On April 22, 1970, millions of people joined in observing the inaugural Earth Day. In New York City, Fifth Avenue was closed to vehicles for 45 blocks, and over 100,000 residents passed through observances at Union Square Park. Eighty miles north, the Vassar chapter of Protect Your Environment offered a comparatively smaller slate of activities, with a series of lectures, movie screenings, and a teach-in.
Vassar – and the world beyond – observed the 50th Earth Day under radically different circumstances. In the months since rampant wildfires have devastated the West Coast. Tropical storms and hurricanes have battered the nation, from the Rio Grande Valley to the Hudson Valley. And the COVID-19 pandemic has caused untold harm across the globe.
The urgency – and moral necessity – of immediate climate action has never been more evident.
Vassar’s 2016 Climate Action Plan outlined the “framework and […] actions that are needed to demonstrate regional and national leadership and set the trajectory of the College toward carbon neutrality.” Perhaps its most substantial impact was establishing Vassar’s commitment to carbon neutrality no later than 2030.
The 2020 Climate Action Plan results from over a year of effort from hundreds of members of the Vassar community. It builds on the successes and lessons learned from Vassar’s 2016 Climate Action Plan. Like its predecessor, it contains high-level frameworks and immediate actions to work toward carbon neutrality.
It also contains two additional commitments.
The first is becoming a signatory of the Second Nature Presidents’ Climate Commitment. As a signatory to the Commitment, Vassar pledges to share its annual progress towards carbon neutrality and develop efforts to increase the campus’s and community’s resilience to climate change impacts.
The second is to build the next five years of climate action around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Sustainable Development Goals were established in 2015 as a framework for global sustainability efforts and were adopted by all UN Member States. The 17 SDGs balance the need for immediate climate action with the moral imperative to create a more equitable future without poverty, hunger, and discrimination.
While not every Sustainable Development Goal will directly apply to an action undertaken in the 2020 Climate Action Plan, adopting the SDGs as a framework will ensure a more equitable and holistically sustainable future for the campus and the community.