Sustainability has been an important value at Cornell for decades. Cornell’s first energy conservation initiative was begun in 1985. Lake Source Cooling, our renewable source of chilled water on campus, was implemented in 2000. The following year, Cornell became the first university to sign the Kyoto Protocol. In 2005, Alice Cook Hall became the first LEED certified building on campus.
Since then, Cornell has redoubled its efforts toward sustainability in campus operations, as we work toward our goal of becoming a carbon-neutral campus, using 100% renewable energy, by 2035. Cornell’s commitment to this goal was one of the most aggressive and earliest of major universities and serves as an important reflection of our values.
Over the past decade, Cornell has reduced its carbon emissions by 37%, constructing efficient buildings and retrofitting older ones, and implementing programs such as our Energy Conservation Initiative, which replaced lighting in indoor and outdoor spaces with energy efficient LED bulbs, saving the campus more than 18,000 tons of carbon emissions.
Solar power is another way Cornell is trimming its carbon footprint. In 2019, the university’s sixth large-scale solar project went online, doubling the university’s offsets from renewables and adding enough electricity onto the grid to serve about 3,000 average residential homes. We also joined more than 20 universities to launch the New York State Higher Education Large Scale Renewable Energy Consortium, a group that is working to achieve 100% renewable electricity use through combined purchasing.
Looking forward, Cornell is investing in the exploration of new technologies like Earth Source Heat, which has the potential not only to enable us to achieve our goal of carbon neutrality, but also to be exported for use elsewhere, decreasing carbon emissions beyond our own campus. Cornell is viewed as a leader in sustainability, achieving a “gold” rating by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education’s (AASHE) Sustainability, Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System (STARS) for eight years running.
Cornell also boasts some of the world’s leading researchers and experts in all facets of sustainability – from climate change to sustainable agriculture, renewable energy and conservation, to name just a few. Our Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability has more than 550 faculty fellows, who both conduct research and teach courses on sustainability. Many of these faculty members are also directly engaged with policymakers at the local, state, national and global levels helping to address the global climate crisis. Learn more about Cornell’s work to be operationally sustainable on our Sustainable Campus website, and about our educational and research work on sustainability on the Cornell Atkinson website.
Comments are totally anonymous unless you identify yourself in the body of the posting.
