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Achieving Climate Neutrality by Building Local Partnerships: Local and High Quality Offset Purchasing
Presented by Amber Garrard
Green Mountain College
AASHE 2011

Summary:
Green Mountain College provides its students with opportunities to explore the meaning and significance of climate neutrality and encourages students to be engaged in the process of helping the College to reach that goal. From student activism spurring GMC to convert its heating plant to renewable fuel to creating a transportation policy for the institution, student participation has led to significant emissions reductions for the College. GMC is now climate neutral and the student voice shaped how neutrality was achieved.

This presentation is intended to outline the campus-wide participatory process undertaken by GMC to select carbon offsets. We will discuss how institutional priorities were assessed and integrated into decision-making. We will also outline the process used to select local offset projects using the ACUPCC guidelines to as a guide to choosing high quality offsets. The social and economic impacts of these choices on the local community and for Green Mountain College will be discussed. The aim of the presentation is to provide one example for small colleges looking to achieve climate neutrality, and to promote discussion of different strategies to move forward in this arena.

Setting:
Small rural school, SW Vermont. 800 students, mostly undergrad, residential. A few Masters students. Core courses include environmentalism. Students want to get actively involved in making sustainability a core value.

CAP drafted in 2009. set neutrality date of 2011

Used baseline data from 2007: 5800 metric tons of GHG.

New biomass cogen plant - data from 2010, plant not operating at optimum capacity, so inventory only dropped to 4000. Hope to see it drops more starting with 2011 numbers.

Focus on reductions first.

Now: how can we use offsets to reduce our carbon emissions?

Approach (from the ACUPCC voluntary carbon offset protocol)
• Real and tangible
• Additional
• Transparent
• Measurable
• Permanent
• Synchronous
• Verified
• Registered
• Retired
Source: Feb 2011 ACUPCC Implementer, 2008 document

Process:

Green Mountain brought three potential offset providers to campus:
• Sterling planet: large, provides offsets to well over 1000 large customers. Reasonably priced, verified, global.
• NativeEnergy: similar broker based in nearby Burlington, VT. Helps to support local businesses. Higher price, but able to identify local projects.
• CVPS CowPower: Central Vermont Public Service. Works with dairy farms in VT, collects methane in digesters that are turned into electricity. Have been buying RECs from CVPS for years, but the utility had recently developed a program to convert these into offsets. Byproduct: clean bedding product for cows, huge environmental savings. Also clean fertilizer, and a closed-loop system on the farm.

Another key player:
AGRefresh- environmental accountants who work with CVPS on Chicago Climate Exchange.

Groups came to campus and held a public forum.

Sterling Planet Proposal:
Offset: landfill gas, $5.50/MT
RECs: national wind, $1.50/MWH

NativeEnergy Proposal: more local
Offset: Landfill gas, $10
RECs: National wind: $1.45

CVPS Proposal:
Offsets: $10/MT with no RECs

Evaluation Process: open to public, campus. Students given extra credit to participate. People asked to evaluate in basis of five factors:
• Location
• Cost
• Local economic impacts
• Social impacts
• Academic value

Analysis
• Rank importance of values
• Assess provider's ability to meet priority characteristics
• Conclusion and GMC priorities: social and economic benefits, academic values
• Idenitify strengths and weaknesses

RECs vs Offsets
Renewable Energy Certificates
• proof that one MWh of elect has been produced from a renewable resource
• Premium price
• Not additional (does not ensure that electricity would not have been produced without the purchase)
Hooke water, M (2007), Trexler, M, Broekhoff, D., Kossloff, D. (2096)

Results:
Purchase of 5800 MT verified and retired offsets through CVPS Cow Power methane capture project
• Educational impact- able to visit the farms
• Regional economic benefit
• Regional social benefit

Q&A:
Process led by Sustainability Council, included four faculty members who got faculty buy-in.
Student Council promoted process to students.
A lot of the students involved were younger, required new educational effort.

Purchasing: had already been paying extra for green power from utility budget. A new administrative choice added the additional funds to buy the offsets.

The verifier, AGRefresh, certified the project just for the first year.
CVPS is looking to conglomerate their efforts on many additional local farms.
May look different moving forward.
Still an emerging market.

Thanks to Russ Pierson for transcribing this session! Join the AASHE 2011 Transcription Project and help spread the great ideas presented at the conference!

Identifying Change Management Strategies for Sustainability
Sara E. Smiley Smith,Environmental Studies Program Manager, Yale College
Doctoral candidate

Summary:
Efforts to improve sustainability at higher education institutions often require challenging shifts in organizational priorities, patterns of behavior, management strategies, and community expectations. In guiding these shifts, sustainability leaders must grapple with a diverse array of competing needs, requiring thoughtful approaches to change management. The change management literature itself is diverse, with numerous suggestions for improving processes. Using three distinct fields that take unique approaches to understanding change, this analysis attempts to distill lessons which can inform the challenges faced in institutional sustainability efforts.

• In the field of public health, experts grapple with complex regulatory settings, a diversity of patient or population needs, and highly complex information.
• The ecological study of climate change and efforts to manage impact reduction and mitigation, scientists work with complex systems analysis and data to draw conclusions and suggest actions.
• Finally, looking at change management through the lens of business management can provide additional insight into priority development, clear communication, and leadership.

Each of these examples provides insights that can be of great use to sustainability leaders as they attempt to identify the nuances of their systems, and manage the path forward.

Intro:
Efforts to improve sustainability often require huge shifts, with competing néeds.

Three examples:
• Public Health
• Ecology
• Business Management

Change management:
Implementing skills, processes and system needed to manage transition.

Elements:
Organizational priorities
Behavior patterns
Organizational structure

PUBLIC HEALTH:

• Complex environment
• Strict regulatory setting
• Diverse clientele
• No tolerance for error

1947 writings. Lewin
Three models
• Unfreezing system
• Moving things
• Refreezing

1954, Drucker
Management by Objectives: role of reprimand

Case study from UK
• Inform when goals not met
• If you can't measure it you can't manage it
• Reward strong performance

ECOLOGY:

Branch of biology focused on study of relationships of organisms one to another and their physical surroundings.

Theory of ecological character displacement, Brown and Wilson
• Dominant competitor displaces the other
• Competing species encourage phenotypic divergence

Lessons from an ecological perspective?
• Adaptation
• Resilience
• Natural selection

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT:

Kotter's 8 Steps: (John Kotter, Harvard)
1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition. Especially essential in terms of sustainability, which is not a hierarchical discipline.
3. Create a vision. Must be organized and sensible, we can't let it devolve into a "list of lists." We need to drive behavior.
4. Communicate the vision. Lead by example.
5. Empower others to act on the vision. Get rid of obstacles, reward nontraditional thinking, risk-taking.
6. Plan for and create short-term wins. Reward people for performance.
7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change.
8. Institutionalize new approaches.

Jick and Mento
• T. Jick - change management as a blend of art and science
• A. Mento - 12- step model incorporates addition of measurement toward goals and cultural context

Higher Education Perspective:
Aber and Mallory, Sustainability arrives with plural meanings. Importance of culture.

Thinking across cases:
• Understanding your institution
• Focusing on interactions between systems and the factors that enable or disable successful cross-avocation and cross-communication.
• Measure, assess, communicate
• Value divergent perspectives

There isn't one clear path toward change.

Q&A:
• Urgency: balance. Avoid the "Chicken Little" syndrome.
• Ecological change: relevance. The way ecologists think about change reinforces the need to think systemically, introduce resilience in our approach to human systems. We need to involve, continue to respond to various pressures.
• Balance "bottom-up" approach with need for buy-in from the top.

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Tony Cortese
Executive Director of Second Nature

Just a year after AASHE was created, AASHE, EcoAmerica and Second Nature came together to ask college and university presidents to step up and not only commit their institution to become climate neutral, but also to educate their students about climate change. (link to the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment website.)

We started with 12. Today, we have 676 institutions in all 50 states. And it includes every type of university and college in the US. From community colleges to big state universities to small private liberal arts colleges, tribal institutions and more. The diversity of the representation of this group is incredible.

Why did we do this? Because we thought the challenge of becoming sustainable as a society, not just in higher ed, required that higher education lead. And, that it not be just one institution leading but that all of them lead. We went to the Presidents because the challenges we face are so profound that only the Presidents could convene all the faculty, staff and students that we need to move society forward. We are 100% of the educational footprint. We educate all the K-12 teachers.

No one expects all the schools to be able to do this overnight. It is a flexible commitment, but it is accountable and tangible and allows a window into all of our progress. What's happened over the last 4 years. Innovation on so many campuses are happening as a result. The president of Chatham University said it was the ACUPCC that allowed the Board of Trustees to have the conversation that lead them to build the first sustainable campus on a 300 acre property outside of Pittsburgh. We have 400 climate action plans and 1,327 GHG inventories. It is the most significant database of what institutions are doing with regard to climate change.

(He shows a chart of Net Signatories, which shows that they have bounced some institutions out of the commitment as a result of their not fulfilling the commitment. So, the commitment does have accountability. But the retention rate is still 95%, which is incredible for a voluntary commitment during this economic downturn.)

The commitment requires that schools develop a Greenhouse Gas Emission and Climate Action Plan within a given timeframe. Accountability and Progress Reports are due in January 2012, which will record all kinds of new information about what schools are doing with regard to renewable energy and climate neutrality planning (they have to set a date).

Here's some examples of what is happening. On Ball State University, they are switching from coal to geothermal heating which will save money. At Butte College, they are the first institution to go grid positive on solar power. And they expect to save $50 million to $75 million over 15 years.

It's taken a lot of partners to make this happen (lot's of logos showing up on the screen). We don't do this in a vacuum. We could not have done it without all these partnerships.

The President's Climate Commitment is a presidential initiative. There is a committee of 26 presidents that provide the direction for the initiative. (Asks them to stand for round of applause.)

We have just started a Presidential Fellows Program in which recently retired presidents that are going to help current presidents implement the commitment. Why? Because they have walked in their shoes. We think the peer-to-peer work is one of the most important things we can do to advance this work. For example, we also have an Implementation Liaison Support Committee that supports the staff working to implement the technical parts of the commitment on their campus.

(Plays a video of President of Arizona State University, Michael Crowe.)

Before I close, I want to thank AASHE for being a partner all along. This year AASHE is playing a particularly critical role in the educational part of the commitment. How do we transform the education? We are delighted to have Cindy Thomashow, AASHE's Education Director, and AASHE, which has all the right connections, to help make that happen.

I'm delighted to see how far we have come in a relatively short time.

Thanks to Alexa Bakker for transcribing this session! Join the AASHE 2011 Transcription Project and help spread the great ideas presented at the conference!

Establishing a Research Agenda for the Sustainability Field
Julie Newman, Ph.D., Yale University
Shana Weber, Ph.D., Princeton University
(Julie Speaking)
Julie comes from a policy background, Shana has an ecology background. Both arrived in a place in their career where they're trying to find a way to frame and grow the research agenda.

(Shana speaking)
The field of sustainability is still young. We still don't have a unified research agenda whereas many other fields do.

Our Assumptions
-A unified research agenda for our field is important
-Sustainability programs are natural partners with but not currently paired with academic research agendas
-This agenda exists where the nuts and bolts operational experience intersects with current academic research interests
-That pairing would provide local solutions to global challenges
-Higher education is the right place

(Julie)
PSU, too, is struggling with finding a research agenda. A friend from PSU said "You're one of those 'pracademics'" to Julie. The knowledge and framework are there, it's just a matter of tapping into them.

What we don't know: a possible framework
-Ecological Systems
-Apply to both urban and rural universities
-Social Systems
-Engagement of people in this work
(Shana)
-Physical Systems
-Built environment. Old vs. new. Learning how to apply sustainability to old buildings, not just building new ones.
-Technical Systems
-Infrastructure. How do we integrate new technologies into energy conservation? Renewable technology.
-Organizational Systems
-How do we look at this from a research perspective?
-Integrative Systems
-Idea that all fields work together toward decision making.

Are theses the right terms? Can some of them be paired?

(Julie)
Questions for Exploration
1. Why is it important to have a unified research agenda?
2. What should a research agenda achieve, in plain language?
3. What kind of expertise do we need in our field to advance a research agenda?

How are these questions manifesting?
-Princeton & Yale
-Linking campus-based sustainability
-Sustainability in the lab. People are finally catching up with this. It's not that people never believed in it before, we are just more capable now.

Sample Research Questions - Yale
-How much aught a campus use to be sustainable
-How to balance small issues like water bottles with big issues

(Shana)
Sample Research Questions - Princeton
-What is the most effective combination of communication strategies to encourage behavior change?
-What are the financial benefits associated with programs perceived to be "soft" (bikeshares, ecoreps, garden projects, etc.)?
-What are effective incentives within the design and construction industry to maximize for energy efficiency and innovation?
-What are viable solutions to the lack of public transportation for commuters?

Analytical tools for potential use in defining agenda
-We all use these tools on a daily basis but we have not yet applied them to the research agenda
-Life Cycle Analysis
-Systems thinking
-Synthesis
-Cost Benefit Analysis

(Julie)
WORKSHOP TIME

-Take a moment to think of your work on campus and discuss the challenges and solutions.

Questions:
-Q: Who is sitting in the room?
A: (Took survey of group) Wide spread of faculty, half-faculty, sustainability directors, librarians, graduates, undergraduates

-Q: Can we define our focus?
A: (Answers from group) How can we learn to live well in our place (whatever it may be) and be good citizens? Majora's quote "local solutions to global challenges. We are anchors in our communities… we're the biggest customers. Maybe we need to publish a research agenda. Need to discuss research grants. Practitioners need to research and faculty need to practice so we can work together.

-Q: Which faculty do we engage around research? (Business? Communication?)
A: (Shana) Connect with the faculty that already have an interest and have been collecting data. Ideal scenario has been that they've had funding that brought faculty out of the woodwork to do great research. Or find faculty that are teaching courses about topics that are of interest.
Q: Does one section of faculty have more credibility and promise?
A: (Shana) Engineering was first for Princeton

-Q: Shouldn't we look outside of campus
A: (Julie) Definitely! Look at broad scale and connections. (Shana) One of the outcomes of a better research agenda is more cumulative impact.

-Q: Where are most faculty members looking for grants? What are grants offering to fund?
A: (Not much response) NSF

-Q: What are universities uniquely qualified to do that is transferrable to hospitals, etc.? How do we tap the brainpower of faculty, students, etc.?
A: (Julie) Links back to first question

-Q: Come up with examples of initiatives
A: (Group member) Flood research, job creation, crop growth in Vermont.

-Q: What is driving the research agenda?
A: (Shana) Instead of being solely industry or academic interests, what is the optimal combination of interests? Could define by profit (industry approach). What is our end point? That's what today's discussion is about.

-Q: How are we sharing this information. It's all disciplinary and there are a lot of separate journal
A: (Group members) Proceedings of the National Academy of Science just started a sustainability focus. We need to constantly ask ourselves what the barriers to interdisciplinary research are.

Cloud of knowledge created… bring it to the next level where it comes together.

Over the past several months, we’ve heard of a lot of anti-government street protests in Africa and the Middle East.

Now there’s news of a government taking to the streets in protest.

The Somalia’s government decided it was fed up and needed to vent its frustrations.

What’s that you say? Does Somalia even have a government? And if so, who, or what, are they protesting?!

The answer to the first question is yes… sort of. Somalia has been known for its lack of a working federal government, but a transitional government is in place now. Even though this transitional government is severely lacking in power, they managed to put together a protest yesterday.

The protest was against Al-Shabab, a terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda. The rally seems to be a backlash against Al-Shabab’s suicide bomb last Tuesday that killed 70-100 people. Not only has Al-Shabab targeted Somalis, it also attacked Uganda last year and even kidnapped a French tourist in Kenya earlier this month.

Though the protest likely will not inspire a change on heart in Al-Shabab, the process was important signal of new Somali resolve in the fight against terrorism.

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the Chrome Browser.

Dart's syntax is familiar, if boring, making it easy for current programmers to adapt.

main() {
      var name = 'World';
      print('Hello, $name!');
    }
    

The source code for the Dart to javascript compiler as well as examples and tools is available online in the Dart Google Code Site.

Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. The design goals for the new language are said to include fixing many of Javascript's flaws, better performance, better support for large-scale projects" and improved security features.

WIle Dart doesn't push the programming language envelope, it looks like a welcome improvement over Javascript.

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. It's described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on current browser. Google says it it exploring adding the Dart virtual machine to the Chrome Browser.

Dart's syntax is familiar, if boring, making it easy for current programmers to adapt.

main() {
      var name = 'World';
      print('Hello, $name!');
    }
    

The source code for the Dart to javascript compiler as well as examples and tools is available online in the Dart Google Code Site.

Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. The design goals for the new language are said to include fixing many of Javascript's flaws, better performance, better support for large-scale projects" and improved security features.

WIle Dart doesn't push the programming language envelope, it looks like a welcome improvement over Javascript.

Joseph Tuzo graduated from UMBC this past May with a B.S. in Computer Science. His research projects included analyzing the dynamics of simulated roadway traffic in order to reduce commute times, and work with UMBC's MAPLE Lab on the Playing to Program (P2P) Project. To learn more about Joseph's research pursuits, read his research profile.