Throughout Fall 2019, more than 200 students, faculty, staff, and administrators shared their feedback on how to make the campus more sustainable with the Office of Sustainability through a campus-wide survey and a series of in-person forums. Typical areas of focus included energy efficiency, waste & recycling, campus dining, and conservation. A summary of feedback and unabridged results are available here.
Vassar students, faculty, staff, and administrators were encouraged to lend their voices to the Climate Action Plan drafting process directly through participation on a Climate Action Team. Climate Action Teams met throughout the Spring 2020 semester for two to four hours per month to create concrete goals and recommendations informed by the results of the Climate Action Forums and the feedback forms.
The four public Climate Action Teams were tasked with the following topics:
Energy and Stationary Emissions (focusing on energy generation and purchasing and campus building standards)
Travel, Fleet, and Commuting (focusing on sponsored travel & study away, the grounds / security fleet, and faculty & staff commuting)
Land and Sequestration (focusing on grounds, landscaping, and stormwater management)
Food, Procurement, and Waste (focusing on campus dining, waste, recycling & compost, and general procurement decisions and strategies)
These teams ultimately created a set of 10 concrete “Goals” (measurable and trackable targets for sustainability) and 17 “Action Steps” (efforts working toward the Goals).
Throughout the development process, the Office of Sustainability worked with staff and administrators to ensure that the individuals and departments impacted by these recommendations considered them feasible and acceptable. In May 2020, the Climate Action & Sustainability Committee (CASC) approved these Goals and Action Steps in concept as the foundation for the 2020 Climate Action Plan (CAP).
During Summer 2020, an Environmental Defense Fund Fellow named Camila Bobroff consulted with the Office of Sustainability to review the draft Climate Action Plan. Camila evaluated the CAP through:
a global lens, using the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals to determine if/how Vassar’s climate action steps align with the goals, and how to measure progress toward those goals, and
a local lens, engaging stakeholders to develop a multi-criteria analysis to capture impact relative to input for each action step
Additionally, Camila developed roadmaps for implementing three critical measures to reducing air travel emissions at Vassar:
Improving tracking and analyzing air travel emissions,
Setting priorities for air travel, and
Offsetting necessary air travel.
Her work is reflected throughout this document, and an overview of all her recommendations is available as an appendix.
In October 2020, the Climate Action & Sustainability Committee finalized its review of the contents of this plan.