Radboud University and Radboudumc are committed to a healthy environment. Our joint policy aims to create the right conditions for improving biodiversity across the entire campus.
In addition to improving the conditions for biodiversity, the objectives of our policy are:
The campus is being developed as a healthy urban ecosystem where nature and the built environment coexist in harmony. After all, a buzzard makes no distinction between a high rocky outcrop and a tall building. By creating the right conditions, various plant and animal species can return naturally.
For the period 2025–2030, this means:
At the heart of this theme lies the realisation that human health and the health of the natural world are inextricably linked. The campus is being developed as a healing environment for staff, students and patients, whereby healthcare can no longer be viewed in isolation from efforts to ensure a healthy living environment.
At present, activities relating to vitality and a healthy living environment are already being organised, but only on an ad hoc basis and with limited reach among staff and students.
For the period 2025–2030, this means:
The campus also has an ecological footprint beyond its boundaries. Emissions from heating, transport and food, as well as the use of materials, affect nature reserves and ecosystems elsewhere.
Policy has so far focused on biodiversity within the campus boundaries and not yet beyond them. Understanding of this is still in its infancy.
For the period 2025–2030, this means:
The Heijendaal Campus will become a ‘Living Lab’ where policy and implementation are the subject of scientific research, with every student gaining knowledge about biodiversity. As part of Radboud University’s new strategy, the Radboud Centre for Sustainability Challenges and the Radboud Green Office share the ambition to develop a structure in which students from different disciplines can work together on their dissertations or placements addressing issues raised by Radboud University, Radboudumc, the municipality of Nijmegen or other local businesses and/or civil society organisations.
For students, this provides academic skills such as collaborating in interdisciplinary groups, and gaining an insight into future career opportunities outside an ‘academic’ setting. By allowing students to gain experience through research placements in policy and implementation on our own campus – which in turn yields new insights and adjustments for policy and its associated implementation – collaboration is fostered within the organisation-research-education triangle.
For research, this means making greater use of the scientific knowledge already present on campus regarding biodiversity, the experience of nature, health effects and management. Through close coordination between the various departments in these research areas and the biodiversity working group, existing and upcoming plans and initiatives can be assessed and analysed for their effects on the campus. An integrated research programme can also be developed around the ‘healthy campus’, in which the aforementioned student placements can carry out this research.
Within this structure, the biodiversity project group will provide substantive issues for the implementation of the biodiversity policy and ideas for new initiatives.
For the period 2025–2030, this entails:
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are seventeen goals aimed at making the world a better place by 2030. They serve as a global compass for addressing challenges such as poverty, education and the climate crisis.
Radboud University’s biodiversity plans are in line with the following SDGs:
