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Forum assesses green effort
The university community got the chance yesterday to publicly review and comment on a draft plan to transform UB into a “climate neutral” campus during the spring sustainability forum held in the Student Union Theater, North Campus.
The UB Climate Action Plan, developed by the Environmental Stewardship Committee, outlines steps for UB to ultimately lower its net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to zero. The elimination of these emissions is a requirement of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment signed by President John B. Simpson in March 2007. The deadline for developing a final version of the plan is September 2009.
“For a considerable amount of time, [UB] has been picking the low-hanging fruit in terms of cost-savings and energy conversation,” said Robert Shibley, chair of the Environmental Stewardship Committee and point person for UB’s comprehensive physical plan. Simpson’s signing of the climate commitment places UB among those institutions prepared to take the next step in fighting climate change, he said.
Constructing more energy-efficient structures or “smart buildings”—as well as retrofitting pre-existing buildings to meet higher energy standards—remains one of the most important strategies for curtailing GHG emissions as UB expands under UB 2020, said Michael Wironen, a sustainability specialist for Ecology & Environment Inc., who also spoke at the forum.
Other energy-saving proposals include upgrading lighting in campus buildings, curtailing heat loss from leaky doors and windows via “building envelope improvements,” purchasing power from renewable sources and generating power on campus using technologies ranging from solar panels to windmills to growing plants for biofuel.
A survey recently conducted by UB Green revealed that 71 percent of UB’s overall GHG emissions come from purchased electricity and the on-campus “stationary combustion” of fossil fuel, Wironen said.
A hot topic among forum attendees was parking and transportation, including proposals to limit freshman parking, to price parking based on distance from the academic core and to encourage public transportation, bicycling and carpooling. “Three people in one car versus one person in three cars can have a huge impact,” he said, noting that 14 percent of UB’s GHG emissions come from university commuters and 9 percent from university-related air travel.
Using classroom-clicker technology to record their impressions, many attendees supported unbundling the cost of parking from student transportation fees so that UB could begin charging students to keep a car on campus.
Other suggestions in the plan include reducing paper waste among employees, lowering travel-related emissions by encouraging telecommuting, fostering student interest in sustainability by offering more courses—or a new undergraduate major—on the topic and boosting community involvement via public lectures and symposia.
Proposals for paying for the plan included redirecting cash recovered from on-campus energy-savings, including $9 million per year from previously recovered costs, into revenue streams dedicated to implementing the plan’s suggestions.
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