The Carbon Zero Transportation Alliance aims to help UMass reduce its carbon footprint by researching, informing, and advocating on transportation alternatives and decarbonization at UMass and for the UMass community.
Objectives:
This group aims to bring more faculty, staff, and students into applied and particpatory research, education, advocacy, and practice related to transportation alternatives and decarbonization.
Ultimately, this group hopes to make the case for investment in alternative and low-carbon transportation methods by UMass and area towns and cities where the UMass community travels, and wide use of by the UMass community of alternative and low-carbon transportation methods.
Spring 2026 Survey Project:
The Carbon Zero Transportation Alliance is currently developing a survey to gather information on undergraduate and graduate student transportation knowledge, experience, usage, attitudes, and choices, in order to:
Provide a baseline that can be used to estimate carbon emissions from student transportation that is not measured by UMass's current scopes 1, 2 and 3 accounting.
Provide a baseline of student current knowledge, experience, usage, attitudes, etc. of low-carbon, especially non-car, modes of transportation that can be used to build and support educational programming.
Inform consideration of future investments to promote transportation mode shifts, reduce emissions, and target education.
A broader, long-term education goal is to give students knowledge about transportation emissions and how to build, support, advocate for, and practice low-carbon transportation, so that when they graduate from UMass they can take their knowledge and experience to their new communities.
In all of these objectives and goals, we hope that the survey will be useful to the University as they continue developing their decarbonization action plan.
Get Involved:
We need people to help develop, advertise, run, and analyze the survey! As of February 2026, it's still in development. Contact us.
The Carbon Zero Transportation Alliance meets via Zoom biweekly on Thursdays from 1-2:15pm.
Email umasscarbonzeroalliance@gmail.com if you have any questions and/or are interested in joining this group.