The solar arrays on Furman University’s campus reduce the need to purchase electricity and also serve as learning laboratories. This fall, students will install a small solar array on campus as a class project.
Richard Cook spends much of his time listening to college and university presidents ask questions about sustainability. Can we afford this? What if my trustees balk? Is global climate change exaggerated? Is carbon neutrality even possible? Cook responds with patience and knowledge about the impact of harmful greenhouse gases, about clean energy, and about why it makes fiscal sense to go green. “I liken it to the moonshot,” says the former president of Allegheny College (Pa.). “When you have lofty goals and you mean it, and you put great talent and resources toward it, you make great progress.”
Cook is an Education for Sustainability Fellow for Second Nature, the Boston nonprofit that acts as the leading support organization for the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, the largest movement in American society to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and achieve climate neutrality. His job is, in part, to support current participants in the Presidents’ Climate Commitment and encourage others to sign.
Given that the recession began just months after the Commitment launched in 2007, it would not be surprising if fewer institutions signed on or current participants stepped back. But that’s not the case—the goal of going green (or getting greener) is surviving and thriving on campus. As of this spring, 677 schools, representing nearly 6 million students and about a third of the higher education student population in the United States, signed the commitment. “We were hoping by the end of 2010 to reach about 40 percent of the student population, and we’re right on track to meet that,” says Anthony Cortese, co-director of the Presidents’ Climate Commitment and president of Second Nature.
To sign on, institutions agree to:
• conduct at least one campus greenhouse gas inventory
• create a comprehensive Climate Action Plan
• implement at least two of seven shorter-term actions for reducing their carbon footprint.
All of the documents are posted online. “We’re accountable to each other,” says James Buizer, science policy advisor to Arizona State University president Michael Crow, a charter signatory. “The teeth is deadlines, and we’re being quite open and transparent on the web. Where it’s flexible is that each university can decide what their target date [for reaching climate neutrality] is.”
Fulfillment of the Commitment’s reporting requirements provides a lens for assessing its success. Of the 388 institutions that signed on in 2007, the inaugural year, about 89 percent have conducted and submitted greenhouse gas inventories, says Toni Nelson, the ACUPCC program director at Second Nature. About two-thirds of the first cohort have either submitted a Climate Action Plan or are working to submit one this spring. Since the initiative began collecting dues from signatories, 66 percent have paid up—noteworthy given that the dues are voluntary. (The amount varies, with the average institution owing $1,865.)
Only about 30 schools were notified this past spring that they could be removed from the initiative due to their failure to submit required reports—of those, about 15 have since made movement to remain in good standing, says Nelson. Overall, the initiative has continued to move in the right direction. “During my professional lifetime, we’ve had six economic downturns, and in every one before this one the first thing that many people wanted to relax was environmental standards, assuming they were too expensive,” says Cortese. “This time around, with the worst economic situation we’ve had since the Great Depression, people are saying just the opposite—the best way to get the economy going again is to pursue the most environmentally responsible way.”
'When you rally people around something like sustainability or energy savings, people come out of the woodwork because it's helping to save their place.' -James Buizer, Arizona State University
Here’s what institutions that have signed the Commitment are doing to continue making progress on their promises—actions that can help any higher ed institution.
Gather In
Arizona State’s community can go places—and be green—via light rail.
In his conversations with college and university leaders, Cook urges them to discuss sustainability at the highest levels of the institution. “These kinds of things need to be part of the strategic direction of a college or university, at the board level,” Cook says. “It needs to be an institution-wide commitment.” That helps when challenges or doubts arise, and when presidents leave. “Institutions that have had those conversations in advance find it quite easy to sign the Commitment,” says Cook. “Those who don’t feel it’s a unilateral act on the part of the president.”
