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We live in an era demanding transformative change. The climate and biosphere are undergoing significant transformations, and communities are experiencing the impacts of climate change. These changes are intertwined in all aspects of our society such that economic considerations cannot be divorced from environmental concerns, and climate action must include social, educational, economic, and policy dimensions, in addition to prioritizing changes to operational infrastructure. And while climate change raises the possibility of irreversible damage if action is taken too late or too slowly, every positive action taken to reverse climate change will have a lasting impact that lessens the degree of overall harm.
Since 2006, Second Nature has supported bold commitments from leaders in higher education to address the most pressing issues of climate change via the Climate Commitments. During the past two decades, we have seen that driving change within the higher education sector has broad impacts beyond the campus, and that action by campuses even without a public commitment to carbon neutrality has ripple positive effects. This sector can and should be the bed of innovation that will drive the next century; it is the place where future leaders are shaped and educated. Climate action from higher education leaders catalyzes and focuses society’s activity in ways that exceed ordinary goals.
Second Nature’s Guidance and work supports campuses at the forefront of climate innovation, grounded in the understanding that higher education cannot fulfill its obligation to support a thriving civil society if that society is not sustainable.
Under the previous iteration of the Presidents’ Climate Leadership Commitments, climate neutrality was positioned like an end goal. However, with the launch of Unify for Climate, climate neutrality is a major milestone, not an end goal in and of itself. Second Nature encourages campuses to go beyond carbon neutrality and strive to achieve decarbonization.
The most effective method to reduce carbon emissions is through decarbonization. Under Unify for Climate, campuses have the opportunity to achieve and be recognized for reaching Carbon Neutrality through the Milestones Program, in addition to receiving public recognition for achieving several other milestones related to decarbonization. For example, the Leadership in Decarbonization milestone recognizes campuses for completely eliminating on-site fossil fuel combustion, and the Powered by Renewable Energy milestone recognizes campuses for purchasing the majority of their electricity from renewable energy sources.
Some types of emissions are indeed extremely difficult to abate, and Second Nature acknowledges the difficulty and nuance involved in fully electrifying or eliminating fossil emissions. In these cases, carbon offsets can be used to deal with residual emissions, or campuses can disclose financial contributions to mitigation valued in line with the sector social cost of carbon.
Second Nature recommends that the higher education sector prioritize common targets for decarbonization by midcentury, either 90% across Scope 1 & 2 emissions by 2045, or 80% reductions across all emissions by 2050. These targets support our update to the Climate Commitments to support the addition of a decarbonization target for Climate and Carbon Signatories. These targets can be adopted by Signatories in place of a prior carbon neutrality commitment, or added as a long term target that stretches the institution’s ambition beyond carbon neutrality. These targets can also be used by institutions that do not have a public carbon or climate commitment, but that want to set ambitious goals in line with a collective of peers.
The original commitments provided a way for campuses to achieve carbon neutrality as soon as possible. These early commitments jumpstarted the sector, catalyzed a proliferation of innovation and replication in climate action, enabled institutions to begin planning for real decarbonization, and surfaced important opportunities for higher education to do better. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, carbon neutrality should no longer be positioned as an end point of climate action, but it is still an important milestone for serious actors, and can jumpstart difficult conversations on campus about how to become truly accountable for the institution’s climate impact.
Second Nature maintains that carbon neutrality is important, and urges campuses to position carbon neutrality targets as mid-term goals in relation to a longer term decarbonization target. In this regard, carbon neutrality target dates should fall before mid-century. The goal of carbon neutrality (i.e., – or net-zero greenhouse gas emissions) – is intended to dramatically and quickly reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the current levels of over approximately 427 ppm (pre-industrial levels were approximately 280 ppm).
Pairing carbon neutrality and decarbonization targets offers a shared vision with short term and long term goals for institutions. While strategic planning must work within an institution’s current constraints (financial or otherwise), it must also set a compelling vision of the goals that make action worthwhile. An aggressive target date for carbon neutrality that falls before mid-century can spur creativity, innovation, and intellectual curiosity. A decarbonization date by mid-century allows that innovation and ambition in action to continue to grow. These targets provide a common aspiration, which helps foster alignment so that the many disparate parts of a large organization can work together toward the same goal, even when complexity and size makes centralized coordination of such efforts difficult.
Alongside ambitious targets, institutions are encouraged to be flexible and adaptable. Given the complexity of the challenge of achieving carbon neutrality and decarbonization, plans can and should be designed to be iterative and adaptable. We cannot know with certainty what the world will be like 20 or even 5 years from now. New laws, discoveries, technologies, and cultural shifts will impact the best-laid plans. Target dates for decarbonization and interim carbon neutrality can and should be adjusted as circumstances change, especially if it sets an institution on the leadership pathway.
If your institution needs assistance in changing targets or adopting new targets, contact the Second Nature Team.
The impacts of climate change are being felt in all regions of the world. From wildfires and droughts on the West Coast to longer hurricane seasons in the East, it is evident that extreme events in the U.S. are causing ever greater destruction. The events are costing us in terms of actual lives and dollars as well as in disruption to progress (deferred cost). Campuses are already and will continue to face direct impacts from climate-related extreme events, and many schools are already taking steps to increase tolerance to extremes such as drought, flooding, or storms. However, we also have an opportunity to engage not just in a protection-focused mentality, allowing us to recover from impact, but also in a much more proactive and community-focused approach that allows us to invest and flourish in the face of change.
The Resilience Commitment complements the investments already being made in decarbonization and carbon neutrality, encouraging institutions to include climate adaptation-specific goals., The Resilience Commitment also focuses on building community capacity to deal with a constantly changing climate, including changing extremes.
Higher education institutions are often at the heart of a community and provide expertise, potential future workforce, engaged young people, space for community events, and other advantages. Institutions also use community resources – water, power, transportation systems, and can either contribute to the diversity or the inequity of social access to education, training, and opportunity. In terms of resilience, it is critical that colleges and universities are working hand in hand with their community partners in examining resilience, increasing it, measuring progress towards shared goals, and leading smart and innovative solutions, even as we deal with climate disruptions and impacts along the way.
Second Nature acknowledges that colleges and universities have a lot of plans: strategic visions, campus master plans, academic plans, development plans, utility master plans, transportation master plans, and more. Taking climate action often results in campuses adding separate climate action and sustainability plans, and resilience plans to these existing efforts.
The most effective plans seek a balance between integration and uniqueness. On the one hand, it is an excellent goal to embed climate action principles into existing planning mechanisms (and this is often highly effective in shifting the culture of an institution in a more sustainable direction). The risk, however, is that these other plans are too broad to include the focused attention on the more complex climate goals. Finding this balance for the unique qualities of an institution is one of the most difficult aspects campus climate leaders face.
The goal of the Climate Leadership Commitments is to address the challenge of climate change holistically by transforming the way higher education operates and educates. Integrated planning to avoid the most serious effects of climate change while simultaneously responding to the already occurring and anticipated impacts is essential for achieving this goal.
The model of change that Second Nature champions is that of collective mobilization, driven by a critical mass of institutions bringing the diversity of higher education’s strengths to bear in pursuit of climate action. This began with a call to action via strong, public commitments by Presidents in the higher education sector, yielding big changes at multiple levels — not only in the institutions where those commitments originated, but in the sector at large, and even beyond.
The Commitments that Second Nature has developed and upheld for two decades guide presidents, sustainability directors, and other campus leaders to advance progress as efficiently and effectively as possible. Further, the Commitments have laid the groundwork and developed mainstream avenues for climate action such that now, institutions are making inroads in climate action and resilience without public commitments. Second Nature’s updated Guidance acknowledges all of these approaches, and with these institutions, Second Nature continues to maintain and update guidance resources for climate action that are relevant, accessible, and tailored to the higher education sector. Institutions that use the guidance, report, and provide feedback on their successes both receive insights from and contribute insights to the network, which advances innovation, catalyzes further leadership, and allows the sector to scale action effectively.
In partnership with the Sustainability Institute at the University of New Hampshire, Second Nature supports reporting and evaluation by a critical mass of campuses. Second Nature strives to develop our reporting requirements that enable institutions to measure progress and celebrate success both locally and nationally. Additional Climate Action Milestones are recognized for members of Second Nature’s Climate Leadership Network using reported data to verify claims, which acknowledges significant progress by institutions, and translates data into real world outcomes. More information about reporting can be found on the Reporting Guidance page.
Second Nature further supports leaders via convenings, via stakeholder engagement groups and our annual Climate Leadership Summit. Through these network building opportunities, individuals can directly engage in shaping the direction of the Climate Leadership Network and its impact. Finally, there are numerous regional and topical workshops, webinars, and other convenings each year. To ensure you hear about these opportunities, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
Second Nature would like to graciously thank all of the contributors and reviewers of this documentation and for the support and contributions all of our peers and colleagues throughout the Second Nature network over the 20 years of learning and practice that went into the creation of this guide.
Sector target developed by balancing the assertion in Anderson, K., Martin, P., & Nevins, J. (2021). Introduction and Abridged Text of Lecture: “Laggards or Leaders: Academia and Its Responsibility in Delivering on the Paris Commitments.” The Professional Geographer, 74(1), 122–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2021.1915809 that academia should reduce 100% of emissions by 2035, the Biden administration’s commitment to netzero across all industries by 2050, and work by Alex Barron, Aaron Strong, and Lucy Metts suggesting 100% decarbonization by 2050.
Energy Information Administration (2015) Annual Energy Outlook: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/
IPCC, 2014: Summary for Policymakers, In: Climate Change 2014, Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Edenhofer, O., R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel and J.C. Minx (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for-policymakers.pdf
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