Don’t Think Your Campus Needs to Prepare for Climate Change?

It isn’t hard to find evidence that colleges across the country are concerned about global climate change and the role they play in contributing to it. Solar panels, LEED-certified buildings, robust recycling programs, and energy reductions can be found on campuses everywhere. The American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment has been signed by more than 650 institutions seeking to become carbon neutral, while hundreds of institutions have heeded the call from 350.org to divest from the fossil-fuel industry. There has been a palpable movement by colleges to reduce their carbon footprint and help mitigate the causes of climate change.

All of those steps are necessary and important. However, colleges must now take another vital step: prepare themselves for the disruptive new reality of a climate-changed world. That means defending their campuses from what is already happening as well as from what is yet to come. If you think your campus is safe, you are wrong.

Three years ago, I co-wrote an article, “Preparing and Adapting Our Campuses for the Effects of Climate Change,” in The Planning for Higher Education Journal. In the ensuing three years, colleges across the country have experienced firsthand the disruption that climate change brings. It has become clear that they must do a great deal more to prepare.

While sea-level rise will ultimately offer the greatest peril for coastal colleges, we will all see the effects of longer fire seasons and more damaging wildfires; more destructive hurricanes; more frequent and devastating heat waves; more extreme weather events with enormous increases in precipitation and flooding; more severe drought; a decrease in groundwater; and sporadic power failures. This is not a list of what could happen. It is a list of what is already happening. The frequency will increase. It’s just a matter of time before your institution feels the impact.

Those direct impacts will have at times even more daunting, indirect impacts. Colleges can anticipate disruption in transportation and in food and fuel delivery; disruption in access to water — especially where snowpack or seasonal glacial melt is a source, and where aquifers are drying up; and disruption of the day-to-day operations of the institutions as fire, water, heat, and wind close down colleges more frequently and for longer and longer periods. The risks are real and the time to develop plans to increase resilience and adapt is now.

Some of those risks have escalated because the air and oceans are now warmer, and the air is more saturated with water. This causes storms to dump a lot more water — record downpour after record downpour — and they don’t have to be tropical cyclones to do so. A lot of our campuses will see increased storms and historic rainfalls. Most of our infrastructure is not ready.

That’s also the case with increasing fires. During this past fall’s wildfires in California, many campuses closed for weeks due to air filled with toxic smoke and ash — and because faculty, staff, and students were trying to save their homes from the fires or caring for others who had already lost theirs. The same upheaval happened in the Carolinas when Florence dropped a record 30 inches of rain. Institutions in Puerto Rico are still recovering from Maria’s toll.

Colleges in our coastal cities — Miami, St. Petersburg, Galveston, New Orleans, Charleston, and many others — will see (not might see) drastic increases in sea-level rise and storm-surge inundation in ways never before experienced by these communities. Cities will be investing in vast infrastructure projects. Colleges will need to join them. Sea-level rise is a longer term problem — but it’s a huge one.

Insurance companies are already preparing. The U.S Defense Department is preparing. If your institution is in a threatened area on the coast, this century you will be inundated. Climate Central’s mapping of rising sea levels offers our institutions a peek into what the future holds for our campuses. Miami is already experiencing this firsthand with regular flooding and tidal surge, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

So what should colleges be doing? For one, they should create a climate-change task force, including scientists, to research how climate change will affect their campuses. They should also develop adaptation and resilience plans. One of the stories that came out of superstorm Sandy was that both Princeton and NYU were able to keep some of their lights on while the region went dark, as they had invested in their own co-generation power plants. They were even able to send some energy back to the grid to power parts of their local communities. Such systems offer solutions to both the mitigation and the adaption parts of the equation.

Planning for events 50 to a hundred years out, especially as some colleges struggle just to keep their doors open, may not seem like a priority. But Boards of Trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to their institutions in perpetuity. It will indeed require investment, but the adage could not be more true: We can invest now or pay later. The return on investment in adapting our campuses for a climate-changed world should be clear. Those that prepare may very well withstand the onslaught. Those that dally may not.