How to Shop for Carbon Offsets (+ Update on STARS)

From Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed: At the AASHE conference, representatives from the American College and University Presidents Climae Commitment released guidelines to assist colleges and universities in their purchase of carbon offsets and AASHE representatives discussed progress with the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS):

Under the Presidents Climate Commitment, colleges set their own time frames for reaching a climate-neutral state. In the short term, given current constraints like fossil fuel-based electricity grids and inefficient older buildings, a college looking to quite quickly cut net emissions to zero would probably have to rely in part on the controversial and confusing process of purchasing carbon offsets, according to new, 73-page guidelines released by the Presidents Climate Commitment at the conference Monday.

The authors of the guidelines are sensitive to the criticism that offsets allow wealthy institutions to “buy their way out” of their sins by purchasing credits for emissions reduced elsewhere but not through their own activities. The guidelines emphasize that colleges should focus on reductions within their own organizations first, while “investments in offsets can be made as soon as these activities are initiated” (in other words, the two steps can happen simultaneously, so long as internal reductions are first pursued and prioritized).

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In addition to conducting inventories of their greenhouse gas emissions, many colleges have been conducting more general sustainability audits, a process described in depth at a session on “Assessing Sustainability” Monday afternoon. Several speakers described using the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, a common self-reporting framework being piloted by about 90 institutions that offers the promise of comparisons across institutions over time.

Others described institution-specific efforts. Beau Mitchell, sustainability coordinator for the College of the Menominee Nation, in Wisconsin, described combing through other colleges’ sustainability audits to identify 108 indicators applicable to tribal colleges. Given the high value many Native American tribes place on the land, he described incorporating cultural indicators, quantifying how many students speak a native language or attend ceremonies, for instance, and gaining qualitative data through interviews. “What did your elders tell you about the woods; what did your elders tell you about the water?”