UA unveils Sustainability & Climate Action Plan

BY SAM PARKER @samparker849

The University of Arizona Office of Sustainability recently announced the creation of a Sustainability & Climate Action Plan, the primary goals of which are for the university to reach zero carbon emissions by 2040 or sooner and to address the many challenges posed by the climate crisis.

Trevor Ledbetter, the director of the UA Office of Sustainability, explained that conversations about a need for carbon neutrality have been going on for a long time, but serious discussions about the university’s strategic plans began in 2018. During this year, the university set an interim goal of reducing scope 2 emissions (emissions that a company creates when the energy it uses is produced) on the UA’s Tucson campus to zero by 2025, which was accomplished through the universities renewable energy agreement with Tucson Electric Power.

While achieving carbon neutrality is the main goal of this plan, Ledbetter also hopes for the plan to take a more holistic approach to sustainability and mitigating harmful effects of the climate crisis.

“We also currently don’t have any formal sustainability goals beyond carbon neutrality, so part of this process will be setting institutional goals around water, around waste, around potentially teaching learning outcomes and how we integrate sustainability as a cultural value at the University of Arizona,” Ledbetter said.

In 2021, the university began working with consulting firm

Brailsford & Dunlavey in order to start gathering data and determining who to reach out to and how to engage the campus community for this action plan.

“We’ve been building up the engagement of the university community into the action plan over the last month, month and a half,” Ledbetter said. “We launched as a small advisory team that does include students, faculty and staff, and that will be doubling in size over the next month as we fill in working groups.”

These working groups will be established in April or May, along with an executive steering committee that will help approve different elements of the climate action plan.

At the April 11 Sustainability & Climate Action Plan Kick-Off, Jillian Buckholz, sustainability advisor at Brailsford &

Dunlavey, explained the role of these working groups throughout this process.

“These are going to be subject matter experts, people that are really passionate about a particular topic. Those recommendations from the working groups will come up through the core team and the advisory team moving up to executive leadership for recommendation,” Buckholz said. “And then again, the Executive Steering Committee will make final decisions on what will go into the product as well. Membership on these groups specified here is still pretty fluid. There’s room for students […]. So, if you are a student, please see yourself as part of this structure too.”

Poulami Soni and Halley Hughes, the co-directors of Students for Sustainability, are the only students currently serving on the advisory team.

Hughes is hopeful about the direction of the action plan, especially because of the diverse backgrounds of the people on the team.

“Other people on the advisory team are employees on campus, and it’s actually really diverse in terms of how they’re choosing to involve leadership, which is what makes me hopeful,” Hughes said. “There’s not only people who are dedicated to research, there are people who are in charge of investments, in charge of athletics, in charge of housing and recreation, there are people there who do retail. So, we’re really pulling from a lot of places in the university, which is really exciting to see.”

UArizona Divest is another student group involved in conversations about the climate action plan. The group met with the Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee, as well as Ledbetter and Sabrina Helm, an associate professor of retailing and consumer sciences at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a co-chair of the action plan, to discuss their ideas and requests for the plan.

Samantha Wetherell, a student leader of Divest, noted that the UA was doing good work in their reduction of scope 1 and 2 emissions, but made recommendations for how to reduce scope 3 emissions, which are “the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organization, but that the organization indirectly affects in its value chain,” according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

“There is the issue of how do you reduce those, because they are the most indirect emissions. They are things like conference travel for professors or commuting time, and including in scope 3 emissions specifically, is investments,” Wetherell said. “So, we’re trying to advocate for what we think is the best way to decrease those scope 3 emissions, through divestment, through investing in socially responsible investment.”

Wetherell and other student leaders of Divest are optimistic about the future of this plan, but they believe it has the capacity to be more expansive and involve divestment as a primary goal.

Another goal of this climate action plan is “fostering a culture of environmental awareness and appreciation” in the campus community, according to the UA Office of Sustainability.

“There has to be significant behavior change at the university,” Ledbetter said. “Change is hard, and conscious change can be harder if you’re asking people to do things differently. So it’s really