
Deepen Carleton’s commitments to climate action, nature, resilience, and environmental justice by expanding ways for students to engage with solutions and collaborate with partners in Northfield and Rice County, and with nearby Indigenous Nations.
Sustainable Futures Fund
Establish a Sustainable Futures Fund that amplifies living laboratory education, engages students and faculty in solutions, and catalyzes support for climate and environmental justice solutions through the development of a knowledge repository. An advisory group of campus stakeholders will work with senior leadership on its application.
Develop the funding criteria and strategy to build a solutions knowledge repository, and develop ideas for strengthening student participation in climate, sustainability, and environmental justice solutions on and beyond campus.
Our faculty, staff, students, and alumni are already active in climate solutions. New funding could support course and project development that would in turn support outcomes like improving campus sustainability, drawing down carbon in landscapes, developing more sustainable food systems, improving public scholarship and engagement around clean water, developing ethical carbon offsets, deepening our action for environmental justice and public health, and more. These examples are based on activities faculty, staff, and students already work on, and funding could allow them to deepen that work, more easily share their impacts through a knowledge repository, and support new collaboration around common themes.
Enhance the breadth and depth of living laboratory education at Carleton.
- We will deepen experiential learning that capitalizes on the places and expertise on our campus and in our surrounding community by strengthening academic coordination and resources, and developing shared education and priorities for Carleton’s existing living laboratories, such as the Cowling Arboretum and McKnight Prairie, and Carleton’s Student Organic Farm and campus food systems.
- We will reduce boundaries between faculty, staff, students, and community partners to accelerate learning and change. First through interdisciplinary, IDE, and place-based opportunities in introductory courses that reach many students, we will evolve to support project-based courses and co-curricular experiences.
Increase solutions-oriented leadership opportunities for students in sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice.
- As part of our efforts to strengthen curricular coordination, we will explore course-to-internship models as well as collaborative or cluster teaching models that enhance the use of Carleton’s living laboratories and integrate faculty and sustainability staff or community member expertise.
- These integrative teaching models can strengthen the connection of the curriculum with our institutional and community needs, and engage students in the big issues we face surrounding sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice.
Establish a Sustainable Futures faculty cohort that co-creates a shared agenda for advancing solutions to the climate crisis.
- This agenda will include learning and action items that could be fulfilled through developing linked activities in their courses or research, and identifying strategies to engage with broader audiences around sustainability or environmental justice solutions.
Provide support for students who are climate refugees or who are impacted by climate shocks through the existing Carleton Emergency Fund.
- Emergency funding is already available to Carleton students, and we affirm our support for those who have unexpected expenses related to climate shocks, such as fires or flooding, that impact their lives and the lives of their families.
Protecting Natural Resources
Strengthen Carleton’s commitment to nature and climate resilience by protecting the Arboretum, developing a climate-smart campus landscape plan, connecting to Indigenous neighbors and their priorities in nature and land, and addressing adaptation concerns where we live.
Support monitoring related to environmental and community climate action decision-making.
- Track environmental factors in the same way we use emissions data by supporting the use and visibility of existing monitoring as well as developing new monitoring streams on the Carleton Student Organic Farm, in the Cowling Arboretum, or in our community that help us understand environmental or social conditions and sustainability decisions.
Protect and maintain the Cowling Arboretum as a special ecosystem on the Carleton campus.
- The Arb has been consciously preserved and resourced over the course of several decades, and we will continue to invest in and protect it.
- The upcoming 100th anniversary of the founding of the Arboretum and the creation of new Arboretum offices within the proposed Center will provide an opportunity to articulate the College’s ongoing commitment.
Complete a climate-smart campus landscape plan and install major features.
- This plan will describe climate impacts, risks, and adaptation needs on campus that are relevant to and informed by the campus and local community:
- Support tree and vegetation species alignment with climate resilience and biodiversity goals, emphasizing Indigenous relationships with local ecosystems.
- Explore upgrades to the Carleton Student Organic Farm centered on learning and physical connection.
- Work to “erase the edge” between campus and the Arboretum by using more native species and increasing native animal habitat.
Commit to ongoing learning and support of Indigenous priorities in nature and land reflected at Carleton.
- We know that we must continue to support learning from our Dakota and Ojibwe neighbors and other Indigenous expertise to improve our capacity for regenerative and just action on landscapes.
- Indigenous people safeguard most of the Earth’s biodiversity with important knowledge and strategies needed for protection of people and the planet.