A Deadline Day in the Presidents’ Climate Commitment

It’s deadline day for colleges that have been working on their climate action plans, a key part of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, and we have been reviewing some of the plans that have been rolling in since last week. Of particular interest are the plans submitted by community colleges.

Many community colleges have fewer resources than other institutions, as well as large commuter populations, which generate difficult-to-handle “scope three” emissions. These are emissions that are related to higher education but are generated off campus, by commuters’ cars and other sources. As a lower-cost alternative to four-year institutions, commuter colleges are also under pressure because their enrollments are booming in this recession.

So it was interesting to see Howard Community College’s climate-action plan, which calls for the institution to become climate neutral by 2020—three decades earlier than many other colleges, which have picked a goal of 2050. Howard Community College will get some help from its county in, say, arranging mass-transit options. “Becoming climate neutral in just 10 years is an incredibly ambitious goal, particularly in this current climate of budget shortfalls,” the plan says. “But the challenges we face will not become any less if we postpone facing them and the expense to address this issue will only increase if we delay.”

The goal is ambitious, but from reading the action plan, it’s not clear whether it’s achievable. The efforts that would have a greater impact on the college’s emissions tend to be expensive or difficult, or both.

There is no clear date for neutrality in Onondaga Community College’s plan (or, at least, we couldn’t find one). The report calls for a 25-percent reduction in emissions by 2020. “It is challenging to establish a precise date for achieving complete carbon and climate neutrality,” the plan says, noting that Onondaga is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the nation, with most emissions coming from commuters. “These variables will impact the rate at which the human, financial, and political capital can be committed to achieve climate neutrality. This must be measured against the growing body of evidence that the time for change is upon us immediately at this moment, not later.”

While the plans come in, you might read through an article about green campuses that ran in Nature recently. The story mentions the activities of some leading institutions pursuing sustainability (like Arizona State University, Emory University, and Middlebury College) as they prepare to finish their climate-action plans. “Such schools … hope to serve as models for others, including businesses, cities, and counties, that hope to reduce their environmental impacts. But their experiences underscore the fact that sustainability can be hard to measure and that attaining it, especially with competing financial pressures, doesn’t happen overnight.”