#Food Waste Reduction vs. Use of Pre-existing Resources

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there's a new trend of people using lemon juice instead of dishsoap

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Group: Caroline Scanlan and Ad Walker

*Sustainability vs. Climate Action Plans:

1. What are the key differences between a sustainability master plan and a climate action plan?  Are there benefits or disadvantages between the plans?

Both sustainability master plans and climate action plans guide local governments or organizations in implementing projects and initiatives toward determined goals, but they function at different scales and scopes.  While a sustainability plan aims to incorporate all goals relating to sustainable functioning, a climate action plan is focused primarily on the goal of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  In many cases, a sustainability plan will include a climate action plan as one of its many components, pairing it beside other environmental initiatives, such as landscaping for water conservation, as well as economic and social efforts, such as workforce training and public health.  The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives notes that a sustainability plan will include a “broader, more holistic view on community sustainability,” than a climate action plan, because sustainability plans include specific and explicit objectives beyond GHG reductions. (ICLEI, p.2)  Though climate action plans are likely to reference the co-benefits of certain initiatives as they relate to economic or social outcomes, the plan will not necessarily have explicit objectives for those metrics in the same way that a sustainability plan will.

The benefit of a sustainability master plan is that it can influence major structural change, by addressing sustainable actions at both the department level and at larger structural levels.  With a broader scope of desired outcomes, a sustainability plan has the potential to catalyze more comprehensive changes and therefore lead to greater improvements.  However, by attempting to create change and manage initiatives across a government or organization and towards multiple different outcomes, a sustainability plan runs the risk of becoming unwieldy and difficult to enforce.  Assessing progress and determining ownership of tasks can become difficult, and can strain the resources of a Sustainability Office.  In contrast, a climate action plan will generally be easier to implement and to assess, since greenhouse gas emissions are easily quantifiable and traceable.

2. In your assessment, what plan is stronger, the Yale Sustainability Plan or the UCSF Climate Action Plan. In your response provide several key examples.

I would have perhaps expected the UCSF Climate Action Plan to be stronger, since it is dealing in more easily quantifiable reduction goals and on a shorter timescale than the Yale plan.  However, the lack of a clear timeline for implementation of future reductions, along with the plan’s limited mention of how responsibility for pursuit of reduction goals will be divided, suggests that the UCSF plan may have difficulty leading to the desired outcomes.  The plan outlines very clearly the mechanisms for measurement of GHG emissions, as well as existing projects that will lead to the desired outcomes by 2014, but the necessary initiatives for 2020 outcomes are left in summary and not divided into clearly implementable tasks.  The report does not address which departments at UCSF will manage the different “Future Reduction Measures.”

In contrast, the Yale plan provides deadlines for each of its initiatives, breaking up major outcomes into measurable goals and setting proposed years by which each will be accomplished.  The Yale plan also notes an “implementation report” that further outlines departmental responsibility and management of certain tasks, though I was unable to find that report on the Office of Sustainability website and I wonder how the enforcement of those responsibilities will be managed, particularly if the report is not publicly accessible.  Though the plan would be much more successful if these divisions of responsibility and accountability were clearly outlined alongside the initiatives, the inclusion of time deadlines makes for a more successful plan.  It is worth noting, though, that the Yale plan includes many goals based on rather vague outcomes.  For example, the plan lists “Sustainability Literacy” as a primary component of its Empowerment goal, including in the timeline the task of launching campaigns to improve campus understanding of sustainability.  In fact, this exact task is that which the student group STEP has been attempting to accomplish for years, and yet the student body still struggles with basic sustainability actions like recycling and reducing food waste.  The Yale plan could do a better job of, as the UCSF plan does, including pre-existing initiatives into their thinking, describing how future efforts will improve upon the current situation.

Though the UCSF plan does compile a list of funding possibilities, neither plan sets out a clear financial structure for funding and implementing its proposed initiatives.  This is particularly troubling in the case of the Yale plan, which suggests the creation of multiple task forces and working groups without describing how paid staff time will be allocated to these tasks.  Will new staff need to be hired, or are current staff expected to incorporate these sustainability goals into their existing full-time work?  Both plans would be well served to have clearer financial strategies for implementation.

3. How does the Yale Carbon Charge relate to the Yale Sustainability Plan? Are they integrated well? Provide key examples.

The Yale Carbon Charge and the Yale Sustainability Plan, though related, are not integrated in a coherent way.  Both the Yale Carbon Charge and the Yale Sustainability Plan aim to inspire reductions in GHG emissions, the first by incentivizing investment in lower-carbon options and the second by shifting operations through other means.  However, though the Yale Carbon Charge references the Yale Sustainability Plan, the latter includes no mention of the former, even when describing the projects and tasks associated with its “Climate Action” initiative.  It is possible that the Yale Carbon Charge could be incorporated into the sustainability plan’s proposed “Carbon Neutrality Strategy,” “Emissions Reduction Program,” or “Campus Resilience Plan,” but at this time it is not mentioned.  The Yale Carbon Charge notes that a key challenge moving forward is incorporation of the carbon charge into budget and accounting systems, so that it can be a more “integral” component of decision making.  In this regard, it seems appropriate for the Yale Carbon Charge to advocate for its inclusion in the Sustainability Plan, which will thereby allow it to be a more consistent component of future sustainability decisions and ideally provide clear timelines for tasks moving forward.

*Yale Carbon Charge Case Study:

4. What are the pros and cons of fixed versus rolling baselines?

In the Yale Carbon Charge Pilot Study, two of the pilot schemes required the setting of “baseline” energy use and emissions values by which to measure changes in consumption. These baseline numbers were rolling, meaning that they were determined by taking an average of the previous three years. These baselines would then be recalculated in three-year cycles. One of the benefits of a rolling consumption/emissions baseline is that it doesn’t “penalize” university units in the long run for increasing their student population or for participating in new research or programming that may require extra energy needs. Rolling baselines also allow for university units to adjust their usage in response to changes that are out of their control, such as climate or other environmental factors. One of the major downsides of a rolling baseline is that it would theoretically allow for a unit or the university at large to increase usage/emissions over the long term – rolling baselines “reset” every three years and thus don’t allow for long-term goals to be integrated into energy reduction planning. With the high stakes of climate change and the future in mind, maybe the university should prioritize low-energy research and programming in addition to investments that increase our resiliency in the face of environmental change. Alternatively, a fixed baseline is more unyielding and allows for high goal setting and clearer tracking of progress. Unfortunately, lofty goals can seem abstract and hard to plan for in the short term. And in the rare chance that goals are quickly surpassed, fixed baselines are not as flexible as rolling baselines, which can adaptively increase targets as targets are met.

5. How might Yale's scheme have differed if its policy objective were about immediate, guaranteed emissions reductions, instead of behavior change?

Of the four schemes tested in the pilot study, the redistribution scheme was most effective at efficiently reducing usage/emissions in the near term but was also perceived by participants to be the “least fair.” If community buy-in and long-term behavior change is also a goal, then trade-offs between efficiency, fairness, and political feasibility must be taken into consideration. Behavior change might be particularly important for the centrally-supported units at Yale, whose energy-use decision makers are not necessarily the people keeping the books and footing the bill.

If the policy objective was truly about immediate guaranteed emissions reductions, then an internal tax per unit carbon emitted could be instated or a more ambitious cap on university emissions. Additionally, the “worst offender” units or “low-hanging fruits” could be targeted first, to ensure the greatest potential reductions in emissions right off the bat. And of course, the university could have also agreed to divest a fraction of its $20 billion worth of investments, to “lead by example,” borrowing the university’s own words.

Yale’s scheme attempted to develop conversation and buy-in across varying unit types (offices, residential buildings, graduate schools, sports facilities, IT, etc) throughout campus. The university’s desire to spark connection, dialogue, and cooperation amongst its stakeholders will likely compromise its emissions reductions in the near term. But will it contribute to a growing wave of support for more stringent reductions down the line? Unclear.

6. What are the drivers behind emissions reductions across the pilot units? How can Yale better structure its approach to determine this? Could the results from the Yale's carbon charge pilot show a false positive?

The reported major drivers behind emissions reductions ranged from net financial incentives, to increased attention towards energy use and GHG emissions via price signals and energy reports, to intrinsic motivation on the parts of the building coordinators, to positive engagement from the project team, to the “spotlight effect” – a sense of responsibility caused by increased visibility and attention. Participants in the pilot units cited all of these reasons as drivers behind emissions reductions, but it is unclear which drivers were linked to which schemes and which drivers were most effective at driving emissions down.

Some drivers could be ineffective (or unpredictable) in the long term – for example, the “spotlight effect” will likely wear over time if internal carbon pricing becomes ubiquitous across the university. Additionally, intrinsic motivation as well as project team engagement will likely shift down the road, as members join and leave teams. In all of these cases, any effects due to these drivers during the pilot project could falsely indicate projections for future emissions reductions. Realistically, some of these more socially-motivated drivers may be important for developing salience and moral in the short time, but might not have legs for the long term.