Campus climate action in the United States
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The “policy gap” created by U.S. federal inaction on climate change is being increasingly filled by local governments, businesses, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Such initiatives could learn and gain much from climate action on U.S. campuses. Campus climate action is important to overall climate change mitigation efforts for several reasons, including the following: 1) universities are often the size of small cities, so their emissions are significant; 2) many universities have made significant progress in reducing their own emissions; 3) university action can influence state and local climate policy; 4) universities play a major role in educating future leaders; and 5) universities offer ways to streamline efforts linking scattered climate action efforts. Interestingly, campus climate action in the United States appears to be much more active than that found in other countries, including European countries with stronger national climate policies than the United States.
Innovative and ambitious policymaking efforts in the United States on climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation are developing apace at regional, state, and local levels. These efforts include regional collaborations such as the 2001 Climate Change Action Plan of the Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers, and the multi-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). At the state level, currently more than half of the U.S. states can be characterized as actively involved in climate change, each with one or more policies that promise to significantly reduce their level of greenhouse gas emissions. At the local level, evidence that many citizens and public officials want more stringent climate change goals and policies can be found in the 60 towns and cities in the Northeast United States, in addition to others nationally and internationally, that have joined the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) and its Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) Campaign.
Yet state and local initiatives face challenges in their continued or expanded involvement on climate policy. At the regional and state level, a consortium of well-funded organizations hostile to any action by any government in the United States to reduce greenhouse gases has become increasingly vocal and visible. Such organizations include the Heartland Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It also appears increasingly likely that various interest groups and the executive branch of the federal government may join forces in bringing legal challenge against many state climate policy initiatives on constitutional grounds. Municipalities are also challenged in their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts aimed to reduce emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. Yet, by 2004, emissions had risen 27 percent from 1990 levels, due largely to commercial and industrial emissions rising by 70 percent over this period.
Given these challenges, campus climate action in the United States may serve as a model and ally for these local initiatives to achieve their emissions reduction goals. The full extent of U.S. campus climate action is unclear, leaving many questions unanswered about its effect on climate policy. Furthermore, while many universities have begun substantial activities to mitigate climate change and address this issue in their teaching, research, operations, and engagement with other institutions, a majority have not. Understanding what is happening on campuses nationwide would benefit overall mitigation efforts by demonstrating progress made in this important local sector. This article focuses on policy leaders among universities, detailing contemporary university climate action, its relevance to the larger climate arena, the reasons for campus participation in climate activities, and briefly discusses the future of campus action.
Contents
Campus Climate Action Matters
Universities are uniquely placed to affect America’s energy future. The higher education sector is a $317 billion industry that educates and employs millions of people, maintains thousands of buildings, and owns millions of acres of land. Because of their size, universities and colleges are often among the largest energy users and waste producers in their region. If every one of the 4,000 campuses in the United States used 100 percent clean energy, demand for renewable electricity in the United States would increase four-fold. With institutions such as Harvard University producing 320,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2005, municipalities such as Cambridge could benefit from increased collaboration on climate action with their local universities. U.S. universities educate approximately 14.5 million students each year, meaning these institutions have a grand opportunity to teach the principles and urgency of climate change to many future leaders and voters. Furthermore, the footprint of higher education is widening, with enrollment expected to increase by 23 percent between 2000 and 2013. Communication of climate change information, already underway at many universities, can play an essential role in not only educating our citizenry, but also mobilizing and sustaining citizen and civic action in response to climate change.
The City of Cambridge and other municipalities have found it difficult to achieve their reduction goals. In this regard, campus climate action could help. Universities function as their own communities, as they are often the size of towns or small cities. As the largest employer?as well as the largest energy user and waste producer?in their region, their emissions are significant. Thus, university efforts to mitigate climate change are often analogous to those at the local community level, and successful university climate actions can serve as models for the greater community. Campus climate action is also important as a model for other sectors interested in climate activities. To date, many regional and business efforts have focused on “smart growth” and “no-regrets” measures which seek to reduce both financial costs and greenhouse gas emissions. Campuses have been setting an example for their communities and the nation by implementing alternative energy, efficiency, and environmental sustainability projects on campus to demonstrate their feasibility and cost-effectiveness. These examples can be adopted by other sectors interested in “win-win” scenarios.
The success of campus climate actions on a variety of levels such as reduced emissions, increased air quality, or financial savings is also important in promoting a positive vision of the future resulting from such initiatives. The publication “The Death of Environmentalism” notes that a landmark social trigger, like Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, would not have been nearly as effective if titled “I Have a Nightmare.” Defining positive visions is necessary in order to effectively engage publics.
Universities serve as centers for the dissemination of knowledge, modeling effective policies, and inter-organizational collaboration. Numerous inter-university collaborations already exist. These consortia and alliances work on many university-specific issues such as multi-institutional agreements on diversity initiatives; they feature conferences and other opportunities for interpersonal discussion, which offer fora for shared information and potential partnerships on climate action. The effect of such interfacing on climate policy has already been demonstrated in the business sector. In many instances, participation in industry associations and institutional gatherings specific to climate change provides arenas within which expectations and understandings tend to converge. As a result, U.S.-based companies have moved toward accepting the need for some precautionary action. It is conceivable that universities could generate further interfacing through their own consortia and networks.
In short, few institutions in modern society are better equipped to catalyze the necessary transition to a sustainable world than universities. They have access to the leaders of tomorrow, they have buying and investment power today, and they are widely respected. What they do matters to the wider public. Lessons learned from universities could provide a significant contribution to efforts to address the global warming problem.
What’s in it for Universities?
Universities engage in climate action for a host of reasons, including financial and marketing interests. Many expect to achieve significant financial savings through initiatives such as energy efficiency programs, wind farms, and cogeneration power facilities. For example, at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), a new cogeneration plant is projected to save the university anywhere from $30 to $50 million over the next 20 years. Such investments also provide some measure of protection against volatile energy prices and occasional problems with the North American energy infrastructure. UNH, by producing much of its own heating and electricity needs, is likely better prepared to deal with an energy blackout similar to the August 2003 blackout in the Northeast. Matthew Simmons, a former advisor on Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, believes the 2003 blackout was a “fire drill for what the future could be”. Furthermore, by operationalizing climate change actions into their overall policies and values, universities can benefit from branding themselves as “sustainable.” This branding effort can lead to public relations opportunities that may increase media attention, the quality and quantity of student enrollment, and alumni support.
Climate actions are also viewed by universities as teaching tools. The University of Massachusetts’ Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (RERL), for example, exists to promote education and research in renewable energy technologies. RERL’s work on wind turbines has encouraged many engineers to go into careers in renewable energy; many of the engineers had come to the lab after working for the oil and gas industry. Program alumni populate the renewable energy field, working in government (National Wind Technology Center), manufacturing (the wind division of GE Energy), and consulting (Global Energy Concepts) among many other sectors.
Furthermore, by producing future policy entrepreneurs, universities may enjoy a closer relationship with state politicians, potentially leading to increased state funding and access to policymaking. The Energy and Resources Group, a multidisciplinary graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, has produced many alumni well-suited for employment in state and national programs dealing with climate change. A number of these graduates, for example, have gone on to staff the California Energy Commission Office. States’ investments in their universities’ climate efforts can reap the benefits of well-educated state policy entrepreneurs, who then further develop, enhance, and influence state climate policy. Such influence may be important to increasing state climate activities.
Universities and their students may also benefit from climate action on a deeper level. By providing tangible examples of climate mitigation activities, such as CO2 reduction policies and cogeneration plants, universities “could channel energy of the human kind.” Student engagement is valued and sought after by university leaders. According to one representative from the University of Massachusetts, “Once we harness students’ enthusiasm, we could get some exciting things done here.”
What’s Happening on Campus?
Examples of campus climate initiatives are organized here within the so called “CORE” (Curriculum, Operations, Research, and Engagement) framework. Each of the CORE framework’s four components is briefly discussed below, while Table 1 contains short descriptions of exemplary programs across North America.
Curriculum: What Is Taught
Institutions of higher education teach professional and intellectual skills. In doing so, universities can both teach and demonstrate environmental and stewardship principles by taking action to understand and reduce the environmental impacts that result from their own activities.
Many universities are seeking to incorporate ecological literacy, energy conservation and efficiency, and sustainability into course curricula. For example, Oberlin College has developed courses based on sustainable design principles, enabling students to interact with climate issues on more personal levels. These principles can, in theory, be carried into the decisions and values of their post-university lives and careers, all of which serves to demonstrate the complex and abstract nature of the effects of climate change. Given that the impacts of climate change are more often visible in areas far from the emissions release point, such principles illustrate their effects to these students.
Sustainability initiatives are also being incorporated into the curriculum at leading business schools in order to make future business leaders more aware and responsible: “The people in business today who are trying to grapple with these issues have business degrees that didn’t equip them to understand what’s really going on,” argues Rick Bunch, executive director of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, a school on Bainbridge Island in Washington that offers an MBA and a certificate in sustainable business.
Universities also educate students through informal means. At Swarthmore College, a wall of gauges tells students how much energy that a particular building is consuming. Since students learn from everything around them, such informal education is highly important in aiding their understanding of anthropogenic contributions to climate change. Similar education is occurring at Berea College in Kentucky, where housing complexes incorporate many of the principles of environmentally sustainable construction and operation. Residents noted a subsequent increased awareness of wasted resources and energy usage.
Operations: How the University Is Run
Many universities are increasingly engaging in more sustainable operations for financial reasons, with comprehensive projects offering a payback in three to five years. Furthermore, smaller-scale efforts such as improving the efficiency of lighting, labs, and vehicles can have payback periods of as little as three months. Such efforts serve as important models for other sectors interested in climate change activities, as they demonstrate “win-win” and no-regrets measures currently favored within regional, state, and local sectors.
More than 200 colleges purchase electricity or heat from renewable-energy sources, such as commercial wind farms, or have installed their own on-site cogeneration plants that allow them to recover heat as a byproduct of other power generation. For example, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) cogeneration plant, which provides 50 percent of the university’s power needs, has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent. The plant is projected to pay for itself in as little as four years, at which time operating costs will be significantly less than purchasing energy from the local utility grid. As a result of this investment, UNH will reap financial and environmental benefits as well as positive media attention from local and regional news outlets.
Campus operations also help to make renewable-energy sources such as wind power more affordable. Students at the University of Oregon in Eugene voted heavily in favor of paying up to $2 per year per student for sustainability projects such as wind power. The money produced by the fee gives more financial support for wind power in general, and leads to a greater likelihood that wind power will become affordable and more widely used.
Research: What’s Studied in Depth
Universities are among the leading institutions for climate research and have responded to the complex and interrelated nature of climate change by establishing interdisciplinary research institutes. The work of these research centers is crucial to the continued understanding and problem-solving of climate change. Research institutes play a key role in forming scientific knowledge about climate change. UNH’s multidisciplinary Climate Change Research Center, for example, is dedicated to the retrieval and interpretation of global change records that document climate change.
Policy is also a major focus of many climate research institutes. The Decision Center for a Desert City at Arizona State University engages scientists and decision makers in studying new methods to better understand how to reduce the region’s vulnerability to climate uncertainty. Similarly, at Carnegie Mellon University’s Climate Decision Making Center, researchers focus on current limits of making accurate predictions of climate change and its impacts, including the costs and the implications of climate change policy decisions.
University-based research institutes also play a key role in forming energy solutions: Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project conducts fundamental research on technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Engagement: How the University Interacts with Others
Engagement is the level of work and cooperation the university fosters with external institutions and communities. For example, an industry-university collaboration between Duke Energy and Duke University, funded by a $2.5 million pledge from Duke Energy, focuses on assessing the environmental and economic costs and benefits of federal policy options for addressing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Another example of engagement is The Campus Climate Challenge, a project of 30 leading environmental and social-justice organizations throughout the United States and Canada. It coordinates efforts and shares ideas among its members in order to produce aggregate outcomes greater than what any of the participating organizations could achieve independently. This initiative leverages the unique attributes of the partner organizations to empower youth organizers and bring highly-specialized experience to the entire campus climate movement.
Engagement at this level can yield increased funding for university research and opportunities for increased visibility. This engagement, in turn, may result in positive attention from lawmakers (who determine public school budgets) and other state officials. Furthermore, information-sharing gives a boost to each institution through the sharing of shared ideas and resources, the linking of allies, and bringing like-minded people together for conferences and workshops.
| Table 1: Campus Climate Action Examples | |
|---|---|
| Curriculum |
A project setting standards for sustainability was recently unveiled at Oberlin College. The 260 students who were involved in research at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies have graduated with an understanding of what it takes to create a sustainable building: one that generates more electricity than it uses, discharges no contaminated water, uses no toxic materials, and is surrounded by landscape that promotes biological diversity. Says David Orr, the Oberlin professor whose class of 25 students first set the high standards, “Education that builds on solving real problems requires... [overcoming] the outmoded idea that learning occurs exclusively in classrooms, laboratories, and libraries.” |
| Operations |
The University of New Hampshire’s cogeneration plant will allow UNH to generate 75 percent of its own electrical and thermal power, with the possibility of someday being able to handle 100 percent of the load. This will result in a 45 percent reduction in emissions, the equivalent of eliminating 13,000 automobile round trips in and out of campus per day. The cogenerator will directly contribute to the reduction of many air pollutants, including a 20 percent reduction in the sulfur content of acid rain. Because of the plant, UNH is projecting it will save $30-$50 million dollars over the next 20 years. |
| Research |
The Decision Center for a Desert City at Arizona State University seeks to engage scientists and decision makers in studying new methods to better understand how to make decisions that reduce the region’s vulnerability to climate uncertainty. |
| Engagement | Clean Air-Cool Planet’s on-line Campus Climate Action Toolkit (CCAT) aims to make resources available to anyone interested in making their institution more “climate friendly.” The CCAT is intended to: 1) model what an actual campus climate action plan might look like; and 2) help people understand, plan, and implement the CCAP’s various elements. The Campus Climate Challenge is a coalition of 30 leading environmental and social justice organizations that aims to organize college campuses and high schools across the United States and Canada to achieve 100% clean energy policies at their schools. The Challenge hopes to achieve this by coordinating efforts and sharing ideas, in hopes that this can produce aggregate outcomes greater than what any of the participating organizations could achieve independently. Drafted in 1990 at an international conference in Talloires, France, the Talloires Declaration is the first official statement made by university administrators of a commitment to environmental sustainability in higher education. It is a ten-point action plan for incorporating sustainability and environmental literacy in teaching, research, operations, and outreach at colleges and universities. More than 300 university presidents and chancellors in more than 40 countries have signed the document. |
Taking Stock of Campus Climate Action
One should not overstate climate action on North American campuses; relatively few have taken serious, concrete steps to move toward a cleaner energy future. Of the approximately 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, research indicates that only 80 to 200 purchase clean energy, and most of these have implemented but small-scale clean-energy projects. Furthermore, only a handful of campuses have developed comprehensive plans with targets and timetables for substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving energy independence.
Also, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of campus climate action. While numerous campus climate activities do exist, there is no single standard available for measuring these activities or their overall impact upon the larger climate arena. It is difficult to obtain consistent data, such as the number of universities purchasing clean energy or the number engaged in “greening” their curriculum. The Talloires Declaration and the Campus Climate Action are two of the leading consortia encompassing multiple institutions of higher education under a single agreement (see Table 1), yet only 182 U.S. universities?not even five percent?have signed onto Talloires. More systematic information about what entices university leaders to sign onto such pledges and programs and about impediments to doing so would increase our understanding of campus climate action.
Many institutions have the “will” but not necessarily the “way” to become leaders in climate change action. University climate change goals need more support. Capital-intensive initiatives such as large wind turbines can cost several million dollars; while these large-scale projects can save money in the long run, start-up costs may prove prohibitive to many otherwise interested institutions. It is also important to gain a better understanding of the political constraints such “willing” universities may be facing. For example, the University of Massachusetts attempted to construct a cogeneration plant more than 20 years ago, but the project was delayed because the local power utility, which did not want to lose the university as a customer, used its influence in the state legislature to oppose the plant. Such scenarios play out across the country, impeding climate change actions.
Campus climate action can have an important impact on sustainable development efforts both at home and abroad. Many large-scale initiatives such as the UN Millennium Project call for increased attention to be paid to local action. As mentioned earlier, universities are similar to local communities in many ways, and are demonstrating strong climate leadership and modeling; many lessons can be learned from campus climate action and applied to other sectors, including local government and business.
Although opponents of climate change action attempt to undermine policy efforts, many universities are playing a major role in helping their students understand the principles of climate change, as well as individual actions each may take. Encouraging individual efforts is important in the current political environment in which many students (and others as well) feel disenfranchised, and communicators face the tremendous challenge of demonstrating that those who should be tackling the problem are not doing so sufficiently.
Campus actions also lead to benefits in areas not limited strictly to climate change issues, such as improved air quality. This is important, since climate change action can benefit from links to other social issues, including those of an economic and security nature. Many climate change activities are directly related to efforts to use more renewable energy?and less energy overall. If linking issues at the university level can be achieved, other sectors and actors can adopt lessons learned and increase visibility and relevance on climate change in the larger society.
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