Northwest Carbon Neutrality Task Force

Welcome! The NWS Carbon Neutrality Task Force is a group of students, faculty, and parents/guardians who are striving for carbon neutrality at the Northwest School in Seattle, WA. 

In the 24-25 School Year, the Carbon Neutrality Task Force has been working on a number of initiatives including school-wide education campaigns, an updated emissions report for the 2023-24 School Year, and tangible achievements in sustainability (purchasing carbon offsets!). Read the report for more detail: 2025 Carbon Neutrality Report

Past Reports:

2023 Carbon Neutrality Report 

In December 2020, students from the Northwest School Environmental Interest Group, noting the urgency of the climate crisis, proposed to the NWS Board Facilities Committee that Northwest adopt a goal to become carbon neutral (reach net-zero emissions) by 2030. In January 2021, EIG submitted a proposal to the interim head of school Dennis Bisgaard to create a Task Force of students, faculty, and parents who would develop a comprehensive plan of procedures to achieve carbon neutrality, determine a method to track progress, and create a detailed timeline for milestones. The Task Force has been at work since March 2021 creating this report. It outlines strategies and actions that would enable The Northwest School to meaningfully achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, in a manner that focuses on emissions reduction and avoids or limits use of carbon offsets. Here are the slides that the Task Force used to present to the NWS Senior Leadership Team, full Board of Trustees, and Board Facilities Committee. In September 2022, Northwest became the first primary or secondary school in the nation to publicly commit to a 2030 carbon neutrality goal that avoids offsets. Please reference the full timeline page for more information about our process and our current focuses. 

In November 2021, the Task Force sent a survey to the NWS community asking for their thoughts on climate action at NWS and our initial recommendations. 

Some general takeaways from the survey:

• 88% of respondents support climate action at Northwest. There is strong support for doing more to address climate change in our operations, buildings, transportation, and commuting. 

• Weaving climate action into school budgeting, strategic planning, and curriculum are top priorities for respondents, with over 75% support for each. 

• No one selected that they are “not worried about climate change.”

• Many respondents thought the biggest barriers to action would be funding and the sustained investment of time and energy that would be required of both the administration/board and entire body of students, faculty, and parents. These are very important considerations, so we tried to cover funding and accountability (at least to a preliminary level) in the report, and we welcome any feedback. 

Why Does Carbon Neutrality at NWS Matter?

• According to scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “without increased and urgent mitigation ambition in the coming years, leading to a sharp decline in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, global warming will surpass 1.5°C in the following decades, leading to irreversible loss of the most fragile ecosystems, and crisis after crisis for the most vulnerable people and societies.”

• Climate change is a social justice issue! It is a threat multiplier, which means it exacerbates existing inequalities and most impacts people who already experience discrimination, including BIPOC, women, people with disabilities, low-income people, and people in the Global South through loss of housing due to natural disasters, food scarcity, health disparities, and more (basically, in every way imaginable). The systems of domination and extraction at the root of white supremacy, the patriarchy, etc. are also at the root of environmental destruction. These issues cannot be understood and rectified in a silo. 

• The top-down interventions are critical to set broad collective tasks for governments and nations. But along with many multilateral national tasks, there are several Articles in the Paris Agreement with a bottom-up focus involving community-based interventions which are just as crucial to mitigating and adapting to climate change, including strengthening adaptation and building capacity from personal and community levels (especially frontline communities), sharing climate knowledge, and establishing transparency. 

• Therefore, as a school with a fairly large student body and profile among independent schools, whose mission is grounded in “respect for ourselves, others and the environment” and “graduating students who believe they have a positive impact on the world,” it is important for us to set an example for other institutions. We must make sustainable changes for our futures.

Terminology

• Offsets are investments through outside organizations in projects which indirectly balance our carbon footprint, such as carbon sequestration (e.g. planting trees) or increasing renewable energy.

• Scopes:

  1. Scope 1 (All direct missions from the activities of an organization or under their control): school buses + natural gas

  2. Scope 2 (Indirect emissions from electricity purchased and used by the organization): already carbon neutral due to Seattle City Light (SCL)

  3. Scope 3 (All other indirect emissions from activities of the organization, occurring from sources that they do not own or control): student/faculty commuting, int’l student/administrative/school trip flights

Our Emissions Starting Point

• Over the past few years, bus transportation, commuting, international flights and natural gas have been the highest producers of GHGs at Northwest. 

NWS 2018-2019 GHG emissions:

• During the 2018-2019 School Year The Northwest School emitted 1,360 metric tons of CO2e greenhouse gases (CO2 equivalent, 

• Of the emissions directly in our control, 71% were from natural gas in our buildings, 20% were from busing, and 9% were from Seattle City Light electricity. Emissions not directly in our control, from school-sponsored air travel, international student air travel, and student/faculty commuting accounted for 87% of our emissions during the 2018-2019 school year.