Remember the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment? It may have been a while since you heard anything about that campaign, which was the focus of some impassioned activism among students and sustainability advocates a few years ago. Given the relative quiet now, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a dead issue.
Well, it’s not—on most campuses, at least. For the 677 institutions that joined the commitment, the time in the limelight is over. Most are now in a phase that might be best described as a slog: the tough work of figuring out how to make their energy-sucking, emissions-spewing campuses “climate neutral.” For most of the colleges, that has meant formulating plans that stretch decades into the future.
This summer, supporters of the commitment will celebrate its fifth anniversary, marking the occasion by showing what the campaign has done both to reduce emissions and to help colleges in tough financial times, by spurring projects that help save energy bills or even draw grant money.
Participating institutions set their own goals, and their progress is tracked on a Web site maintained by Second Nature, an environmental organization. Here and there, the site shows an institution late with its report or “action plan"—steps in the commitment’s process—but most institutions are keeping up.
However, since the recession began in 2008, meeting the terms of the climate commitment has been too much of a burden for a small number of institutions. Administrators of the ACUPCC, as it’s known, have delisted 27 colleges so far, and a handful of others contacted by The Chronicle say they don’t have the resources to continue.
Fitchburg State University, which has not met a deadline in the commitment since 2009, is one. The institution has chosen “to allocate our limited resources to efforts on the ground that will have a direct environmental impact,” a spokesman for the university, wrote in an e-mail. “We remain committed to a sustainable future with our own climate action plan and continue to work toward benchmarks set by the state of Massachusetts.”
Lee College, a community college in Texas, is another. Steve Evans, vice president for finance and administration, says it does not have the staff or the money to keep up with the commitment’s reporting requirements, which he estimates as costing about $50,000 a year. However, he points out, Lee College recently completed $12-million in energy-efficiency projects. (They were financed through energy-services companies, which front money for projects like lighting and boiler replacements and are paid back through the college’s utility savings.)
Toni Nelson, who directs the climate-commitment activities for Second Nature, says that some signatories, like the San Bernardino Community College District, have left the commitment and later rejoined. After being dropped in 2010 for failing to meet the pledge’s requirements, the district completed a sustainability plan this year that put it back on track.
But dismal financing doesn’t necessarily kill colleges’ fidelity to the pledge. In California, where state budgets have wreaked havoc on public universities, the commitment has had benefits, with various energy-efficiency projects saving the University of California about $32-million a year, says Matt St. Clair, the system’s sustainability director. Public utilities add a surcharge to utility bills that the state redistributes for efficiency projects, he says, and “we have been very aggressive and have gotten the most funding of any entity in the state through pursuing our climate goals.”
The California system has a goal of reducing its emissions to year- 2000 levels by 2014, about a 25-percent reduction. That goal has to be met institution by institution—one campus cannot ride on the achievements of another. Some campuses, like Santa Cruz, will easily reach the goal; others, like San Francisco, which has built a lot of new energy-intensive buildings, may fall short.
Without the climate commitment, Mr. St. Clair says, “I don’t think there’s any chance that half or even a quarter of the presidents or chancellors would have made even an internal commitment to a climate action plan.”
