of decision-makers to incorporate sustainability concepts into policies, business plans, designs, and processes.
6. Enhance the exchange of information by serving as an independent forum for open discussion and constructive dialogue on sustainable development issues and policies.
7. Develop linkages with other institutions and non-government organizations concerned with the issue of sustainable development.
8. Support young scholars from around the world to pursue graduate study and research on sustainability issues.
9. Support outstanding visiting scholars to Rice University working on the issue of sustainable development.
Our strategy is to create an institution focused on sustainability and having a lasting beneficial impact on society.
