illustrated text reading: sustainable futures
illustrated text reading: sustainable futures

Carleton College has demonstrated a strong commitment to climate action through significant investments in renewable energy and campus-community collaboration, as well as divestment from fossil fuels. Since 2008, we have reduced our direct operational and purchased fossil energy needs by 54% and 72%, respectively — beyond most institutions that have proclaimed carbon neutrality, which often relies on purchased offsets and renewable energy credits.

We achieved remarkable progress with Carleton’s 2011 Climate Action Plan, which prioritized integrating sustainability into our facilities and utility planning — including the construction of a LEED Platinum-certified integrated science complex, Minnesota’s first geothermal district energy system, and the first group of PHIUS-certified student housing buildings in the U.S. — and fostering a culture of operational sustainability.

Our students, faculty, and staff have played an important role in connecting education to action and supporting complementary cultural change. Collaborative initiatives — such as the Food Recovery Network, Lighten Up, Empty Bowls, and Carleton’s support for Northfield’s Climate Action Plan— help us connect in meaningful ways and apply the expertise we have on campus to the broader interests and needs around us. Through divestment, we support climate action through our choices and stand for a healthier, more just future.

Students pour soup into handmade bowls on the college Bald Spot

Even with these past successes, we feel urgency not only to continue, but to deepen our response. Students especially have asked for more experiential and interdisciplinary learning opportunities to engage the climate crisis, sustainability and environmental justice. The call we hear from students is also one that calls for education innovation to more deeply connect education and action.

In 2020, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM, or the National Academies) underscored the imperative for sustainability education: we must empower students to drive meaningful change toward a sustainable future. This catalyzed action, including the formation of the White House Forum on Campus and Community-Scale Climate Change Solutions, a national directive to better link colleges to the communities around them. Specifically, the forum called for colleges and universities to connect with their communities in applied and creative climate action by deepening partnerships, centering Indigenous communities and other marginalized populations, collaborating with those most impacted by the climate crisis, and deploying solutions that occur at the intersection of sustainability, equity, and community.

As years pass, there is awareness that more learning experiences should be situated in authentic challenges. The Aspen Institute’s 2024 Higher Ed Climate Action Initiative suggests that institutions must: prioritize climate action, educate climate literacy and solutions, engage and support affected communities, research and innovate solutions, and communicate and support broad climate action, including working beyond campus to spur and support accelerated climate action. Our students can act directly, whether by analyzing the data needed for decisions, connecting with and learning community priorities related to environmental issues, or helping our institution, our partners, our city, our state, and our country fulfill climate action goals.

Our vision for sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice places students and their education and experiences at the center of our future. It is about equipping our faculty, staff, and students with the tools they need to unite and address real-world challenges. A goal is not to value academic expertise alone, but to connect across academic and applied expertise to catalyze change.

The United States will soon have updated national climate literacy standards. While the 2009 Essential Climate Literacy Standards focused on building literacy about the drivers and impacts of climate change, our next standards will place community-building and equitable, just climate solutions at the front of education. The solution to the climate crisis is not only about what we do as individuals or within organizations, but how we collaborate locally and through civic engagement for resilience and justice.

We are fortunate to have faculty and staff already demonstrating why connecting our work to authentic sustainability challenges matters. It points to strengths we can build on and where we might collaborate more into the future.

Geology professor Cam Davidson demonstrates how to measure river flow while standing near a river

With new resources and support for education that unites applied and academic expertise, we can build interdisciplinary linkages and engage in solutions more robustly. Despite many people at Carleton engaging in sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice, we have not yet identified common goals for sustainability education and action as an institution, nor have we dedicated enough time to community-building around sustainability education.

To this end, our vision for Sustainable Futures departs from a focus on carbon neutrality, which we defined in our 2011 Climate Action Plan and in Carleton 2033: The Liberal Arts in Action. While we still aim to pursue the elimination of natural gas and greening our electricity, we find that a focus on neutrality narrows the conversation to only reducing historically measured campus emissions, rather than investing in work to measure and address new emissions (building standards, food, plastic lifecycle, etc.) or support broader transformation of sustainability (for example, action with our community partners to support operations or adaptation and justice).

We know that our community seeks to learn and build a purposeful interdisciplinary community together. Pursuing an equitable, just, and sustainable future is integral to this. What we do next — from supporting education and action with each other, to building community where we live and in the field of higher education — will impact our role and the role of our graduates in addressing the climate crisis.

After thoughtful discussion of the neutrality goal stated in Carleton 2033: The Liberal Arts in Action with many students, faculty, staff, alumni, institutional leadership, trustees, and experts, we realized that we could instead pursue a broader and more ambitious suite of solutions that support mitigation, adaptation, and environmental justice with a scope of action not just on our campus.

We envision that a Sustainable Futures Fund will help us strengthen and develop our capacity in climate and environmental justice solutions. This investment should not be less than the funding we would need to participate in carbon offsets; rather, it should be more. We should seek to demonstrate that our commitment to accelerating sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice has not wavered, especially when carbon neutrality has guided how we advance and communicate progress for so many years.

To support this shift and support the College engaging in a broader landscape for action, we could imagine an investment that is proportional to our emissions, which we have long used as a guide to our neutrality commitment. This would honor our longstanding commitment to climate action and allow us to define progress for our existing commitments, as well as new areas of work, such as emissions we have yet to consider. It could also help students engage with off-campus partners in order to contribute to those partners’ emissions reductions and improve nature, resilience, and environmental justice outcomes.

Pursuing our institutional vision for sustainability calls for new coordination and support that unites us in action. We know that with investment, we will strengthen Carleton’s institutional mission to act on climate, building the capacity of our students to advance equity, justice, and sustainability.

Aerial of the Arb with two people standing in grasses