Bowdoin: A Blueprint for Carbon Neutrality in 2020
Draft Report - 10/21/2009
Bowdoin College has made a commitment to become carbon-neutral by the year 2020.
This demonstration of the College’s environmental stewardship is the embodiment of one of the College’s fundamental principles—stated in the inaugural address by Joseph P. McKeen, Bowdoin’s first president—“to count Nature a familiar acquaintance.”
This ambitious effort to erase the College’s carbon footprint reflects a heightened institutional response to the growing consensus on the catastrophic effects accelerating climate change will have on the natural world and human societies if current trends are not offset by innovative and creative solutions on a global scale.
Bowdoin is not alone in realizing the key role that higher education must play in educating a new generation of citizens who are environmentally literate and capable of innovating the new solutions and technologies required to meet these pressing environmental and social challenges.
In 2007, Bowdoin President Barry Mills signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC)—a pledge by leaders of more than 640 colleges and universities to move their campuses toward carbon neutrality and build new academic pathways for addressing sustainability issues.
As part of the ACUPCC, colleges committed to set a date by which their institutions would achieve carbon neutrality and to develop a public institutional action-plan for doing so. After a year of intensive study, the College developed a detailed implementation plan for becoming carbon neutral by 2020.
Bowdoin’s Climate Neutrality Implementation Plan was developed by a team of Bowdoin staff, faculty, students, and trustees who evaluated a wide range of strategies for increased energy efficiency, transportation adaptations, renewable-energy generation, and carbon offset options that will be necessary in order to erase our carbon footprint.
The Bowdoin Blueprint for Carbon Neutrality is an overview of the basic goals and strategies of that plan, with an explanation of the rationale, costs, and outcomes associated with these important steps.
It is a dynamic plan that will be revisited and updated every two years so that Bowdoin community members can measure the effectiveness of strategies, evaluate the financial feasibility of specific projects, and incorporate new technological advances.
This is not a simple initiative. It will demand participation from all corners of campus to achieve carbon neutrality in little more than a decade. Some of the strategies will immediately reduce our carbon footprint; other options will take longer to yield results and require greater financial investment. The educational components are more difficult to quantify, yet no less important. In many ways, they are the College’s most potent response to the uncertainties that lie ahead, for they will shape the hearts and minds of those on whom the future rests.
The assumptions underlying this particular path to carbon neutrality are not fixed, nor should they be. The Carbon Neutrality Implementation Plan will be updated, reassessed, and modified to reflect changes at Bowdoin as well as in the world. This updating process could identify a new path to achieve carbon neutrality more quickly, through different strategies or different costs.