bentley has been selected as a finalist for a second nature, climate leadership award for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from campus operations and increasing sustainability education in our business curricula.  both of these actions help to fulfill our pledge to the american college and university president’s climate commitment to be carbon neutral by 2030.

colleges and universities have been defined by what happens in academic departments. but the world has problems—serious, knotty, and increasingly interconnected problems—and these generally do not fit neatly into departments.

climate leadership requires casting climate change as a symptom of a larger set of problems—from poverty to overconsumption and bad design to biodiversity loss—that drive unsustainability and diminish quality of life for all. at western michigan university, we recognize that there is a tremendous opportunity to create transformative, system structure change by reimagining formal education and using it to build a culture of sustainability.

climate leadership is certainly about greenhouse gas reduction. we have reduced ours by 13% from 2008 to 2012 using no offsets, and we started at 12% below the acupcc average for doctoral-granting universities. over the past 17 years wmu increased building square footage by 19% and reduced energy use by 15%, and we just added 235 kw of pv. climate change leadership is also about behavior change research, water conservation, and green building. we are partnering with honeywell to explore the potential of electricity dashboards to facilitate consumption reductions. we have reduced water use by 50% over the past decade and are approaching stormwater neutrality. we have followed leed principles on 14 buildings, require all major new buildings to be leed silver certified at a minimum, and have the first leed eb gold building in higher education.

climate leadership is also about fiscal responsibility and wise, anticipatory administrators who model their sustainability commitments. the sustainable endowments institute has identified wmu as having the oldest documented quasi-revolving fund and the one with the second highest return on investment. wmu is a founding circle member of the billion dollar green challenge, our president serves on the acupcc steering committee, and we have built sustainability into our mission and strategic plan and use stars as a core framework for evaluating it’s implementation. climate leadership is about students who have the vision to create a sustainability fee (ours was the first in michigan), engaged faculty (42 faculty from all seven colleges participated in our sustainability across research & teaching initiative in year one and we are researching and developing sustainability core competencies), and integrating sustainability into our first year seminar (through a video competition).

finally, climate leadership includes cultivating community engagement. our community sustainability incubator model is gaining wider recognition as others begin to seek place-based solutions to climate change dilemmas. during the past year community and university partners collaborated to deliver more than 25 major climate change programs. we are leading the city of kalamazoo’s first ghg inventory and this year’s national campus sustainability day featured a community sustainability roundtable (with nine campus and community leaders, including our president and the mayor) and a sustainability slam.

for these and other efforts, the detroit free press recognized wmu as a 2013 michigan green leader. these collective efforts to build a culture of sustainability have begun to inform everything we do; it’s becoming second nature.

at morris, it’s easy to make the green choice–sustainability is so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives that we don’t always think about the scope of its reach. for more than 100 years, our campus has been grounded in a mission of environmental sustainability, and this mission touches all aspects of university life. both our pivotal successes and everyday victories range from the group up and make this place truly extraordinary!

morris is a finalist in the 2014 second nature climate leadership awards and represents 1 of only 4 baccalaureate colleges recognized. beginning april 1, 2014, you can vote for morris in a video contest.

learn more about our sustainability efforts at www.morris.umn.edu/sustainability

sustainability at allegheny college is a community endeavor that is as much about responsibility as it is about fun. in collaboration with the american college & university presidents’ climate commitment, we’ve pledged to achieve climate neutrality by the year 2020. to meet this goal we’ve integrated sustainability principles into budgets, daily operations, job descriptions, purchasing and contract policies, and our strategic plan. students explore and advance sustainability in interdisciplinary curriculum; innovative research such as aquaponics and wind feasibility studies; collaborations with the city of meadville and local schools; and extracurricular activities such as the annual october energy challenge and the trashion show.

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