Amherst College
PA-2: Commitments and Planning

Amherst College has committed to decarbonizing its scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 2030. The college developed a climate action plan based on the following principles, vision, and goals:

The College's Climate Action Plan is:

Collaborative: The Amherst College community will be conscious of our role as good neighbors in the Town of Amherst and beyond. We will work collaboratively as a campus, as a Five College Consortium member institution, as Massachusetts residents and as global citizens to learn from each other and collaborate when feasible.

Conservation-Focused: We will prioritize projects and solutions that support real and effective reductions in our emissions.

Dynamic and Timely: As technology, behavior, emission profiles and many other influencing factors change, so must the plan and its implementation, in order to stay relevant and actionable to the larger goal of addressing climate change. We must have plans and timelines in place to review and update our path forward with this larger goal, and our guiding principles, in mind. We must also consider the urgency of climate change, and that actions now are more valuable than actions in the future.

Financially Viable: The plan will be developed with financial sustainability in mind, both for immediate priorities and into the future. This will ensure its implementation remains steadfast even in times of economic constraint.

Mission-Driven: The mission of Amherst College is to educate students “of exceptional potential from all backgrounds so that they may seek, value and advance knowledge, engage the world around them, and lead principled lives of consequence.” To support this, the plan must not live in a silo of operational improvements hidden to passersby; instead it must incorporate and support communication, engagement and educational opportunities throughout its implementation, highlighting successes and collaborating on challenges. Additionally, we need to consider the evolution of “lives of consequence” as we mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a world impacted by climate change.

Scalable: Greenhouse gas reductions achieved by Amherst College will be insignificant when compared to the global reductions needed to stay below a 1.5-degree temperature increase. By experimenting with novel approaches to reductions and sharing them with the world, we can scale our impact exponentially. Priority will be given to solutions that have this potential.

Transparent: The development of this plan, its implementation and any future updates will be done in a transparent way that seeks the input of all interested and impacted stakeholders.

Campus Decarbonzation by 2030

https://www.amherst.edu/about/sustainability/reporting-and-operations/climate-action-plan 

Amherst’s Climate Action Plan is an ambitious set of initiatives that constitute a critical part of our response to climate change. We are one of only a small number of schools nationwide taking on a project of this magnitude. The plan lays out an actionable blueprint to decarbonizing all of the college's scope 1 and scope 2 emissions by 2030. 

The plan has a number of specific action items, the details of which can be found on the CAP website above:

(1) Transition the campus' heating and cooling systems from steam to low temperature hot water.

(2) Create low temperature hot water through ground source heat pumps.

(3) Procure zero-emission renewable electricity to meet all of our heating, cooling, and electrical needs.

(4) Reduce our energy load and reap greater benefits from our energy system.

(5) Provide deep engagement and experiential learning opportunities related to climate action.

As part of the plan we conduct an annual assessment of our scope 1 and 2 emissions to track progress towards our 2030 goal.

The college recognizes that achieving sustainability is perhaps the defining idea of our era. The consequences of not achieving sustainability are certainly catastrophic as humanity faces a series of complex, interconnected sustainability challenges (e.g., climate change, racial and socioeconomic inequities, resource depletion and degradation, biodiversity loss, growing population). The problems are global in scale, long-term in scope, plagued by uncertainty, and in many cases politically contentious. The urgency to act grows with each moment if we are to set ourselves on a sustainable path forward.

Amherst has a major role to play when it comes to leveraging our research, education, operations, and engagement to help effectively address and seek solutions for these major sustainability challenges. At Amherst College, sustainability isn’t a buzzword. It’s a part of our identity, our core values, and our envisioned future!

The Office of Sustainability serves as the focal point and catalyst for awareness-building, collaboration and action on sustainability issues across campus, facilitating and coordinating sustainability efforts across the curriculum, co-curriculum, and campus operations. We track the integration of sustainability across our curriculum at the course and department level and aspire to expand our curricular offerings in sustainability. Although it is an internal goal of the Office of Sustainability to have every department offer at least one sustainability course and at least faculty in every department conducting sustainability research, we do not yet have a formal publicly stated objective. This coming year we are working on the college's first comprehensive sustainability strategic plan.

The sustainability office offers a series of novel sustainability education programs designed to engage faculty, staff, and students around new ways of thinking, collaborating, and problem solving and the skills and knowledge necessary to deal with the sustainability challenges of the 21st century. The office serves as an animating academic hub where professors, students, staff, and community leaders wrestle with the most complex issues associated with forging a more sustainable future. The office tracks campus engagement through participation across the large number of events and programs coordinated through the office. Our goal ideally is to have a touch point with every member of the campus community (although not yet a formal publicly stated objective), but our focus has been on student engagement - awareness of the office's programs and opportunities, participation in our programs and events, and engagement with the campus sustainability efforts. The office provides an annual summary to the key campus stakeholders. This coming year we are working on the college's first comprehensive sustainability strategic plan which hopes to formalize these goals.

The college has an ambitious climate action plan, as already described, that among other things lays out a clear plan to decarbonize our campus energy system. We are in year 2 of a 7 year $150 million+ campus infrastructure overhaul that will replumb our main campus for low temperature hot water (to replace our current steam distribution system), install 130+ deep geothermal wells, and procure renewable sources of electricity to run the entire system. We plan to complete the transition to the new system by 2030!

The college has written an anti-racism plan aimed at making our Amherst community truly equitable and inclusive. The plan is one of the focal efforts by the administration in fostering a more sustainable campus community. The goal of a liberal arts education is to fight prejudice and ignorance with knowledge and understanding, changing the world for the better. At this pivotal moment in the nation’s history, we have an opportunity to join together to fight systemic racism, racist prejudices, and discrimination.

https://www.amherst.edu/about/diversity/antiracism/anti-racism-plan 

As part of our commitment to addressing climate change, the college has committed to divesting our endowment from fossil fuels by 2030. Specifially, the Board approved that the college:

• Make no new investments in public or private equity fossil fuel investment funds.  
• Phase out the remaining investments in directly held, long-term fossil fuel funds over time. By 2025, we anticipate that these investments will have been reduced by 60% from current levels, and that we will no longer hold any such investments on or about 2030.
• Instruct the managers of our separately managed accounts not to acquire or hold on our behalf direct investments in fossil fuel companies.
• Continue to engage with all of our managers to ensure that each appropriately incorporates long-term risks, including those posed by climate change, into their investment analysis. This includes our generalist investment managers who may, from time to time, hold investments in fossil fuels.