By: Katie Koenig
I’ve been working for the past couple semesters on a large research project to provide data on other universities’ carbon offsetting strategies to guide Emerson’s strategy to achieve carbon neutrality. I’ve mentioned this in prior posts, but I’ve officially reached the final stage of this project, no longer researching but rather summating the data I’ve collected. You can look at a slides summary here.
By considering ways to offset or fully reduce more of our emissions as an institution, Emerson will be taking an important step to reach our goal of achieving neutrality by 2030. There are many ways Emerson has already reduced institutional emissions on campus—something that I’m currently working on researching to create a detailed map of campus with all sustainable architectural aspects listed. Still, offsetting is an especially important part right now, since some emissions are incredibly difficult to reduce or negate entirely, such as Scope 3 emissions like travel emissions.
In addition, achieving carbon neutrality is only the first step to becoming a fully green institution, especially when relying on carbon offsets to do so. Even though paying money to help support emissions reductions projects elsewhere is a valuable action, Emerson can more directly contribute to climate change mitigation by reducing our own direct and indirect emissions in order to become a carbon zero university.
Whether it’s possible to achieve zero carbon—actually producing no emissions, not just offsetting them to declare net carbon neutrality—it’s still an important goal to work towards, even just to become more conscientious of what emissions are actually necessary to the College’s core operations, like transportation for example.
Database Research
For this database of offset projects, I included a long list of information about each project, including but not limited to location, primary and secondary environmental and community benefits, and the organizations that certified that each project actually had the impact that it claimed to have.
While researching, I started by looking into campuses deemed carbon neutral according to the standards set by the organization Second Nature. In addition to universities highlighted or mentioned by Second Nature, these institutions often provided detail into their entire process of investing in carbon offsets and reducing their carbon footprint on their university websites. This was particularly useful considering the ultimate goal of this project is to provide examples of other universities’ investment strategies for Emerson to base our own strategy on.
Universities often publicly share information on their websites about the carbon offsets projects in which they have invested, in addition to other strategy decisions about how they came to invest in the way they did, and what other actions they were taking to reduce their on-site emissions. I then dove deeper into these projects by reviewing their individual websites when they existed and double checked information against carbon offset registries like the Carbon Action Reserve (CAR).
It was especially important for me to confirm these projects with trustworthy third-party verifiers, CAR being just one of multiple that I relied on. One major critique of the voluntary carbon market, which I explain more fully in my prior post on it, is that there can be untrustworthy projects that suck in money and effort but don’t actually impact the environment and reduce carbon-equivalent emissions the way they claim to do.
By verifying the projects, I was able to mitigate this concern, in addition to pulling much more information about the specific, quantifiable impacts of each project than I otherwise would have. This helps avoid the pitfall of investing in projects that have little impact on the environment. Also, it allows for investment in projects that have impacts related to what emissions are offset. For example, if certain investments are intended to offset carbon emissions from travel, it may be interesting to invest in projects in foreign countries or related to offsetting transportation emissions.
Conclusion
Overall, I found it easiest to research universities with notable sustainability practices and strategies, then look into the specific projects and policies they took towards carbon offsetting. I will highlight that a significant minority of offset projects are managed by the industries that are polluting what they are offsetting. I also found it reasonable that several notable universities, as detailed in the database, invested in offsets that improved the regional environment in a way that was connected to the emissions the university was offsetting.
It’s inspiring to see so many universities already focused on emissions-mitigation practices. My hope is to see similar practices implemented on our campus, not just through carbon offsets, which, although useful, are just one tool to consider our environmental impact as an institution, and certainly aren’t the be-all end-all of sustainable practices.