Abstract
Shana Weber, PhD, Director of the Office of Sustainability at Princeton University spoke with Jamie Devereaux, Editor of SJoR, about the university's new Sustainability Action Plan and path to net zero, the campus as a living lab, and the sustainability projects that Dr. Weber is proudest of.
There was a moment, many months into that process, where all of us were sitting around a table together, and someone from one area—say, in charge of transportation and parking—was listening to someone from procurement or facilities engineering talking about their aspirations, and they started to see how everything connected.
And I could see it in their eyes—what started as a feeling of, “this is extra work; it is really hard to think about this stuff”—all of a sudden became, “this is bigger than just what I do in my program.” That was an incredibly exciting moment that never gets published in an annual report. Those moments are so critical, and anybody who sits in a sustainability officer chair has experienced those moments or is trying to get to them, because you get years of dividends from taking the time to enable those moments to happen.
From this baseline, came some key highlights that we are very proud of and that have served us well leading up to the development of this new plan. One is foundational—we decided very early that we were committed to absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through direct campus actions regardless of how much we grew, without buying offsets that would allow us to continue business as usual. That stance has been helpful in guiding decision-making in the past 10 years.
Second, the Campus as Living Lab approach is something that the 2008 plan set the stage for. That approach of actively bridging teaching and research endeavors with campus-based operations and experimentation has only grown since we introduced it and tested it during the implementation of the 2008 plan. Now, it is a formal program, and is gaining traction. I see more and more very intriguing tinkering happening on campus, with faculty, staff, and student engagement.
One other interesting part of the 2008 plan is that it declared our practice of assigning an internal carbon dioxide (CO2) tax (proxy carbon pricing) when making decisions about systems in buildings. In other words, when we evaluate several different heating and cooling systems for example, we assign a monetary value to the carbon emissions associated with each, and that information becomes part of the decision-making framework.
This approach is sometimes called a proxy price, or a shadow tax, meaning that we apply it in our financial and life cycle costing analyses when we make those decisions. And we were one of the first to start to tinker with an internal carbon tax and to see how it influenced our decision-making, and we have continued with that practice, and are now refining it and building on it and trying to learn more about how to make it even more effective in our 2026 Campus Plan development phase.
The other concept that is foundational and that you will see in the new plan is this idea of cultivating leadership and champions at all scales from the personal to the global. That language is refined in the new plan, but it has its roots in the 2008 plan, in that everything we do here on this small spot on the planet, with a relatively small number of people, should be a demonstration of what can happen at larger scales, or be repeatable.
Finally, the 2008 plan set a tone for target-setting beyond our comfort zone. Our 2008 carbon target was to reach 1990 levels of emissions by 2020. When we conducted the analysis, there was a 25% gap in our knowledge of strategies to achieve that target. We are now calling that an innovation gap, deliberately stretching beyond what we know we can achieve at the time. And, in the case of that 25 percent gap, we are on the verge of closing it.
So, for your readers who have ever been in the trenches of implementing carbon reduction initiatives, the details matter. We felt we needed a set of decision-making criteria to help keep thoughtful and deeply informed guardrails on our decision-making as we went forward, and as we grappled with very difficult decisions.
That task force produced recommendations and a proposal for carbon neutrality by 2046. At the time, the proposal was intended to mirror targets proposed by the scientific community that would help avoid catastrophic climate change if adopted widely by mid-century. In the few years since then the mounting evidence is even more concerning. I'd like to pause here and emphasize that a mid-century target is, frankly, meaningless without immediate early action. Every year of delay compounds the problem into the future. One of the criteria developed by our CO2 Task Force was to avoid delayed action and to resist the argument to wait for new technologies or lower prices for renewables, given the compounding damage from delayed reductions in emissions. This is a critically important stance that is often missed when carbon neutral headlines appear in the news.
The 2046 date was very deliberate. It is a date of cultural significance because it is the 300th anniversary of the university. We wanted to reach our target before midcentury, and tie it to something that is very important to the institution's identity. We were able to do both with that date.
The other very important work that came from the past 10 years of implementation, and the work of the CO2 task force is setting the tone that we must go beyond infrastructure and technology changes, to achieve this target. We have to engage people. It has to become part of our identity. It has to become part of our decision-making. We have to set new behavioral norms and social norms. We embrace the idea that, yes, technology can help us, but if we do not change how we think about ourselves in relation to the planet and to decisions about how we exist on this planet, every day, then we simply will not solve the problem.
We have a sustainability steering council that is made up of administrators and faculty, meeting once or twice per year. We have a sustainability committee that engages students, staff, and faculty on a monthly basis. We have a sustainability leadership group which includes executive level administrators who engage with strategic decisions as needed.
We already had many engagement bases covered with the rest of the campus community through these committees. This particular task force was designed to gather clear direction from academic thought leaders.
So, with those recommendations in place, we could then build the broader dialogue internally with all stakeholders, and begin studying tangible strategies to actually follow those recommendations.
It took between 2015 and 2018 to do all that internal work to build evidence and consensus around our direction, resulting in what you see in our Sustainability Action Plan.
Here in Princeton and in surrounding communities, flooding is increasingly a major disruption. Saturated ground and high winds cause trees to fall, disrupting power and blocking roads. Stormwater management infrastructure was not designed for these types of events, and along with the loss of water-storing wetland habitat that infrastructure becomes overwhelmed and flooding occurs.
We have made a lot of progress over the last 10 years in ramping up stormwater management and enhancing our stormwater management approaches and trying different things on campus.
What I am really excited about is that we are now moving into a phase of studying the effectiveness of what we have done over the past 10 years with a monitoring program. We are confident about the improvements we have made, but they are based on design modeling, not real measurement. My understanding is that there is rarely real-time monitoring of the effectiveness of stormwater infrastructure anywhere—so as a research institution I'm excited about the evidence-based contribution we can make.
So, we put in monitoring stations in stormwater outflows from the campus to learn at a deeper level. Then, we hope to share results with the intent of providing information that is useful for others in this watershed, and we can start to have a broader impact. Of course, field monitoring involves a lot more troubleshooting than computer modeling. Sometimes, if the storm events are severe enough, we lose monitoring equipment. As we tinker, we're learning how to handle those situations.
I have two favorite projects that are mutually enhancing. There is the Frick Chemistry Laboratory and there is a stream that runs along Washington Road, near where the lab is located.
Years ago, the stream itself was extremely degraded. There was too much stormwater going into it, and it was eroding sediment and undercutting Washington Road. We took the opportunity to think holistically about both the upstream causes as well as restoration solutions, including better stormwater management in surrounding landscapes and installing meanders and pools back into what had become an un-naturally straight and steep-sided stream channel. These interventions would reduce the volume of stormwater entering the stream, and slow down the rest, resulting in clearer, cleaner stormwater entering Lake Carnegie.
The Frick Chemistry Laboratory was built on a former building site and parking lot. We took away the parking lot entirely, and improved the impervious surface area dramatically of that site by installing rain gardens so that stormwater now infiltrates into the ground and does not crash into the stream at high speed out the end of a pipe as it used to. According to academic assessments the stream is in far better shape now. It is more stable structurally, and healthier ecologically.
I love those two projects because they illustrate the connection between actions at a building with what is happening in the adjacent natural environment, and it makes it really obviously for us all on the campus.
I think most research institutions have a handle on that dimension of impact-scaling. The question remaining, however, is, How do we translate that knowledge and research into applications that starts to move the needle and accelerate the changes that need to happen? And how do we do that using the campus itself as a testing site that stimulates impact from the personal to the global.
The stormwater example applies here. If you start to think about sustainability work in the context of these scales of action, you go about the work a little differently. If we just wanted to improve Princeton University's stormwater management, we have been doing a good job with that, and we will continue to do a good job with that.
But, if we ask ourselves instead, How can what we do on this campus actually be useful to others such that what we do here could be repeated successfully or scaled successfully? then you start to think about the need for quality data, good documentation, and the ability to translate what we have done effectively. We have to be able to communicate it well.
And if we do not have data to tell the story well, then we are not serving our educational mission as best we can. This approach changes the way we think about strategies, and I find that really intriguing and motivating.
If you look at what we are facing with global markets, there is a very clear signal that global markets do not want mixed soiled materials. We are being very open about the fact that we have not figured this out, and we know we are not alone.
So, with our Campus as Lab tinkering approach, we want to face it head on and build evidence around what strategies work in a given setting and what do not. We want to be part of a broader community of figuring out how to address this.
It is a really complex topic, and the markets are telling us we need to do things differently, and in this case, it is pushing us to think about the materials we buy, first of all. What is their full life cycle? Then, we have to figure out how to adjust our purchasing so that we can most responsibly manage what happens to the materials when we're done with them. That is going to require a combination of strategies—more habits of reuse, better sorting of recyclables, far better separation of organics and composting, more effective messaging, better operational infrastructure, and more.
It's important to think of these materials as commodities with value. But, they are not nearly as valuable if they are all mixed together and sticky and gross from soda or pizza. No markets in the world today want that. If we can find ways to separate those commodities, and clean them up, there are markets for them.
We are asking ourselves how to get the right infrastructure in place, then how to train people, how to engage them, how to keep it interesting, how to keep it simple. After the waste audit, we will go into a mode of assessing viable strategies for moving in a different direction, toward far less waste initially and toward zero waste.
We had great discussions, and they took those conversations and developed a platform for a first-of-its-kind (for Princeton) undergraduate student referendum on climate action, and they got a fantastic response from the student body, terrific engagement.
I am so encouraged that a very significant percentage of the undergraduate student body has now made a statement that says, “This issue is important to us.” I am excited about that signal from the students, and inspired by their caring spirit, passion, and willingness to work together.
Scope 1 and 2 emissions are the foundation of most climate action plans, but Scope 3 allows you to bring broader dimensions of personal and institutional behavior into the dialogue. They have been a gap for many institutions, because they can be challenging to track. But these students are ready to take that challenge.
Seriousness about it was here when this office was formed, but now it is realized in many tangible ways, and I am very proud of that. I am proud of that growing solidarity.
I would say one of the most interesting journeys has been figuring out how to communicate and message effectively. There is an open acknowledgement that in order to build the engagement that we are looking for to move forward with assertive targets, we have to reach people. We have to become excellent at conveying stories that people can relate to.
Human beings respond to stories, and whether it is a story told through charts and graphs or a story told through infographics or a story told through a personal experience, we have to do them all.
One thing happened recently that ties in with this idea of storytelling and also symbolizes what I am most proud of. A friend and professor emeritus in our Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department named Henry Horn recently passed away. He was what you might call our grandfather naturalist for the campus.
He had been walking this campus for 52 years, chronicling everything he saw. He knew where the birds were nesting. He knew the natural pulse of this campus intimately, and he was extraordinarily generous in sharing that with anyone who wanted to walk with him.
I am extremely fortunate to work with a filmmaker, helping us tell stories about what is happening with sustainability in engaging ways. One of the things that we did that I am so grateful for was a series of “Nature Walks with Henry Horn” [available on Youtube]. 6
It seems so simple, but moments of connection with nature, for me, are one of the most compelling ways to engage people in sustainability. We crave it anyway, even if we do not know we do. There is abundant literature that supports that a few minutes of exposure to nature can lower your blood pressure, improve mental wellbeing, and enhance learning capacity. I love that we are learning to tell these stories in more personally meaningful ways, and that we are learning to connect better with where we are.
That is why I love the Campus as Lab approach, because it is really rooted in place. And no matter where you go in the world, that sense of immersing yourself in a place is the root of developing a sense of care. And that is really what this is all about—developing a sense of care and love for this incredible world.