How rapidly are campuses carbon footprints shrinking to zero? Some have already made it, while others are not just slow, they are in denial.
Sparked by a question from Bryan Alexander, I set out to try to answer this question, or at least get the lay of the land. My idea was to see how well the institutions fit an innovation diffusion curve. The concept is that diffusion of ideas and innovations (in this case shrinking a campus footprint to zero) fall into 5 cycles or cohorts from initial Innovators to Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and eventually Laggards.
Since there are more than 6,000 higher education institutions, I chose to look at 4-year public institutions, of which there are more than 800. I narrowed the group for this preliminary estimate to the largest 42. They enroll about a tenth of all undergraduates and graduate students.
I searched each institution’s website to see if they had a climate action plan. I also used sustainability as the search term. From these queries it was possible to determine if there was a current Climate Action Plan, what the planned carbon reduction targets were, what specific actions were planned, and how much progress toward the targets had been made.
Slightly more than half of the institutions are Innovators, Early Adopters, Early and Late Majorities. [graph] All have current climate action plans and are making varying levels of progress in shrinking their carbon footprints. Another twelve percent can be categorized as Laggards. They do not have current climate action plans but are working on them. Unfortunately, after reviewing the data, I had to add a 6th category, even later than Laggards. I’ll call them the Nearly Nevers.
The Nearly Nevers were one third of the group. None of them have current climate action plans. Many are members of various sustainability organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education but have taken little or no action to reduce their carbon footprints.
Perhaps some of the Laggards will accelerate their work. Perhaps some of the Nearly Nevers will become Laggards in coming years. Most of the Nearly Nevers have faculty members who study climate change issues, and have added sustainability content to their curriculum and student activities, but for now those institutions have demonstrated little or no action to reduce their carbon footprints.
In subsequent months, I will expand the number of institutions in my database to be able to make a more comprehensive assessment of campus climate plans. As of now the answer to the question, “how quickly?” is: not quickly enough. While the majority are moving in the right direction, nearly a third are making little to no progress.
Earlier posts on climate change
Campus – Accelerating to Net Zero
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The bell curve presented is typical of many things in business and nature. The real question and benchmark I would use is a little different. The most energy efficient (or in this analogy the most net-zero energy) building is the one that is not constructed (or has been removed from the inventory). Therefore, I would look at the change of campus space against the change of energy consumed (or carbon emitted). Another way is to look at the energy per facility user (student + faculty + staff). Zero net per stakeholder would be the ideal.
As defined, net-zero, remains squishy. Carbon offsets, planting trees, purchasing off-site renewable energy, etc. feel like ‘smoke and mirrors’ to me. A real net zero building or campus generates as much energy on-site as it consumes on-site; a pretty high bar.
The previous post which addressed the issue of a virtual campus makes a little more sense for net-zero energy assuming the production and delivery facilities can be net-zero and the receiver of the learning is net-zero as well. (How might that be measured?) Then the next question one should ask is the quality (or value) of the learning per unit of energy input (or carbon output).
It takes us back to the famous James A. Garfield quote, “all you need is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student at the other” for learning to occur. That’s net-zero carbon education as long as you don’t count the loss of a living tree to create the log.
Ted, Thanks for the insightful comments. There is a lot to think about, but I am certain campuses need to move more quickly in adapting to like on a planet that is different than the one they are not built for. Be well,
Very timely article Michael!
Just finished “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”
By Bill Gates
Howard, thanks. I hope this piece and others help to accelerate de-carbonization and adaptation.
When your data becomes a factor in US NEWS college rankings you will have provided an even greater incentive to the laggards and nearly nevers.