Ambitious ‘greening the campus’ goals announced

Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy recently accepted from his environmental advisory committee an updated Climate Action Plan that outlines ambitious goals for the campus, focused not only on energy efficiency and reduced emissions, but on raising sustainability literacy, student participation and integrating green principles into all of campus life, notably academic courses.
 
The 60-page report updates the campus’s first action plan released in 2010, which identified strategies for reaching carbon neutrality over the next 37 years, by 2050. That is the goal that former President Jack Wilson committed all five campuses to when he signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment in 2007.
 
With the report, the chancellor’s Environmental Advisory Committee chaired by Ezra Small, campus sustainability coordinator, update Subbaswamy in his first year as leader of the flagship campus. The report identifies two- and three-year targets that will make it easier for faculty, students, staff and administrators to measure progress in the near term.   
 
Small says, “We proposed to form a number of new subcommittees to work on transportation, energy, food and permaculture, green building, education and research, climate, waste reduction and finance. We also recently hired a new sustainability communications manager. We think all this will help to keep us on track toward our interim goals identified for 2015.”
 
These include increasing the number of students whose major field of study includes a sustainability requirement from the current 14 percent to 30 percent by 2015, for example, and increasing the number of sustainability-related courses offered from 2 percent of the total in 2011 to 4 percent in 2015.
 
With a “Reduce Your Use” campaign, the committee also hopes to increase the number of residence halls that participate in the annual Green Games, an annual eight-week water use and energy-reduction awareness program and competition for students, from 25 halls now to 30 in 2015 and to all 45 residence halls by 2020.
 
Taking a wider view, committee members want to find a way for the campus’s thousands of faculty, staff and students to contribute on a daily basis. Small notes, “We’re all adults and we have a responsibility to do what we can. There are ways that each person can do their part. Our job is to make it clear how everyone can and to make it fun for them, to give incentives for saving energy, materials and supplies.”
 
“We think if we change the way we get energy, the way we design and use our buildings and how we use energy every day and if we all do this together, we’ll be on the pathway toward carbon neutrality.”
 
On the facilities side, the campus has begun a program of continuous commissioning of new and existing buildings, which means regularly assessing how they perform and how to improve energy efficiency, for example. Students in the green building program are collecting preliminary data now, Small says. Other staff and students are exploring potential solar, geothermal, wind and orientation design options.
 
“If UMass Amherst wants to lead the way, and we do, there’s no way to do it without producing renewable energy,” he adds. “Renewable energy can come with a major price tag, but there are many more options now, and promise for us to have a much smaller carbon footprint.”
 
Read the report