Nearly 400 colleges are expected to submit their climate action plans this week, a major step in the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The heavily detailed reports, which took colleges many months to produce, map out strategies for limiting emissions for decades to come.
But the hard work has just started. From here, institutions have to figure out how to transfer theory into action, which will present a whole new set of challenges. Chief among them: How to tackle ambitious projects when money is tight.
Toni Nelson, who is managing the process for Second Nature, a prominent sustainability group that sponsors the commitment, says she expects about a quarter of the charter signatories to file for deadline extensions. But in many of those cases, the climate plans are finished and are just awaiting approval from a trustee board or another campus body.
In other cases, institutions will submit plans that may immediately change. “We have decided to do the best we can with very little information at this point, knowing that we will revise” the plan at some point in the near future, says David Henry, chief sustainability officer at Richland College.
The Dallas-area community college is still working out energy-service contracts and other projects that will have some bearing on emissions, but the college will turn in its action plan on September 15, the original due date.
The climate action plans have been anticipated with both excitement and some criticism. Critics have wondered whether colleges would set far-off dates for achieving climate neutrality—that is, no net greenhouse-gas emissions—or buy their way out through the purchase of offsets (which some perceive as an easy way to meet the letter but not the spirit of the commitment). Some have also questioned whether climate neutrality, the ultimate goal of the plan, is even feasible.
Many colleges seem to be setting a goal of climate neutrality by 2050, with concrete actions defined over the next several years only. They tend to focus initially on projects that are either under way or slated to be started imminently. Offsets, which are projects that absorb or prevent the release of carbon emissions to make up for emissions created elsewhere, play some part in the plans, but they are not always a major part. They seem to be largely reserved for later phases, to cover emissions that have been too difficult to limit on site, like those of student and staff commuters.
“Given our institutional resources, I decided [buying offsets] wasn’t a good move,” says Janna Cohen-Rosenthal, sustainability coordinator at Brandeis University, an institution that is working on a climate plan and recently stopped buying renewable-energy credits. She noted that Brandeis’s plan will focus on ways to cut energy use, with a goal of reaching neutrality in 2050. However, nearly half of Brandeis’s emissions come from fuels burned to create electricity the university buys, so offsets may be used in the future.
As for whether climate neutrality is feasible, most colleges map out a path to that goal. But as the plans look years ahead, they become more hazy and speculative—and perhaps for good reason. Myriad pressures and developments—in legislation, in energy resources, or in technological innovation—could change the landscape of climate-neutrality strategies at any time.
A Sneak Peek
Drafts and summaries of climate action plans reviewed by The Chronicle may give some indication what other plans will look like. The plans are as different as the colleges themselves but have some broad similarities. Here are some of the plans:
• Cornell University’s plan, which was formed with the help of at least three consulting firms and $1-million in funds from both the university and a New York State agency, envisions getting to neutrality by 2050, in part through some ambitious renewable-energy projects, including one that would involve drilling miles underground to hot rocks to produce steam for power. In the short term, the plan includes more-conventional strategies, including firing up a highly efficient cogeneration plant, now under construction. These conventional strategies would lead to a steep drop in the university’s emissions by around 2020.
• Ithaca College, which is just down the street from Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., sat in on portions of Cornell’s planning process. The college also sets a date of 2050 for neutrality, knocking emissions down an average of 2 to 3 percent per year. Immediate plans call for closer measurement of energy in buildings, evaluating the efficiency of building systems, and doing various renovations. In the longer term, the college may follow some of Cornell’s geothermal plans or look into other renewable-power programs.
• Dickinson College, which generates 61 percent of its emissions through purchased electricity, plans to reach climate neutrality by 2020; it will do so mainly through offsets, by purchasing renewable power. Seventy-five percent of the carbon-emissions reduction will happen through offsets in 2020, but the college hopes to reduce that to 50 percent by 2025 through setting up highly efficient cogeneration plants, and, to a much smaller effect, changing behaviors among students. The plan describes ways the college might dissuade students from bringing their energy-sucking televisions and minifridges to campus.
• The University of California at Berkeley’s climate action plan was released early. The plan says that the university will reach its 1990 levels of emissions by 2014, mainly through projects to replace lighting, upgrade heating and cooling systems, install meters to more closely track energy use, and other projects already under way. Those efforts will get the university only halfway to its 2014 goal, and Berkeley may have to purchase renewable-energy credits to make up the difference. Notably, while the plan does say that climate neutrality is an ultimate goal, it does not set a date for that goal—something that sustainability advocates at other institutions have noticed and privately criticized. Rather, the university says it will release another emissions goal for 2020 or 2025 in 2011, after planners have tried putting this plan in place.
• The University of Maryland at College Park’s plan accelerates its reductions over time, with a 15-percent reduction from 2005 levels in 2012 to a 60-percent reduction in 2025, until finally reaching climate neutrality in 2050. To meet its goals, the university will hire an energy-services company to do $20-million in renovations, start a policy to build carbon-neutral structures, and establish some on-campus renewable-power projects, among other efforts.
Worries About Making It Work
The economy is a wild card in realizing these plans. Many of the early stages of colleges’ plans offer a good return on investment, but later projects have longer paybacks—or may not pay back at all.
“We signed on in a very different era,” Kyu-Jung Whang, vice president for facilities at Cornell, said of the climate commitment. “We have been struggling, trying to decide how we are going to implement this plan, given the fact that we are not allowed to spend dollars the way we used to.”
He assumes that within the next few years the economy will bounce back to where it was before the recession. If that doesn’t happen, he says, Cornell won’t meet its goals.
Buildings are often the biggest source of an institution’s greenhouse gases. So campus growth, and the ways institutions plan it, could also affect their climate plans. The University of Maryland’s plan says that growth is a given, but that the university should use only renewable power to cover new growth. Cornell’s plan calls for the university to use space more efficiently, but Cornell officials fully expect the university to continue growing.
Cornell has grown by about one million square feet per decade, and its plan assumes the same growth in coming decades. But that might have to change. “Maybe we can get by with 800,000 square feet every decade,” Mr. Whang says.
For many colleges, reaching the lofty goal of climate neutrality is less important than other benefits the process yields. Ms. Nelson, of Second Nature, says that colleges in the climate commitment are prepared for mandatory restrictions in greenhouse-gas emissions, a possibility that has generated buzz recently in Washington. “You’re changing the culture around energy consumption,” she says, “so when legislation comes down, you’re ahead of the curve.”
Mr. Henry, of Richland College, says signing the commitment and now preparing a plan has helped change attitudes at his campus—and helped push projects that save money: “You don’t know what kind of creativity and resources and colleagues are there until you need them.”
