Harvard Vision 2020:

A Bridge to Campus Sustainability
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Conference in the Media

University announces new funds for environmental projects, Gazette
For the second time in less than two years, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers doubled the dollars available for campus conservation projects, to $12 million this time, through the Harvard Green Campus Loan Fund.

Summers announced the dramatic increase Thursday (April 27) as he declared Harvard's commitment to doing all it can to fight global warming through both research and the way it runs its own business.

Summers said it is apparent to almost everyone that human activities are causing global temperatures to rise and it is incumbent on an institution like Harvard to address the problem.

"There is much we do not know about global warming," Summers said to an audience of about 150 in Harvard Business School's Burden Hall. "[But] we do know enough to say that those who deny the reality of human-caused global warming sit in a particular place in intellectual purgatory alongside those who believe tobacco does not affect human health. We do not know everything we need to know, but we know enough to know we have a problem."

Summers joined Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino in delivering keynote speeches on the first day of a conference on environmentally sustainable practices on campus called, "Harvard Vision 2020: A Bridge to Campus Sustainability."

Sponsored by the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, the Harvard Center for the Environment, Harvard Dining Services, and several businesses and organizations, the conference presents three days of workshops, speeches, campus tours, and training seminars.

"We wanted to give the Harvard community a chance to reflect on its own successes to date, give campus and city leaders a chance to articulate their goals on sustainability, and to involve people in talking about the future of sustainability on campus," said Green Campus Initiative Director Leith Sharp.

In his talk, Menino praised Summers for his leadership at Harvard, saying he has made a difference in a variety of ways to the city of Boston and citing the millions of dollars Harvard has spent on after-school programs, affordable housing construction, and summer jobs programs.

Menino said Boston is working to improve its own record on sustainability, buying 8 percent of its power from renewable sources, embracing environmental building standards, and taking a variety of other steps, such as using biodiesel to fuel city vehicles. Menino decried what he called a lack of leadership in Washington, D.C., on sustainability, energy, gun control, and other issues and urged conference attendees to go home at the conference's conclusion and take action.

Summers last increased the Green Campus Loan Fund in December 2004, infusing enough cash to grow the fund from its initial $3 million to $6 million.

Since then, the increasingly popular fund has something of a victim of its own success. It has loaned out enough money that it would have had to stop funding additional projects within a few months until money had been repaid by prior projects.

The no-interest fund was conceived because many environmentally sensitive building and rehabilitation projects have higher up-front costs than traditionally-built projects, though the environmental projects often result in lower operating costs down the road.

"This allows us to continue at the same rate at which we've been investing," said Associate Vice President for Facilities and Environmental Services Thomas Vautin, who also serves as co-chair of the Green Campus Initiative. "This sends a very important message that Harvard's leadership cares about these projects."

Over the years, the Green Campus Loan Fund has acted as a catalyst for conservation-minded projects, funding such things as computerized irrigation controls to conserve water used in landscaping; a computer energy reduction program aimed at getting students, faculty, and staff to shut off computers, lights, and heating in rooms that aren't being used; and a wide variety of heating, lighting, ventilation, and air conditioning upgrades that replaced older systems with newer, more energy-efficient ones.

In his speech, Summers said the investment is one that the University should make even if it cared nothing about global warming. He said many of these projects repay themselves in three or four years, the equivalent of a 30 or 25 percent return on investment.

"This [the funding of conservation programs] often does not conflict with good economics," Summers said. "We're not talking about something that is charitable, or something that is just good for the good guys. We're talking about something that we should do even if we didn't care at all."

Summers went on to pledge to Menino that the University will build a life-sciences center in its new Allston development that will make Boston, along with existing facilities and laboratories, the world's leader in that area. He further said that the related construction will be built in the most sustainable way possible, pointing out that Harvard has hired an architect for the already-announced science building that has a reputation for creating environmentally-friendly building designs.

Summers credited student activism and the advocacy of the Green Campus Initiative in educating him on the importance and feasibility of environmentally friendly building designs. He said that four years ago sustainability wouldn't have been high on his list of construction priorities. Most convincing, he said, was the demonstration, through Loan Fund-financed projects, that environmental sustainability made financial sense.

"Harvard will have more money for facilities and more money for books in the library, more money to hire professors than we would if we didn't do it," Summers said. "That's why it's important we do it."

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Summers Doubles Green Campus Funds, The Harvard Crimson

Harvard’s first ever conference on campus sustainability kicked off yesterday with a pledge from University President Lawrence H. Summers to double the Green Campus Iniatiative’s loan fund for campus conservation projects to $12 million.

Harvard Vision 2020: A Bridge to Campus Sustainability, coordinated by the Green Campus Initiative (GCI), an interfaculty organization, highlights the best practices that the University has adopted over the past five years, from purchasing renewable energy to using “green” cleaning solutions to planning and building green buildings.

The loan fund supports projects that reduce energy use and increase environmental sustainability. Recent examples include the installation of motion sensor lights in classrooms on campus.

According to GCI organizers, the loan fund has generated over $2 million in savings per year, and the projects supported by the fund have reduced campus greenhouse gas emissions by almost 70 million pounds annually.

“The best investment in the University is not the endowment but the Green Loan Fund,” said Summers, referring to the savings generated by the fund. The University’s $25.9 billion endowment has averaged more than 15 percent growth over the past 14 years.

Summers delivered the keynote address along with Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino at the Harvard Business School yesterday afternoon.

The three-day conference, to which more than 580 people from the Harvard community and the Boston area have registered, features panel discussions, workshops, and tours of the University’s green facilities.

The conference seeks to convey to the University community “all the efforts Harvard is taking in the direction of environmental sustainability,” said Thomas E. Vautin, co-chair of the GCI.

Summers commended undergraduates for promoting environmental awareness and practices on campus over the past few years and said that their efforts have helped him understand the importance of environmental sustainability.

“If I had to plan expansion to Allston four years ago, environmental sustainability would not have been one of my top priorities,” Summers said.

Students attending conference events yesterday said that it has made them rethink their own behavior.

“I didn’t realize how much water we use and how much energy it takes to treat the wastewater,” said Robin S. Bellows ’09 after attending a workshop on water use at the University. “It makes me think again about everything. Every extra minute I spend in the shower really makes a difference.”

“I love that the school is invested in, and willing to put out the effort and money to, support sustainability,” said Spring Greeney ’09, who has registered for the conference.

“People were thrilled about the conference,” said Leith Sharp, director of the GCI. “They seem to be very happy about what’s going on at Harvard.”

The conference continues through Saturday. Environmental attroney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will speak today and the President of the U.N. Foundation Timothy E. Wirth will address the conference tomorrow.

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May 4th 2006 | CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS From The Economist print edition

A sudden passion for waterless urinals and biodiesel shuttles

WHEN student activists start trumpeting new causes, university administrators usually batten down. But greenery, the new on-campus craze, is different. Last week Harvard's outgoing president, Larry Summers, enthused about energy-efficient buildings at the university's first campus sustainabilityconference. He promised to develop Harvard's new piece of land in Allston, just across the Charles river, in the best and most sustainable way we can. One professor proposed a two-acre farm, allowing Harvard to grow (a very small amount of) food.

How times have changed. Ten years ago, when your correspondent studied at Harvard, energy conservationmeant staying in bed an extra hour. These days dorms compete to turn out the lights and recycle. Some places are flush with waterless urinals. Tufts University in Boston has switched to water-saving washing machines and has an all-electric, non-emitting vehicle to deliver post. At the University of Michigan, one recently renovated building uses glass from aircraft windscreens in its windows and recycled tyres for rubber flooring. At the University of Colorado, students have even taxed themselves to pay for renewable power. Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Faculty of Arts and Sciences have followed suit.

Fear of global warming, in part, is driving this. Many universities are the size of small cities, so their emissions count. Fair Harvard belched out about 320,000 metric tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent last year, nearly as much as Djibouti. Far more important is the bottom line, especially as oil prices soar. Harvard's green campus loan programme, which lends money interest-free to departments to green themselves with energy-efficient kitchen equipment or lighting upgrades, claims a return on investment of 33%better than Harvard's endowment. The average payback time for a loan is three years. I like that kind of arithmetic,noted Mr Summers, a former treasury secretary, as he announced a doubling of the size of the fund to $12m a year.

Even as universities show off their green buildings, students are moving on to a new frontier: the curriculum. At Harvard, some design-school students worry that their coursework does not include enough on green building. Another problem is that sustainable-development issues are cross-disciplinary, and Harvard's professional schools do not much care to speak to each another. Developing the new campus in Allston, students say, provides a perfect opportunity for faculty to come down from the clouds, reach across disciplines and act locally. Are Harvard's great minds up to the task?

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The future looks greener now

The two days I spent last week at the Harvard Vision 2020 symposium made me the proudest I have ever felt about my alma pater.  (OK, it's alma mater, but my true alma mater got eaten by Harvard a number of years ago, and I felt bad about it even though every class but one through my four years of college was at Harvard.)

So what does a Harvard symposium have to do with Lincoln?

On a trivial level, you could say there's a spring theme to this column, because it's partly about greening - as in green buildings and green roofs - and it was organized, funded, and hosted by the six-year-old Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI).

More precisely, it was - and is, for this effort will reach far into the future - about environmental sustainability.  It will affect Lincoln in at least two ways: by the environmentally sound efforts HGCI is initiating and supporting across Harvard's large footprint in Cambridge and Allston (and the School of Public Health in Boston); and by its leadership in offering an environmental model that schools, companies, and yes, towns and individuals can look to - or even compete with (!).

The full title of the project is Harvard Vision 2020: A Bridge to Campus Sustainability.  Participants were welcomed to Harvard's first ever Campus Sustainability Conference - although there were references to two earlier conferences apparently organized solely by students.

There were fewer students this time, perhaps because HGCI is made up of a handful of managers, co-chairs, and faculty advisors and an additional handful of staff members (as well as some 40 student leaders).

The conference was impressive - not only for the great keynotes and the range and depth of topics, but in two other respects: the scope of the effort and the honesty about its challenges and current shortfalls.  The latter included the reminder that Harvard is no single entity, marching in lockstep, but an assortment of highly individualized schools and subdivisions.  Getting them all on the same page may be a bit like herding cats.

HGCI is also honest about the ways in which some institutions may be ahead of them.  Their emphasis, I think, is trying to work productively with leaders around the world to bring about a desperately needed green revolution.

That said, this group has already accomplished a lot.  Here's a sampling, in no particular order:

- Minimizing vehicle use.  They're encouraging the Harvard community to walk, bike, and use the Harvard shuttles - which they're converting to biodiesel.  They even have a program of refurbishing abandoned bikes for community use.

- Building green. Not only is Harvard trying to plan its buildings to minimize energy consumption; construction and repair processes are being redesigned to minimize waste in some astonishing ways.

- Running existing operations in greener ways.  At one end of the spectrum, the Empower Harvard campaign is looking at wind generation for part of its energy needs (not off the Cape, alas!). At the other, they're encouraging people to establish green habits like turning off unneeded lights and computer monitors.

- Initiating changes in the campus food program.  Serving 25,000 meals a day, how does Harvard minimize waste?  Dear to my heart: they're donating leftovers to food banks and shelters.  But the Food Literacy Program's (FLI) focus areas reach far beyond that question to agriculture, nutrition, food preparation, and community. Our Thursday lunch was an example of the product: delicious organic, locally produced food.

- Adding composting, which I'd thought got done only in our yards, to the Harvard recycling program, and optimizing trash reduction.

- Encouraging institutional change and relationship building (like the FLI community focus above). That includes involving local officials such as Boston's Mayor Menino, Mayor Reeves of Cambridge, and at least one Cambridge School Committee member; and pressing Harvard's food, energy, and other vendors to comply with Harvard's greener standards.

- Instituting "green cleaning," i.e., using green cleaning products.  That's something every Lincoln household could do.

It was also exciting to learn that undergrads can now major in environmental science - a green revolution will be far more successful if young hearts and minds are involved. And great to see a Zipcar on display.  Check the Zipcar flyers I've put in the Library - or go to zipcar.com.

This column does not begin to do justice to an extraordinary experience.  Please go to www.greencampus.harvard.edu to learn more.  I understand slides and recordings from the conference will soon be available on that site.

Happy Green(ing) Season!

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