Responsibility is in the air at this weekend’s Bioneers conference. The attendees are, by and large, concerned about the impact they and their organizations exert on a stressed planet, and perhaps no one feels more culpable than teachers and education leaders.

During yesterday’s Education for Action session, Jim Baizer, science policy advisor at Arizona State University, said, “We work at institutes that are creating future leaders. They are coming up with economies that crash and lose $13 trillion. We are responsible for all these people and all these ideas.”

If higher education’s job is to prepare students for the world ahead, panelists and speakers seemed to suggest, it has so far failed to meet the challenge.

But no one is giving up. Tony Cortese, founder and president of Second Nature, said, “This is the first time in higher education that I’ve seen people saying that we need to be the first to try something and figure it out, rather than wait around and see who else can work it out first. Of course, sometimes when we try to solve a problem, we cause worse problems, because we think too much in the short-term. What we need to do is get people to look at multiple consequences, in an interdisciplinary and long-term way.”

The all-day session included workshop time for small groups, in which 70 or so faculty, administrators and students broke out to devise solutions on their specific campuses, or tell stories of projects that had already demonstrated success. One standout was UC-Santa Cruz, which has been pioneering a project that gets students to spend a semester researching a solution to a problem in their community and presenting the results to university staff.

Crystal Durham, executive director of the California student Sustainability Coalition, said, “We’ve probably saved millions of dollars in consulting fees by using the curriculum. Students run a research-based class that solves a problem. For example, they might say they want more recycling on campus. So they spend a semester working to understand how the local waste management system works, bringing in someone to talk, finding out how the university could make this happen, then at the end of the semester they present their results.” The class gives students real work to do that not only prepares them for their careers and incorporates environmental literacy into the curriculum, but also moves the school towards climate neutrality.

This is the most immediate way to influence students, said participants: the college must walk the walk toward climate-neutrality and involve youth in the process. Most attendees were already familiar with the President’s Climate Commitment, either because their school had signed, or because they were campaigning to get their president on board. More than 650 college presidents have signed, out of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S.

The importance of the Commitment, said Cortese, is that it moves beyond the historical segregation of environmental studies from the rest of the university: “When universities have done environmental work historically, what they’ve done is create environmental studies departments, which reach 5% of the students, and create more specialists. What’s great about the PCC is that it moves beyond these models.”

For everyone in the room, moving their institutions towards climate neutrality was a priority. Amber Katherine, a professor of philosophy at Santa Monica College, made the point that schools can no longer ignore the urgency of rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasing water, food, and resource scarcities. “What must we do at one minute to midnight?” she asked. “There is no time left, and excuses aren’t acceptable.”

On the heels of our earlier post on sustainability rankings comes this quote from Charlotte Strem, interim director of physical and environmental planning at the University of California's Office of the President:  

"Campuses measure profits and other things differently than other organizations, and one of the major metrics is how many students want to come to a university compared to how many can. So, ratings and rankings systems make a fairly big impact: something like 62% of high school graduates say they look at how green a college is when they are investigating schools."

(October 15, 2009, at the Education for Action session of the Bioneers Conference)

The Sustainable Endowments Institute's new green rankings are out, and there is some good news: With all the focus on sustainability in higher education over the past few years, grades are going up. Just over half of the schools surveyed earned an overall grade of B-, compared to only 38 percent in last year’s report. The average overall grade this year is a C+, but 26 schools received the top grade (A-), including Amherst, Harvard, Pomona, University of Washington and University of New Hampshire.

Like last year, the report comes on the heels of a variety of rating systems. Sierra and Greenopia have their own (less rigorous) versions ranking the Top 20 and the 100 largest, respectively, and AASHE has just launched its STARS tracking system for schools to join. Last year, we released the Campus Report Card, which showed improvement on the operations and facilities side of greening, but a lag in curriculum development.

SEI’s report, now in its fourth year, only covers 300 schools in its ratings, leaving out the other 3700 colleges and universities in the U.S, although 32 new schools petitioned to be added this year and are ranked accordingly. It's worth noting that these 300 schools are chosen not on the basis of extraordinary projects or the extent of their efforts—though many are pack leaders—but on the size of their endowments.

The Institute notes, “The profiled schools have combined holdings of more than $325 billion—approximately 95 percent of all higher education endowment assets. Widespread investment declines have impacted almost all schools, with the Report Card finding average endowment value dropping by 23 percent in the past year.”

Its focus on the endowment is the most useful feature of SEI’s research. That enormous pool of money allows the wealthiest schools to support new research and endeavors that might not otherwise get the funding they need. Harvard, for example, reports that it invests in renewable energy companies, and “allocates a portion of the endowment to private equity and natural resource investments that seed companies and/or ventures that may take environmental and sustainability factors into consideration.”

But highlighting only the wealthiest or the largest schools is fraught with its own issues. As the Chronicle and others have pointed out over the years, sustainability is an extremely difficult thing to track, and an even more difficult thing to grade, particularly when looking at an entire campus. For example, if the college is planning to erect a half dozen new buildings that will certainly increase the energy needs of the campus, even if they are built according to LEED standards, should the school's grade go up or down? 

And what about the small schools, lacking in deep pockets but with commitment to spare?

Mitchell Thomashow of Unity College notes the importance of university investment, writing that colleges serve as dynamic economic multipliers, becoming places “where businesses and faculty work with students and community members to develop innovative entrepreneurial approaches.” However, Unity, which received a B on SEI’s report, wasn’t graded on its endowment because it didn’t meet the minimum threshold of $16 million in assets. It also received a D in the transportation category because its 24-car fleet doesn’t include any hybrids, and because “most people walk to their destinations on campus due to Unity’s small size.” Does this mean that Unity's students and staff aren't invested in their community, or that they are emitting more carbon dioxide during their commutes? Quite the opposite. But SEI's system isn't designed to take these small-school factors into account.

The hope is that as sustainability enters the mainstream, expanded systems like STARS will more comprehensively rate these colleges in a way that takes into consideration factors beyond finance, as well as providing a more common standard for measurement. Without those two factors, measuring sustainability won't be possible.  

We talk a lot about climate and the environment here at Campus Ecology, but the truth is that long-term sustainability requires more than ecological considerations. If a school is carbon-neutral, but not financially viable, it has failed its mission. Therefore, energy efficiency and other “green” initiatives often have to save the institution money, or at least break even, to be considered at all.

The most common way to gain support for these energy projects is to prove a significant return on investment, and are therefore worthy of being included in the college's master plan. So, articles on campus greening initiatives usually include a summary like this one: an initial investment of $X is expected to pay for itself in Y years, and generate an extra $Z. The numbers often speak for themselves, as in the case of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, which saves 2.26 tons of CO2 emissions per vending machine per year using small devices that turn off the machines when idle. The Vending Misers, which cost $175, pay for themselves in one year by saving about $200 on electricity bills.

It seems like a no-brainer. One of our latest articles, Master Planning for Sustainability, quotes Terry Calhoun of the Society of College and University Planners, who says, "If you did good integrated planning, you would end up with sustainability. Why would you build a building that uses six times as much energy as it has to?"

Unfortunately, this picture is incomplete. The reality of a university’s bureaucracy can often mean that even projects with large and easy paybacks may be ignored, because complex budgeting structures are not designed to reward electricity savings in the facilities department. This may be true even if a comprehensive master plan puts environmental sustainability as an organizational priority. Leith Sharp, writing for Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, notes that, “Even if operating managers do manage to fund efficiency improvements to produce operational savings, they are rarely allowed to capture and reinvest these savings for further improvements. Instead, they will often see next year’s operating funds reduced to reflect this operating cost reduction, hardly a reward for a job well done.”

Sharp, former director of Harvard’s Green Campus Initiative, adds:

"Our institutions freely use the mantra of the “business case” to challenge and scrutinize the viability of anything new without addressing the fact that in many cases the business case is being sabotaged by poorly designed finance and accounting structures. Colleges and universities are incurring enormous additional costs by failing to reform these practices to enable good business practice to flourish … It is not clear how this has evolved, but it occurs in almost all large organizations. This division results in capital budget managers resisting the expenditure of any extra money, even when the operation savings are extraordinary. At the same time, the operating budget managers commonly do not have enough access to funds for ongoing efficiency improvements."

For a problem this complex, master planning is only part of the solution. Sharp goes on to describe the "complex, irrational, and unconscious life of the institution," which sabotages the work of campus sustainability officers and their efforts to bring the campus towards climate neutrality. As examples, she points out energy-purchasing contracts based on volume consumptions (where the unit price of energy goes up when consumption goes down) or steam return-metering. Both systems encourage individual waste, which saves money to a particular building or department, but results in overall system inefficiency.

Harvard was able to make significant progress using a revolving loan model, which funded projects with paybacks of less than five years, and reinvested that money in ongoing upgrades, efficiency projects, metering and behavioral change programs.

But Sharp is aware that this wouldn’t be possible everywhere: Harvard is blessed with more resources than most schools, and a sustainability staff of dozens of people. “The deeper lesson,” she says, “is that we should stop creating the ongoing need for revolving loan funds—by structurally connecting capital and operating budgets and institutionalizing life-cycle costing, a well-established methodology for calculating upfront and future operating costs relating to different decision-making options. I also believe that our organizations should capture and reinvest savings that result from successful resource conservation and waste-reduction efforts as routine practice to fund dedicated annual innovation budgets for financing pilot projects and ongoing efficiency upgrades.”

It’s not exactly a small request. Such redesigning of the university’s essential infrastructure might take years, and it’s a lot harder than installing add-ons to a couple vending machines, or even retrofitting an HVAC system. This doesn’t discourage Sharp. She says, “Over many years, I have observed that the common belief that people are innately adverse to change is not generally true. People are not resistant to change, they are opposed to instability, and they simply assume that change equals instability.”

To achieve this stability, Sharp argues that the sustainability staff need to act as the rudder-on-the-rudder, going beyond simple equations of return-on-investment and discussing the real risks and barriers in play. Only then, she says, can universities bring their carbon footprints “down to an equitable share of what the planet’s life-support systems can support.”

Our Chill Out: Campus Solutions to Global Warming program has been nominated for an award from The Imagen Foundation for its positive portrayals of Latinos and Latino culture in entertainment.  NWF is thrilled to be nominated for this prestigious award! The Chill Out webcast was shown on over 400 college campuses this year and showcased the winning campuses of the Chill Out competition. 

The winning campuses have amazing projects and initiatives on campus to reduce global warming emissions.  The initiatives range from a strong transportation plan to a fuel cell power plant that powers part of the campus. 

The broadcast is narrated by an all-star cast of students, faculty and staff and a broad range of advocates and activists in today’s environmental movement, including: Academy Award-Winning producer Lawrence Bender; actor Courtney Gains ("Sibling Rivalry"); musician and composer Ethan Gold; comedian and host of Planet Green’s "Wa$ted" Annabelle Gurwitch; musician Nick Jago, Actor Efren Ramirez ("Napoleon Dynamite"); actor Alisa Reyes (Nick’s “All That”); Founder and CEO of Karmaloop.com Greg Selkoe; director, screenwriter and actress Angela Shelton; actor and stuntman Isaac Singleton Jr.; producer, first president of eBay and founder of Participant Media Jeff Skoll; Tony-Award-winning poet "Poetri" Smith; actor Douglas Spain (HBO’s "Walkabout"); actor Michael Welch ("Twilight"); actor Jose Yenque ("Traffic"); and actor Shawn-Caulin Young ("Dreams and Shadows"), and music by Austin band The Steps.

Chill Out is a low carbon footprint production, going well beyond the industry’s sustainable filmmaking guidelines, and has been recognized by the Environmental Media Association’s  Green Seal Program for using the film industry’s best environmental practices.

The awards will be presented at a black-tie dinner gala on Friday, August 21^st at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. Check back Friday night to see if we won!

Butte College’s 3rd annual sustainability conference opened with a welcome from the school’s president, Dr. Diana Van Der Ploeg. Her speech exhorted attendees to remember that sustainability is as much a national security issue as an environmental one, and that the shift is necessary for society.

Speaking to the 250 conference attendees here in Oroville, California, Dr. Ploeg described her work at Butte, managing a 928-acre campus (80 acres is reserved for farm use, and there is also a wildlife refuge) and serving approximately 20,000 students a year. The college, located on a wildlife refuge, is committed to sustainability - it uses LEED metrics in all building projects, is powered by 50 percent renewable energy, and incorporates sustainable practices into many other areas of the campus. Dr. Ploeg drives a Prius to the office every day.

Dr. Ken Meier, Butte’s Vice President of Student Learning & Economic Development, also presented, and touched on Butte’s culture of change that focuses on three primary aspects: social equity, environmental stewardship, and economic development. He says a fourth needs to be added – community. He says the role of the American community college is to work with and engage the community, and to serve as an example. “Sustainability it not possible without community involvement,” he said.

The first day of the conference featured speakers from Ohlone College, the Los Angeles Community College District, San Mateo Community College, Bakersfield College, and Co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Price Dr. Woodrow W. Clark II was the afternoon keynote speaker, presenting “On Climate Change and the Future.” 

One of the favorite presentations came from an Ohlone graduate, currently a student at UC Berkeley, on eco-behavior, hoping to answer the question – what does it take to change people’s behavior? Maria Javier surveyed several groups of students, finding that:

• The environment in which a person grows up seems to have a huge impact on how a person lives as an adult. For example, a student surveyed that grew up in Ohio, in a community that had a strong conservation ethic, was a better steward of the environment as an adult than other students surveyed that grew up in communities without a strong conservation ethic.
• Laziness or perceived threats to “luxury of life” are common reasons why people don’t behave in sustainable ways.
• If behavior is going to change, education is vital, we need government policies that enforce sustainable practices, and economic incentives or disincentives need to be instituted.

Maria also highlighted a site on eco-behavior, Fostering Sustainable Behavior – Community-based Social Marketing, which consists of five resources for those working to foster sustainable behaviors in conservation, energy efficiency, transportation, waste reduction, and water efficiency.

After a day packed full of presentations, attendees had the opportunity to tour the sustainable fields at Lundberg Family Farms.

Kristy Jones is reporting from the 3rd Annual Butte College Sustainability Conference, in Oroville, California.

This week marks the first edition of AASHE's Global Edition of the Bulletin. Alongside ClimateEdu, the Bulletin is one of the best sources of news on the campus sustainability scene, but until now has only covered stories in the US and Canada. The new international version will be released twice a year, sent by email for free to subscribers of the existing Bulletin.

The first issue, released yesterday, covers such topics as green building awards in Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as student projects in Sydney and biodiesel parks in India.

See More:

Shanghai Calling: International Collaboration for Sustainability

Youth Activists Vocal at Climate Talks in Poznan, Poland

Almost exactly one year ago, ClimateEdu's premiere issue included a story about several Utah organizations and universities that switched to a four-day workweek schedule on a trial basis, hoping to reduce GHG emissions and provide an extra benefit to employees. One year later, they have released their findings, and so far the program seems to be working.

A Scientific American article examines the results, noting that the state projects a 12,000 metric ton reduction in carbon emissions from commuting and building electricity use annually, and $1.8 million in savings from utility bills as of May, 2009.

In our original story from August 2008, we reported that "Not only is this change likely to keep a few more cars off the road in a state that has weak public transit infrastructure, it is also expected to save a significant amount of building-generated emissions by turning off most of the lights, heat, and air-conditioning in almost 1,000 non-essential government buildings every Friday. Preliminary reports estimate that shutting down six sample buildings for an extra day would lead to an annual CO2 reduction of more than 3,300 tons per year, and this number is likely to go up depending on which additional buildings are selected."

Although the $1.8 million that Utah has saved on utilities so far is shy of their original estimate ($3 billion), which may be partly due to lowering energy costs, the carbon dioxide emissions savings seem to be higher than officials planned. And employee morale is also higher, according to the Scientific American story. "'People just love it,' says Lori Wadsworth, a professor of public management at Brigham Young University in Provo. She helped survey those on the new Working 4 Utah schedule this May and found 82 percent would prefer to stick with it." Other research shows that employees are not fatigued by the new schedule, show less stress, and are taking fewer sick days. Anecdotal evidence even suggests that volunteerism is up, though it's not clear if that shift can be attributed to the change in work schedules or a general trend.

Other universities are experimenting with flexible schedules, such as Georgetown, Cornell, and the University of New Mexico, with mixed results. Not all regions will be able to save energy in their buildings this way, and tracking the amount of emissions saved can also be difficult, particularly when it comes to including commuting emissions in a climate action plan.

However, managers and legislators seem to feel it's worth a try. "As we move further into the 21st century, governments need to look for ways to become more efficient," says Michael N. Gianaris, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly. "Moving to a four-day workweek should be at the top of the list. It helps the environment. People like it. It's a no-brainer."

A new article in Inside Higher Ed profiles a growing trend: hosting a themed "year of sustainability" on campus. The story notes, "with multiple campuses, including Davidson College, New Mexico State, Villanova University and University of Denver having just finished up their years, the results have been varied, and some question whether the concept is more than a gimmick."

The schools featured took different approaches, including everything from reducing food waste and increasing recycling to creating new graduate programs or minors that focus on sustainability.

The story goes on to quote NWF's director of campus and community leadership, Julian Keniry, who says, "Sustainability is something that needs to be the purpose of education across operations and disciplines and sustained over time. The idea of focusing on a one year theme doesn't lend itself to a [sustainable approach]. But it might be a way to catalyze thinking that could lead to long term work."

The point almost seems too obvious to make. A "year of sustainability" shouldn't be a discrete event, but rather a kick-off to bolder steps. By definition, sustainability is about the long-term, about making communities and campuses more flexible, more resilient and more useful over time. If treated as a fad, it will fail.

So it's encouraging to see that none of the faculty or staff interviewed for the story thought of their efforts as a one-off. Says Kealy Devoy, Davidson's sustainability fellow, "We haven't achieved 100 percent on most of the goals, but I don't consider that an issue because we're not going to just stop." 

In the spring, we alerted you to the Florida legislature's approval of FGCU's solar array, which is expected to cover 19 acres and produce 2MW of electricity for the university.

However, to no one's surprise, the project has been delayed by more provincial concerns. Namely, permitting. 

While officials expect that the missing environmental resource and water use permits will be granted quickly, the clash between even the best-laid plans and bureaucracy is not a new one for universities.

"FGCU initially put December as a target date to see the first panels hit campus, hoping to take advantage of federal tax credits that were set to expire when the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31. Congress extended those credits as part of the financial bailout bill, though, making the back-and-forth permitting process not as stressful. Now, the university is just waiting for a green light."

Here at HQ, we are doing some retrofits -- including test drills for ground-source heating -- to make our building carbon-neutral, and what we've found is that the bidding process is absolutely crucial. Learning to ask the right questions saves a lot of time and headaches. In our specific case, we had much better results by specifying in RFPs that the bidder be familiar with permitting processes and provide us with solid examples. By including the permitting in the scope of the work, we headed some of this off at the pass, and ended up going with a project management firm instead of a contractor.

Of course, this won't solve every problem, but perhaps is useful as universities move forward with significant sustainability projects. What has your school's experience been? Where have you found unexpected "hurry-up-and-wait" moments? What lessons have you learned from the process?