My friend had an outdoor wedding this past weekend. It was lovely. We were rained on, but compared with the weather in the area earlier that week—extreme flooding, tornadoes—we were very lucky.

A rainy graduation day has always been a planning concern for campus administrators, but that worry pales beside the challenges posed by extreme weather events. As our climate changes and extreme weather becomes more common, the way we think about the campus environment must change. Many environmentalists have been hesitant to talk about adapting to the new climate for fear of detracting from efforts to mitigate global warming. But despite those efforts, the climate has changed and will change more.

Chronicle posts from earlier this week documented the flooding at the University of Iowa. This problem is not unique to the Midwest—flood zones are shifting and the 1...

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that both university officials and activists that oppose development in a grove of trees are declaring victory after a judge put plans to build an athletic training center on hold. The activists are trying to protect a stand of coastal oak trees that would be damaged by the project.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Barbara Miller raised questions about the project and said that the university would have to prove that the center would not violate state earthquake safety laws. But she said the project mainly complied with the law, the Chronicle reported.

“This in no way affects our ability to build the center,” Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the university, told the Chronicle. “This is a great ruling for us.”

“We are ecstatic,” said...

Looking for ways to cut carbon emissions, reduce energy usage, and enhance your environmental profile? Check out a report issued this week by the Environmental Protection Agency titled A Business Guide to U.S. EPA Climate Partnership Programs.

Although it is aimed at business, the report contains practical information that will interest many people in academe. It profiles the different programs in which EPA partners with business and institutions in “addressing the risks and opportunities of climate change.”

Readers can find out whom to contact at EPA to learn more about energy-efficient labs, environmentally friendly landscaping, and waste-reduction strategies.

A new report from Clean Air-Cool Planet examines the meaning of the term “climate neutral” and examines some companies that are making that claim. The basic points of the report could be applied to any college striving for climate neutrality or claiming to already be climate neutral.

“We heard more and more companies claiming neutrality, but we also saw that no one was looking at what such a claim really meant,” Adam Markham, chief executive officer of Clean Air–Cool Planet, said in an announcement about the report. “We wanted to see what was behind these claims and offer guidance to others.”

The report is “intended to serve as a guide both to companies that have used—or are considering using—the language of neutrality and to stakeholders that are trying to evaluate whether a particular claim is justified or not,”...

DePauw University’s Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics earned a gold rating for its efficient design and local materials. (Photo courtesy DePauw University)

A handful of colleges are celebrating gold certifications in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Vanderbilt University’s Commons Center, a dining area and community center for first-year students, will save hundreds of thousands of gallons of water each year through low-flow devices and is 30 percent more energy efficient than a conventional building. A number of recycled materials were used in the center’s construction and operation — for example, old oak chairs in the dining room came from the library. (Nearly 75 percent of the material from the old dining facility, which was torn down to make room for the Commons Center, was recycled.) Student groups are also...

The University of Iowa restored electric power to buildings across its campus yesterday—although not to buildings that are still flooded—and got to work on clean-up plans, as The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan reported.

But university officials said it could take as long as a week for the Iowa River to recede to normal levels, and buildings that have remained dry so far remain vulnerable until it does. Typically, the big worries in flood situations are that debris being swept downstream could break through a temporary levee or that debris could pile up on the upstream side of a bridge, forming a temporary dam and raising water levels behind it.

An article in this morning’s Iowa City Press-Citizen reports that the university has two temporary boilers in place to provide steam for campus needs, and that officials hope they will soon be able to begin pumping water out of the journalism...

Boston College will meet with its neighbors tonight to discuss the most contentious aspect of its expansion plans — the housing of students.

Last year, Boston College announced its expansion plans for what officials call the Brighton Campus, a plot of land once owned by the Boston Archdiocese, which will be the home of playing fields, an athletics center, and other structures. The Boston Globe reports that the college has already made several changes to its plans to appease the neighbors, including rotating the fields away from the neighborhood, reducing the size of the athletics center and its parking garage, and limiting artificial...

A water feature is almost always an asset for a university campus—except when it gets out of hand, floods 16 buildings, and wreaks havoc.

That’s the situation right now at the University of Iowa, as The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan reports this morning. Among the flooded buildings are such notable structures are Frank Gehry’s Iowa Advanced Technology Labs and Steven Holl’s Art Building West, to say nothing of the Iowa Memorial Union and the Hancher Auditorium.

Just as important, though, are key utility components that are offline. The university’s flood blog reported yesterday that an underground electrical vault by the university’s power plant had to be taken out of service, causing a blackout in some areas of the campus that are not under water. On Friday the university ordered the shutdown of nonessential research projects “to preserve utility assets such as steam (hot water),...

Sister Joan O’Shea was among those saddened when Dominican University cut down a stand of trees this year to make way for a new academic building. The university softened the blow by putting the wood to good use: firewood for the neighbors, benches for the campus, and crosses — handcrafted by a psychology professor — for classrooms in the new building. But most unusual were the items created by Richard Marrell.

Mr. Marrell’s company, RLM Tissue Bank Prosthetics, makes prosthetics for the bodies of people who donate bones when they die. The devices make the bodies easier to handle and enable families to hold open-casket services. Most important to Mr. Marrell, a surgical technician turned entrepreneur, they are environmentally friendly. Their plastic precursors damaged crematories and were not biodegradable.

Mr. Marrell was delighted when Dominican offered him the wood. “I like the...

It’s a latter-day form of enduring college rivalries: As colleges and universities have become national leaders in carbon reduction, interest in comparing greenhouse-gas emissions among institutions has grown. A number of institutions have published their greenhouse-gas emission levels, and their reduction strategies, to great effect.

That gives context to reduction efforts as well as to using greenhouse-gas data as an umbrella for sustainability efforts spread across different sectors. But many colleges have received negative attention for those same reports. Once a number is put on a college’s carbon footprint, the footprint can be compared to that of another college.

Are genuine, apples-to-apples, college-to-college greenhouse-gas-emission comparisons possible? Beyond that—and perhaps more to the point—are such comparisons relevant if the goal is...